SCL gp camb a

forgot distinction. is this military intel? ca 3?

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an 12 24

The Australian Information Commissioner today announced a settlement with tech giant Meta over its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The settlement will see Meta establish a A$50 million ($32 million U.S.) payment program for Australian Facebook users who had their personal data harvested by the British political consulting firm.

The commissioner, Elizabeth Tydd, said:

Today’s settlement represents the largest ever payment dedicated to addressing concerns about the privacy of individuals in Australia.

However, details of the payment scheme remain uncertain. And it’s not yet clear whether it will send a strong enough message to other organisations to be more careful when handling sensitive personal information.

What was the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm founded in 2013.

Five years later, it became an infamous household name, thanks to revelations it harvested the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users. The firm then used this data to target messaging for political campaigns, including the 2016 US presidential election, won by Donald Trump.

The firm harvested sensitive data of Facebook users through a third-party app called This is Your Digital Life, created in November 2013 by Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at Cambridge University. It was enabled to do this by Meta, which three years earlier had changed its software to allow third-party apps to access Facebook users’ personal data.

Only 53 people in Australia installed the app.

However, Australia’s information commissioner estimates that an additional 311,074 Facebook users who were Facebook “friends” of people who installed the app may also have had their personal information compromised.

How will the payment scheme work?

The payment scheme is the culmination of a protracted legal battle between Australia’s privacy regulator and Meta, which have been locked in court proceedings in Australia since 2020. As part of the agreement, the regulator has dropped proceedings against Meta in the Federal Court.

The payment scheme will be set up by Meta but administered by an independent third party. It will be open to people who:

• had a Facebook account between November 2 2013 and December 17 2015
• were present in Australia for at least 30 days during that period
• either installed the This is Your Digital Life app using Facebook login or were Facebook friends with an individual who installed the app.

People can check whether they are eligible on a help page on the Facebook website. The information commissioner anticipates those who are eligible will be able to submit applications “in the second quarter of 2025”.

According to the undertaking, it could take two years for eligible claimants to receive a payment from Meta.

Several uncertainties

Several aspects of the payment scheme remain uncertain. This is because a number of elements will be determined by “scheme instructions” to be given by Meta or left to the absolute discretion of the third-party administrator.

For instance, we don’t yet know:

• the set amount that will be paid to any eligible person who experienced “a generalised concern or embarrassment”, or
• what will be regarded as sufficient evidence that such a person also experienced “specific” loss or damage that entitles them to further compensation.

If the administrator decides on a total amount of compensation for eligible claimants which is less than A$50 million, the remaining funds will be paid to the Australian government’s consolidated revenue fund.

Long overdue

Australia’s privacy commissioner Carly Kind has called this settlement “groundbreaking”. But such enforcement action is long overdue.

When the information commissioner originally brought these proceedings in 2020, it was the first time the regulator had sought a civil penalty order under the Privacy Act. But it has had that power since 2014.

The commissioner was also following in the footsteps of privacy and consumer protection regulators in other countries that had already taken action against Meta over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

For instance, the UK privacy regulator fined Facebook the maximum £500,000 (A$997,167). The US Federal Trade Commission also settled with Meta on a record-breaking US$5 billion (A$7.86 billion) payment.

These precedents help in understanding the limited deterrent effect the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner case is likely to have on Meta. When the US$5 billion settlement was announced in 2019, Facebook’s share price increased.

The settlement between Meta and the Australian information commissioner represents roughly 0.02% of the tech giant’s US$130 billion global revenue for 2023.

A Meta spokesperson said the company had settled on a “no admission basis” and that the allegations “relate to past practices no longer relevant to how Meta’s products or systems work today”.

However, this is far from the only privacy breach by Meta, with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission last year reaching a A$20 million settlement with Meta companies over claims that its Onavo VPN service misled users about how their data would be used.

Katharine Kemp, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice; Lead, UNSW Public Interest Law & Tech Initiative, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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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 Analyticawith 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–

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.

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...Emma, as you listen to this conversation, your work in Cambridge Analytica has been going on for a long time. Can you relate what they were doing, also Facebook, in manipulating populations, as we move into this current election — we don’t even have to say “2020 election” anymore because we’re in 2020 — and how this work is basically PSYOP, psychological operations?

EMMA BRIANT: Thank you, Amy. Yes, I actually first came across the company SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, in 2007 as part of my master’s and then doctoral research. And I’ve been following their techniques and how they evolved over the years. And what I’ve realized when I started to discover the political work that they were doing, beyond the counterterrorism campaigns that I was studying, was just horrifying to me. The potential for what, you know, escalated during the sort of 2010s is just phenomenal.

So, we started to see them doing these big data projects for the military and so on. And this was, you know, quite a change of direction for them from their earlier work, which was a lot more about qualitative data, doing interviews with people, and so forth, for their research. And it started to change the kind of target audience analysis, this kind of analytics of what — if you like, the persuadables, the people that you want to target your communications at, how those groups were being profiled by the military, then was being taken out and deployed in elections.

And this is deeply disturbing to me because of the fact that I think that these companies have been established with a particular motive in mind, with a particular way of doing things and methodology. And to be repurposing that, when you have been doing work with DARPA, the defense research agency in the U.S., as well as the British equivalent, the DSTL, to develop these kinds of techniques, and then you’re going off and taking them to clients that are working in shady political campaigns around the world and working for human rights abusers, it’s really very disturbing — and then, of course, moving back into our own elections. So, I —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about that.

EMMA BRIANT: Yeah. So, in 2017, I started to realize that they were working in — they had worked on Brexit and that they worked on the Trump campaign. And I started to do a lot more interviews with the company, including meeting Brittany for the first time. And also I met the filmmakers from The Great Hack. And I was weighed down by the responsibility for what I was discovering from my interviews. I was interviewing people like Nigel Oakes, who, as you can see in the — from the evidence that I submitted to the British Parliament, was telling me about the unethical activities that they were doing around the world for — for instance, for Kenyatta —

AMY GOODMAN: In Kenya.

EMMA BRIANT: — and the role that they played — in Kenya — and the role that they played also in the election of Donald Trump. And he was telling me about how they had basically deployed the same kinds of techniques of the Nazis in the U.S. election. Now, this horrified me. And I had to go further and further and haven’t stopped researching this.

And I think the most important thing is also to put this in the context of their military work, because, actually, these firms are working in multiple domains. You have commercial data use, you have military data use, and you have political data use in the same company. And we have no regulation over what is happening in the United States with companies like this. And there is little transparency over these companies in the United Kingdom, too, which is how we’ve ended up with this real catastrophe for democracy.

So, the issue is that we don’t know how data was being abused by this company. We know some examples of it. We certainly know that they had a slack regard for consent, from the — you know, what’s been revealed in The Great Hack and by Carole Cadwalladr. And the data was being repurposed from research done by academics for their political campaigns. Where else might they have been repurposing data from? And this is the thing that really scares me the most, is that this is rampant, I think, across the industry. I see many, many more companies out there that are working in these multiple domains with little accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go back to October, when New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Did anyone on your leadership team know about Cambridge Analytica prior to the initial report by The Guardian on December 11, 2015?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I believe so, in that some folks were tracking it internally.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And —

MARK ZUCKERBERG: I’m actually — as you’re asking this, I do think I was aware of Cambridge Analytica as an entity earlier. I just — I don’t know if I was tracking how they were using Facebook specifically.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: When was the issue discussed with your board member Peter Thiel?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I don’t — I don’t know that offhand.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: You don’t know. This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t — you don’t know?

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s AOC, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, questioning Jeffrey [sic] Zuckerberg. Brittany Kaiser, was he telling the truth?

BRITTANY KAISER: I have found that during multiple rounds of questioning, that he —

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Zuckerberg, that is.

BRITTANY KAISER: — that Mark Zuckerberg continues to deny the amount of strategies that he is aware of, the amount of data abuses that he is aware of. And just saying that “My team will get back to you,” without being honest with the public, is a massive disaster, not only for his own PR, but for our democracies and for moving forward in a productive manner.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what Ocasio-Cortez was getting at when she was talking about Peter Thiel.

BRITTANY KAISER: So, Peter Thiel, as far as I am aware, was the head of Trump’s technology advisory council. There were multiple meetings where Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was either being invited or attempting to be invited to those meetings, through the Mercers, through Kellyanne Conway, through Steve Bannon.

AMY GOODMAN: And you were with Rebekah Mercer, right, on Trump inauguration night?

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. The Mercers and a lot of other people who had played a very large role in the funding and in the campaigning for Donald Trump were reaching as far as they possibly could to technology tools in order to achieve their goals.

AMY GOODMAN: And are they doing it now?

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. I think if anybody thinks that this is different than 2016, they are sorely mistaken. In 2016, everybody saw how successful Cambridge Analytica’s tactics are, so now there’s hundreds of Cambridge Analyticas around the world, especially acting in the U.S. elections right now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t we talk about John Bolton and Iran, the files that you’re releasing, that you had during your Cambridge Analytica days? Can you set up this video that we want to play?

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, the files on Ambassador John Bolton show the work that Cambridge Analytica was paid to undertake for the John Bolton super PAC. That was work that started in 2013. It was actually one of the biggest first projects that Cambridge Analytica undertook in the United States. And that was to find five different psychographic groupings of voters and target them with psychographic messaging meant to resonate with your psyche and engage you, depending on whether you’re open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable or neurotic.

And those videos were targeted over television and YouTube pre-roll in order to convince people, one, that national security was the most important political issue; two, that Ambassador John Bolton was the biggest authority on these topics; and, three, that whoever John Bolton was endorsing — for example, Thom Tillis — would be a better candidate — than Kay Hagan, for example, in that specific race. So, these ads were paid in order to manipulate people into being more interested in his hawkish foreign policies than in their own best interest.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the ad, that is not radio-friendly because it’s mainly music with script over it? But this is an ad for Thom Tillis, right?

BRITTANY KAISER: Yes. And it was an ad targeted at a group of people identified as being highly neurotic, and, therefore, it is black and white. It’s eerie. You get very emotional music, that shows surrender flags on all of America’s most prominent landmarks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play it, and I’ll read what it says on the screen. So we’ll listen to that music and play the ad, and you can then comment further.

There’s white flags going up, white flag on the Brooklyn Bridge, over the White House — over Congress. And it says, “America’s never surrendered before. What happens if we start now? On November 4, vote Thom Tillis.”

An ad paid for, 2014, by the John Bolton super PAC. The ad was titled “White Flags.” Tillis went on to win his Senate race.

BRITTANY KAISER: Yes, he did, indeed. And they used these tactics in a very successful manner. In fact, the John Bolton super PAC paid for a third party to rate how successful Cambridge Analytica had been. And they saw, on this ad specifically, that there was over a 36% uplift in engagement on these ads versus the communications that they had already been running.

And so, what scares me so much is that I know that these tactics are being used right now.We are being manipulated in order to support going to war with Iran. We are being manipulated in order to believe that this type of violence is acceptable and that we should support candidates that support this violence.

AMY GOODMAN: There are some who have suggested that President Trump did this, possibly in part because he’s so deeply concerned about his impeachment trial, and this specifically could be targeted for John Bolton, the former national security adviser, who almost immediately tweeted, “We have been working on this for a long time,” talking about the assassination,and that Trump is afraid of what he might say, and so this would appease him.

BRITTANY KAISER: Another important tranche of documents that I released are in the Iran folder, which actually shows that Cambridge Analytica and other right-wing organizations, like America Rising, that does all of the opposition research for the GOP, were polling to see how many people in the United States were interested in the Iran deal, to drop sanctions, or if they were against the Iran nuclear deal and more interested in war.So you can see the types of questions that were asked, and that they were using that to model and identify people who could be persuaded to go against Iran, and whether or not that would be favorable for electoral fodder, I should say. And right now that same polling is happening. So, if you are identified as being a persuadable, you are going to see more of this propaganda in order to convince you that war is in our best interest, when it obviously is not.

AMY GOODMAN: Emma Briant, what makes this different from regular polling? Why do you see this as evil?

EMMA BRIANT: It’s not polling I think is evil; it’s what it’s being used for. I’d like to put this in a little bit of a wider context, if I may, and talk a little bit about what I know about SCL and —

AMY GOODMAN: You have 30 seconds, and then we will do Part 2.

EMMA BRIANT: — Iran. Oh, OK, sure. So, basically, they were working also in the Gulf from 2013. And it’s really important to note that the Saudis and the UAE were also very keen to oppose the Iran deal, and Trump’s election was followed by a huge spike in arms sales to the Saudis. And I think that this being a military contractor is extremely important to remember in the light of these recent developments on Iran. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s where we’re going to leave it now, but we’re going to pick it up in Part 2, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org. This has been an astounding discussion. I want to thank Emma Briant in Washington, Brittany Kaiser for joining us, and Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. The Great Hack is their film. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

Up Next

The Weaponization of Data: Cambridge Analytica, Information Warfare & the 2016 Election of Trump

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TEXTIFIRE

May 19, 2017

Steve Bannon-owned Cambridge Analytica LLC, a US subsidiary of UK defense contractor SCL Group, has been increasingly faulted for its dual role in both Donald Trump and Brexit’s victories. Its elevated & expensive role in the Trump digital marketing team’sself-proclaimed voter suppression rolloutwas the culmination of several years of preparation by military and anti-government interests on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as nationless finance & technology kingmakers seeking to enhance their own profit power.

As a direct result of the reporting led by the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica is already under active investigation for violating United Kingdom data protection laws, as related to their involvement with Leave.EU. It’s unclear if anything will come of this, as Leave’s ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ seem quite confident they were able to skate through some loopholes and use some creative accounting to their advantage.

Separate issues have been under the microscope of UK authorities. For example, one is the improper collection & use of voters’ personal data via the internet for political marketing/advertising purposes, and another is the question of foreign (read: non-UK) money being used to fund the Leave campaigns. Cambridge Analytica is at the center of the data inquiry, and US-based stock trader Robert Mercer has been identified as the primary source of the foreign money, but in both cases political media production & dissemination is the underlying issue.

Our previous article looked at the undertold history of the nonprofit organization Citizens United regarding highly influential American political media & advertising from 1988 to 2011, and we’ll continue just prior to where we left off. SCL was in a down period at the beginning of our tale, and its Cambridge Analytica did not yet exist. Donald Trump would soon begin early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012 presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal aspirations on hold.

Still, the fire rises.

Dukakis to Donald: 30 Years of Citizens United - TEXTIFIRE - Medium

1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of…

medium.com

PROFIT BOTS

Bannon & Bossie began releasing their political issue advocacy film collaborations in 2010, months after Bossie’s Citizens United v FEC case received its big Supreme Court victory, but they were among many looking to exploit the new election [de]regulations. One such up-and-coming major player was half-billionaire Robert Mercer.

Mercer had won awards in his first career, working for IBM’s Watson AI project in the field of natural language processing, where he wrote code teaching computers how to understand humans. The avid yachtsman changed tacks slightly in 1993, as he went on to make his sudden fortune with the wildly profitable private hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, also known as RenTec, of which he is now co-CEO. Its stock-in-trade, if you will, is using quantitative analysis and high frequency trading (HFT) to win big on the global financial markets.

Quantitative analysis is a blanket term that covers a range of techniques, but the basic idea is to execute financial transactions based on predictions made by calculating large groups of historical alphanumeric sets; i.e., using existing patterns to predict future outcomes. When you’re anticipating future numbers, you might naturally expect to first inspect past numbers.

However, the standard human brain can only do so much these days, so the vast majority of work involved in this field is performed by computers. Even experts in the field — unsurprisingly called ‘quants’, though RenTec is known for exclusively employing mathematicians, physicists, and cryptographers — are still only able to quickly & accurately calculate a small grouping of historical variables. As a result, giant datasets — consisting of any number of different variables tracked over time — are fed into computers which calculate them using complex math equations, following repeatable series of preprogrammed steps that are known as algorithms.

Not only do quants employ algorithms to spit out robotically identified market trends, but they frequently direct the algorithms to buy and sell stocks all on their own. This outsourcing of labor is known as algorithmic trading, and since the computers involved are usually employing algorithms on both sides of these transactions, the trades can happen incredibly quickly (nanoseconds) and in high volumes (around half of all US equity trades). Now we’re describing the quant subgenre of high frequency trading.

HFT is very controversial within the financial industry, with supporters saying it helps keep the markets liquid & transparent and detractors saying it increases volatility, but it’s probably safe to say most outside observers think it’s very dangerous. It’s been responsible for “flash crashes”; allowed for massive accumulations of private wealth for no reason other than automated exploitation of loopholes, timezones, and bandwidth; played a sizable (or at least very profitable) role in the 2008 global financial meltdown; and put the planet’s resources under the control of larval artificial intelligence.

For these reasons, it should be no surprise HFT came under the scrutiny of regulators, but only after a decade of algorithmic trading that was enabled by the 2000 changeover to stock decimalization (pricing shares by pennies instead of quarter-dollars). The EU had been fairly vigilant in that regard, but the US government hadn’t pricked up its ears until after the July 2009 arrest of Sergey Aleynikov, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, for allegedlystealing ‘proprietary’ algorithms from his employer Goldman Sachs.

Aleynikov was accused of sticking his digital avatar hand into the “black box” — the batches of algorithms that are kept secret by HFT firms — of Goldman Sachs, but his still-active case has been in & out of courts for these past 8 years, partially because some of the laws he broke had not yet been fully written. That genre of legislative inefficiency sparked the interest of Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, which in turn caught the eyes of quants and black box houses like RenTec.

4 minutes of HFT]

DeFazio spearheaded the idea of a financial transactions tax — to impose a micropercent tax on trades that would only affect the high-volume HFT in any tangible way— and teamed up with a couple colleagues to bring bills to the floor of Congress. He got nowhere in 2009, two years after the “Quant Quake”, nor in 2010, even after the May 6th “Flash Crash” again alerted the public to the dangers of HFT. Despite the failure to ignite substantial interest, his dedication to reform did not go unnoticed.

TEST DRIVING CITIZENS UNITED

DeFazio’s 2010 reelection campaign was nearly derailed by the appearance of highly-funded ads which attacked him and supported his ‘Tea Party’ Republican opponent, Art Robinson. Created by a PAC calling itself Concerned Taxpayers of America (CTA), it had been an ongoing mystery at the time as to who put up the big money for that organization. Only a few weeks before the election, as per the then-newly lax criteria set forth by the Citizens United decision earlier that year, was it revealed that one of the only two funders was Mr Robert Mercer, who contributed $643,750.

Investigation by the Washington Post prior to the reveal turned up even more curiosities, including a denial of the existence of CTA by a PR rep standing in the doorway of its registered address and directly to DeFazio’s face. Also, we should not be surprised to learn CTA’s treasurer was Jason Miller, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign communications director starting 30 June 2016. Miller was briefly named White House communications director in December 2016, before recusing himself a few days later after a fellow campaign worker accused the otherwise married Miller of fathering her unborn child.

Mercer’s attacks on DeFazio are easily attributable to HFT tax proposals, but his support of political then-novice Art Robinson is also notable. Robinson is a crackpot pseudoscientist whose mentor was Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling, before they acrimoniously parted ways in a divorce which ultimately ended in Robinson’s $25.5m lawsuit against the Pauling Institute (which he settled for $575k).

Robinson then became a supporter of homeopathic disease cures via exposure to raw radioactive elements, as well as a well-known climate change denier, an obsessive hoarder of 14,000+ human urine samples, and a forest-dwelling widower who homeschooled his 6 children using his own Bible-based, available-for-sale “Robinson Curriculum” (all of which basically makes him the Anti-Captain Fantastic). He lost to DeFazio in 2010 and lost again & again & again in 3 subsequent elections, but managed to become the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party from 2013–15, and has recently been considered for the role of Trump’s chief Science Adviser.

Robert Mercer and his politically powerful daughter Rebekah are said to have become fans of Robinson’s after reading his newsletter “Access to Energy”, which argues such things as Chernobyl radiation and carbon pollution are ultimately beneficial to planetary life. However, Mercer has privately “downplay[ed] the dangers posed by nuclear war” when excitedly expressing his belief that Hiroshima & Nagasaki radiation made the greater population of Japan healthier, and Robinson has published a book & multi-DVD set on Nuclear War Survival Skills, so they have that hobby in common.

After bringing someone like Robinson close to victory in 2010, the Mercers’ fresh taste for political power brought them the privileges and lifestyles of the rich & famous. They soon found themselves at a 2011 conference of the Club For Growth, a pro-business activist group for the conservative elite, which spent $6m of its own in support of 2010 GOP/Tea Party contenders. The Club is perhaps best known for being sued and fined by the FEC in 2005 for violating fair election laws. Its Executive Director David Keating then formed SpeechNow, a group which sued the FEC and did even more damage to campaign finance regulations via their Ninth Circuit Court victory in the immediate wake of Citizens United v FEC, but right now we’re focused on the Club as the place where Mercer first met Andrew Breitbart.

BREITBART OUT, BANNON & MERCER IN

Three years after meeting Steve Bannon in 2004 — at the Beverly Hills movie premiere of Bannon’s directorial debut In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed —Breitbart left The Drudge Report to start his own media outlet, Breitbart News, which he said was intended to be “unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel.” Breitbart rapidly became the darling of the ultraconservatives and elbowed his way into mainstream relevance, becoming a driving force in the 2009–10 rise of the explicitly anti-Obama Tea Party.

With their respective stars on the rise, it’s impossible to know who was more smitten with whom at the Spring 2011 Club For Growth meeting, but Breitbart took enough interest in the Mercers to later introduce them to his man Bannon. Having been with Breitbart News since its inception, Bannon ended up hitting it off with the Mercers and they immediately joined forces. In June 2011, the Mercers invested $10m in Breitbart, becoming co-owners in the process, but one of their contract stipulations demanded that their brand new friend Bannon be promoted to the board of directors.

Bannon & Breitbart, aka the Three Men and A Baby ghost

Around that same time in 2011, the 42yo Breitbart suffered a heart attack. Within a year, he collapsed on an L.A. street and died on 1 March 2012, with his autopsy blaming another massive heart attack due to an enlarged heart. Later that very same day, Bannon has said he met with New York investors to plan the future of Breitbart News, and he would quickly be named Executive Chairman on 19 March.

This was a crucial time period for all of these players. In February 2012, Bannon founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) with $2m in seed funding from the Mercers. Rebekah Mercer became Chairwoman, and Bannon installed Peter Schweizer— author of Reagan’s War, the book adapted into Bannon’s first “documentary” — as president of GAI. Like Bossie and Mercer, Schweizer is yet another Clinton-hating, Reagan-adoring, tax reform & financial deregulation advocate and conspiracy theorist.

A couple of the first ‘reports’ out of the gate for GAI: a treatise attesting to the horrors of food stamps,as well as another which itemized every instance of President Barack Obama’s attendance at his daily briefings. Breitbart predictably publishes multiple stories each time GAI puts out a press release, but both of those early missives were picked up for publication and discussion in major media outlets, such as ABC News, Washington Times, National Review, and Washington Post.

Peter Schweizer on Russia Today

What we’ll call ‘Mercer Money’ was also funneled into Citizens United’s coffers, to the tune of another 2 million dollars. This cash was at least partly used to fund Bannon & Bossie’s 4th Citizens United Productions collaboration, The Hope and the Change, an anti-Obama movie which premiered at the August Republican National Convention and played in theatres & on cable TV up through Election Day. Once again, the Citizens United v FEC decision enabled that release schedule.

And yet despite all of this intrigue, perhaps the most important development and deployment of Mercer Money in 2012 came in the form of a $5,000,000 investment in a relatively unknown British defense contractor, then called Strategic Communication Laboratories Ltd but now known as SCL Group. The Mercers tossed the pounds across the pond to enable data analytics research, with Rebekah wanting a “results-oriented consultant.”

This investment has been noted elsewhere as a natural fit for Robert Mercer, as his background in algorithms and language processing mesh with what we now know about SCL’s recent use of big data to enhance electioneering communications, but that actually didn’t yet make sense at the time. Back then, the only technology strongly tied to SCL would have been communications hardware (as opposed to database software), but only as one aspect of their rather straightforward advertising-cum-propaganda tactics.

SCL had worked on some elections, in a few war zones, and for the Pentagon over the years, with perhaps their most notable appearance being in 2004 Ukraine at the time of the Orange Revolution (allegedly on behalf of the vested interests of British intelligence, according to one untrustworthy source,as previously noted by TEXTIFIRE).

SCL carries a Secret clearance as a ‘List X’ contractor for the British Ministry of Defence and had always portrayed themselves as experts in the field of behavioral dynamics and psychological warfare, but had no known background in the algorithmic data processing with which they are now associated.

So why would an ill-equipped foreign defense contractor like SCL be called upon by the Mercers to do big data research? The answer again appears to lie somewhere in the weeds near Steve Bannon.

Header for Nigel Farage’s dozens of Breitbart essays (Source)]

WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?

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Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation. He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly those tied in with Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).A hard right party commonly disparaged as fascist, UKIP sought to restore what it saw as true conservatism. Bannon was greatly invested in the USA Tea Party ‘movement’ at the time, as evidenced by his movie productions and speaking engagements, so he viewed UKIP as a natural comrade in arms.

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UKIP had been stagnating as a political force while known as a single platform party, focused almost entirely on immigration crackdown and demand for UK’s exit from the European Union. Co-founder Farage had returned to lead the party for a 2nd time in November 2010 — later in the same week as the first Tea Party Republicans were elected in the US midterms — after failing in his bid to become House of Commons Speaker earlier that year, and began to incorporate a wider variety of populist messaging with a focus on local elections to increase growth.

Soon after Bannon took over Breitbart in the summer of 2012, he brought Farage to the USA for a grand tour of New York and Washington, D.C. During this trip, Bannon introduced Farage to a number of movers & shakers, including the staff of Jeff Sessions,the then-senator from Alabama who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.

Throughout the previous year, a UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge was garnering a lot of press for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox, after being founded in 1997 by Fox and Reagan BFF/ex-UK-PM Margaret Thatcher, its stated goal was to protect the 80's holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special relationship’ from “the European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States.”

Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]

Atlantic Bridge fell into the sea in late 2011, after extensive investigations found Fox had been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” by internationally courting a variety of corporate lobbyists and military contractors via the dark money donated to Bridge as a falsely-labeled charity. Fox then resigned his Cabinet position, taking a few others down with him.

One of those affected was yet another powerful hedge fund manager, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, climate-change denier & funder, and longtime Tory/Conservative donor named Michael Hintze who provided the majority of those donations and lent his private jet to Fox for schmoozy jaunts to meet with D.C. defence contractors. With a strong interest in geopolitical wargames, a habit of supporting Defence Secretaries, and a predilection for hiring senior military officials at his powerful firm Convertible & Quantitative Strategies, it’s small wonder Hintze sought to establish a Western security superhighway before the Bridge collapsed.

Back in 2007, however, Atlantic Bridge was still in its prime, and it gained even more power when a giant among US political activist groups began an official partnership with it. The American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, so they may further the ideals exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”

Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]

ALEC’s decades-old modus operandi is to write complete versions of new legislation, which invariably benefits only its powerful corporate members, to be passed off to complicit politicians and introduced in Congress as original products. An official ALEC newsletter from Dec 2007 bragged of the Bridge Project’s new plans to enact “a series of events aimed at conservative leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia — exposing them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.”

Catherine Bray is pictured in the newsletter as the Director of International Relations for Atlantic Bridge; she had previously worked for prominent UKIP member & climate change denier Roger Helmer and subsequently worked for Tory Daniel Hannan, “the man who brought you Brexit.” In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen, Atlantic Bridge’s Washington DC Director, and J.D. Gordon, a retired Pentagon spokesman and well-traveled defense lobbyist. Lee Cohen is now an ardent Trump supporter, publishing an IJR essay in November 2016 predicting Trump and new UK PM Theresa May will be the new Reagan & Thatcher.

Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director forHerman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier Cain promised to reduce corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA. Cain began briefly leading Obama in the polls at that time and was the most reported-on GOP candidate in 2011, but quit the race less than 2 months later after sexual misconduct charges arose.

Gordon was slightly controversial when he originally joined up as one of Cain’s foreign policy advisers, as he had recently left a fellowship position at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank (or perhaps hate group) devoted to advancing founder and former Reagan official Frank Gaffney’s pet cause of extreme Islamophobia. Cain’s campaign also absorbed the staff of Gordon’s own embryonic thinktank, the Center for Security and Democracy, which included a former Heritage Foundation manager.

J.D. Gordon is most recently known for his work as a key foreign policy adviser to Cain clone Donald Trump, who counted Herman among his early campaign rally speakers/surrogates, and about whom Gordon wrote a pro-Trump Breitbart article in April 2016. Gordon was also Jeff Sessions’ deputy, allegedly traveled to Budapest six times during the campaign, participated in the infamous July 2016 Republican National Convention meeting — hosted by the Heritage Foundation — involving co-adviser Carter Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and is said to have previously recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow. Gordon also claims he personally asked to water down the RNC platform with noncommittal language omitting lethal weapons support for Ukraine, and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.

(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio]

Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, then frequently cited as one of the farthest-right sitting Senators. An ardent tax reformer, Family member, and anti-immigration crusader, he was on board with the Tea Party from its inception in early 2009, setting the stage with the establishment of his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC in 2008. The Fund attacked Republicans for being too ‘moderate’ and then gave millions to the successful 2010 Senate campaigns of such first-time Tea Party candidates as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey. Also in 2010, DeMint introduced the first bill intended to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few months later with his first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage, so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he endorsed Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.

A large chunk of the money for that tactical assault was provided by Robert Mercer, with other miniature morsels of Mercer Money going to DeMint, Toomey, and Rubio at various times. Unsurprisingly, Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time, with Lee and Demint tying for the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.

“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]

DeMint resigned from the Senate less than two months after the 2012 election in order to become president of Heritage — a thinktank which shares an enormous number of historical, practical, and membership commonalities with ALEC — by which time Atlantic Bridge had been dead [in the UK] for over a year. Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, Liam Fox, J.D. Gordon, and/or any of the other Atlantic Bridge ambassadors still managed to make their way to any one of the legendary parties thrown at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a four-story townhouse rented (?) by Breitbart near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

As for the gregarious and cigar-chomping heavy drinker Nigel Farage, we don’t have to imagine anything. He was treated as the guest of honor at a Breitbart Embassy dinner & cocktail party in September 2014, where the stars of the new right rubbed shoulders with journalists from across the media spectrum. Other guests that night included LifeZette’sLaura Ingraham, a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannon had been partially living at the Embassy since at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially expected to serve as a means to rub shoulders with the movers & shakers of the DC political elite. “Andrew [Breitbart] said that if you didn’t have a place within spitting distance of the Capitol, no one would come,” Bannon told The Washington Post at an Embassy blowout schmooze-and-boozefest CPAC rager in 2014. “He loved to throw big parties.”

But regardless of the precise circumstances by which Bannon became enmeshed with the UK’s conservative elite prior to mid-2012, engrossing as the detailed story may be, his friendship with UKIP & Brexit’s Farage tells us all we need to know. As such, we should be unsurprised to learn it was allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.

PSYOPS GOES MAINSTREAM

In October 2012, a month before Mitt Romney’s loss initiated the Bannon-driven deposit of Mercer Money toward new election management technology, a Strategic Communication Laboratories subsidiary named SCL Elections was registered in the UK. All company shares were initially owned by Alexander Nix, Director of SCL Group and public face of the conglomerate, but its first and current Managing Director is Mark Turnbull.

Turnbull had previously worked for the tremendously influential public relations and strategic communications firm Bell Pottinger — co-founded by infamous PR guru Lord Timothy Bell — spending 18 years at the company. In 2004, he founded and led Bell Pottinger Public Advocacy (BPPA, fka Bell Pottinger Special Projects), which claimed to specialize in “understanding and influencing the human and social dynamics of conflict and cooperation…[using]…people’s identities, interests, networks and narratives that are the focal point for communications designed to deliver measurable change in support of political, social, developmental or military objectives.”

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Bell Pottinger (B-PC) landed a 2004 Pentagon contract in Iraq devoted to manufacturing pro-Coalition media — including in-house advertising, video production, and paid placement of newspaper/TV/radio news items — in support of post-Saddam Hussein nation building and anti-Daesh messaging. The creative team of BPPA collaborated on the media directly with US military intelligence, with the crews working side-by-side in the most highly secured locations, such as Baghdad’s Camp Victory.

Though initially intended to be a 4-month contract, first granted by Ian Tunnicliffe’s Office of Strategic Communications of the Coalition Provisional Authority under USA’s pseudo-viceroy of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the project ultimately extended all the way to 2011. Upwards of 40 ‘stratcom’ companies — including BKSH & Associates, formed from the ashes of Black, Manafort, and Stone — followed B-PC’s lead, creating a veritable vortex of political propaganda and psychological operations experimentation. B-PC came out as the big winner of the free-for-all, as by the end of its time in Iraq, B-PC’s contract payouts had ballooned from US$5.8m to a total of $540m–660m.

Also present in Iraq during those years was a specialized British Armed Forces tri-service unit, the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, formerly known as Shadow. Its stated objective was to “influence attitudes in order to affect behaviour” with “planned, culturally sensitive, truthful and attributable activities directed and disseminated by various means to an approved target audience.” It drew from the Army, Navy & Air Force, seeking out Reserves who were also “TV & film producers, camera operators, radio presenters, [and] graphic designers/illustrators for print/web.”

Two important members of 15 (UK) PSYOPS (aka 15 POG) were Stephen Jolly of the Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham, both graduates of Cambridge University-affiliated schools. A linguistic scientist, certified psyops planner, and instructor for 15 POG, Jolly went on to serve as the UK’s Director of Defence Communications, starting in Dec 2012. He retired in 2015 as the most senior serving psyops officer in British Defence, moving on to become Fellow of the UK Defence Academy and Fellow in Communications at the Cambridge University Judge Business School.

As Defence Comms Director, Jolly embraced the new ‘Army 2020’ holistic reform initiative, pushing a “full spectrum” approach which combines the fields of public relations, media operations, information operations (IO) and psyops. This led to the creation of the 77th Brigade of the British Army, which absorbed several specialized units, including the 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group. Its establishment received a fair amount of media coverage, due to the claim it would partially focus on utilizing social media to wage the ‘dark arts’ of asymmetric warfare, but its ?1 Column focuses on “the behavioural analysis of actors, audiences and adversaries.”

Commander Steve Tatham served with 15 POG in Iraq, but commanded its Afghanistan regiment for years. He also plied his trade as Director of Communication Research at the UK Defence Academy, and was the UK’s longest continuously serving Influence Activities officer. Upon retirement he became Director of Operations at IOTA-Global, a UK company owned by Nigel Oakes, the founder of SCL and its research arm, Behavioural Dynamics Institute (BDi).

Grown just outside battlefields across the globe, Tatham designed a course titled “Target Audience Analysis” for the National Defence Academy of Latvia on behalf of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, teaching several agencies how to counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe. Originally a 9-week intensive training, delivered as a collaboration between IOTA-Global, BDi, and SCL Defence (formerly an SCL Group subsidiary), Tatham has repeated the course in Moldova and Ukraine. As IOTA-Global recently disbanded its corporate status, Tatham is currently Director of Defence Operations at SCL Group.

Verbalisation’s RAID

Another pair of 15 (UK) PSYOPS veterans and avowed fans of the new 77th Brigade, Sven Hughes and David Stanhope, are leaders at the behavioral marketing firm Verbalisation, which bills itself as “the world’s first consultancy dedicated to changing behaviour by precision-engineering language.” Hughes, a former head of elections at SCL from 2009–10 who also assisted NATO forces in Afghanistan, says his staff members are “largely ex-military personnel and political campaigners.” Stanhope spent eight years with 15 POG, serving under Cdr Tatham for a spell in Afghanistan, and also worked in 2011 for SCL (briefly joining fellow ex-IO/psyops agents Jerry Knight & the aforementioned Ian Tunnicliffe, both former SCL directors). The POG vets claim Verbalisation’s RAID aka Rapid Audience Insight Diagnostics® software tool can help military and marketing clients — including several News Corp media outlets — “decode” personalities based on 24 set parameters, including language, cognition, susceptibility, and culture.

Despite years of effort and billions of international dollars, the Iraq and Afghanistan information operations (IO) projects were deemed by experts to have been a failure. Cdr Tatham even co-wrote a UK Defence Academy report lamenting “the corporate failure to adapt IO and PSYOPS’s operating practices to the 21st century, instead relying upon ages-old methods of communication,” as well as an “over reliance of IO and PSYOPS on commercial advertising and marketing strategies.”

“Commercial marketing and advertising methods are designed to increase the hit rate of customers in a target group. A conversion of 10% would be considered outstanding and highly profitable. But in military operations achieving a 10% change in the behaviour of an insurgent group or a hostile community would be operationally insignificant,” Tatham wrote in the NATO StratCom Target Audience Analysis (TAA) course summary. He instead advocates for TAA and the use of scientific research into behavior predictors, such as language, likes, and motivation, as opposed to focusing the majority of resources on creative media production glitz.

To this end, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), a trading fund of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which is the equivalent of USA’s DARPA, conducted a study between May-Sept 2013 called ‘Project DUCO’ which contracted SCL and BDi to test out their TAA capabilities. The evaluation was undertaken as part of the Human and Social Influence project, funded from the MoD Science and Technology research budget. In-person questionnaires were verbally completed byyoung unmarried males (“YUMs”) in target regions, with SCL-trained interviewers canvassing neighborhoods like standard solicitors, simply because no other means existed to gain insight into individual personalities and groupthink.

It seems that the psyops startup incubators of Iraq and Afghanistan failed to overwhelmingly win the hearts and minds of the target audiences in those locales, but succeeded in honing the methodological requirements of the IO traffickers. As Tatham suggested, giant billboards and radio jingles aimed at a large population based on small sample size indicators weren’t effective enough, so a product like Verbalisation — listed under “Counter Terrorism and Security” on R-Cloud, Dstl’s marketplace for partnered contractors — was born, ready and able to pinpoint individuals & target groups for analysis and alteration.

Of course, all of this sounds exactly like the TAA work SCL was contracted in early 2017 to perform for the US State Department’s new Global Engagement Center, a reboot of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) and its famously failed 2010s online propaganda & surveillance program.

SCL Group Joins the US State Dept.

Robert Mercer-funded Cambridge Analytica’s foreign parent company signs deal to do propaganda work for State’s Global…

medium.com]

SCL and State’s CSCC were not strangers prior to 2017, though, as Nigel Oakes had spoken at a January 2012 CSCC seminar on “The Most Common Mistakes in Designing Influence Campaigns,” at which Oakes was pitching the State Dept on knowledge acquired from Iraq and Afghan 15 POG work. The seminar’s BDi-provided video description explains, “Nigel highlighted four very common errors made in designing influence campaigns, especially if one is trying to induce significant behavior change.”

Bits and pieces of the 2000s Middle Eastern psyops extravaganza had trickled out back then, but the full extent of B-PC/BPPA’s Iraq work under Mark Turnbull was only revealed in a October 2016 report entitled “Fake News and False Flags” by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK nonprofit devoted to extended and unbiased investigations.

Five years previous, the Bureau conducted another well-publicized investigation into Turnbull’s BPPA, in which B-PC executives were caught on tape boasting about their unique “dark arts” ability to initiate political change via their deep infiltration into the highest levels of UK government. The execs also boasted of their skills in hiding bad PR bymanipulating Google results with juiced-up ‘Google bombing’, and how they had a team devoted to Wikipedia reputation management, which is common now but was rather cutting-edge at the time.

NOT EXACTLY MAGGIE & GORBY

Also back in 2004 — the same year BPPA formed and their work began in Iraq — B-PC took on a contract to spin their web in Ukraine for Yulia Tymoshenko in the time of the Orange Revolution, which would have seen them working against Paul Manafort’s clients in the Party of Regions, as well as in the vicinity of fellow contractor SCL. A previous article published by TEXTIFIRE explored SCL’s role in those events and the related history, which involves billionaires, rigged elections, the most glamorous Russian spy in history, and a mythical war room SCL billed as “The Most Powerful Weapon In The World.”

SCL Group’s Eurasian Vacation

SCL once had their defense contractors’ conference booth made by a design team from Goldeneye 007. Here’s a pitch for…

medium.com

Bell’s involvement in Ukraine did not end in 2004, for even though they had been employed by future Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, it was her frequent antagonist and Party of Regions bigwig Dmytro Firtash who retained the long-term services of B-PC. Firtash is an oil & natural resources magnate who also owns Ukraine’s largest TV station, but is now an internationally wanted criminal suspect trailing a long history of personal relationships with Vladimir Putin and Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich.Just as with the American PR firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, whose client list is littered with objectively unsavory characters, Bell Pottinger has long made itself available to the highest bidder.

Bell advised the Firtash Foundation while Anthony Fisher, senior consultant with Bell Pottinger, served as director of the Foundation. Fisher also co-founded the Firtash front Scythian Limited, which came under fire for funneling foreign funds to Tory politicians in a scandal which prevented a National Security Adviser nominee from being confirmed, and is a board member of the Firtash-supported group British Ukrainian Society (BUS). Chairman of BUS is Lord Risby, an economics graduate of Cambridge University, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, and current member of the House of Lords.

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Firtash’s direct ties to several well-placed UK Conservatives is a curiosity. Despite his heavy baggage, Firtash has stayed active in politics via his BUS, and he donated a truck full of cash to help establish Cambridge University’s Ukrainian Studies school. Perhaps his open checkbook and loose lips have allowed him to avoid extradition to the USA, instead roaming free in Vienna while out on US$125,000,000 bail from long-unprosecuted charges. Without speculating too much about his actual place in this tale, Firtash’s story in particular is reminiscent of the days of Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev era Cold War double agents.

What’s old is apparently new again, however, as the Parliamentary members of the short-lived group Conservative Friends of Russia would no doubt decline to attest. Conservative Friends rapidly fizzled after public outcry but quickly relaunched as the Westminster Russia Forum, yet those ex-Friends could be expected to assure us that their original so-called “Tories for Putin” group was strictly on the up and up.

As Friends co-founder Richard Royal explained at the time in his 2012 Guardian op-ed, the Tories had turned their backs on the more liberal Labour leadership but found their increasingly hardlining nativist gaze met in Eurasia. “We must remember, however, that being a Friend of Russia is not the same as being a Friend of the Russian government,” said Royal. “By that reckoning, our Conservative members were not friends of Britain between 1997 and 2010[.]”

Margaret Thatcher & Lord Tim Bell (Source)]

Retro ’80s stylings abound, in fact, as Conservative bedfellow Lord Bell was nominated for his knighthood by Margaret Thatcher, for whom he served as personal media adviser throughout her time as UK Prime Minister, with their close friendship illustrated by Bell’s official announcement of her 2013 death.

The Iron Lady left behind quite the well-connected coterie, with her Atlantic Bridge co-founder Liam Fox overseeing the aforementioned psyops work while Shadow Defence Secretary & Defence Secretary from 2005–2011, his megadonor patron Michael Hintzea client of Lord Bell’s during the time of Atlantic Bridge, and old friend Sir Geoffrey Pattie — another former vice-chair of the Conservative party who served as Thatcher’s Minister of State for Industry & Information Technology and Undersecretary for Defence Procurement — spending a few years as a Director of SCL.

Though Sir Pattie had switched from Director to President of SCL Group four years prior, SCL Elections’ official registration in the month preceding President Obama’s reelection — with Mercer Money in its coffers and Lord Bell’s ‘Special Projects’ ex-director Mark Turnbull at its helm — set off a chain reaction of SCL corporate maneuverings that extended across the following four years.

A flurry of declarations of new subsidiaries and subsequent name changes of those companies culminated on 7 September 2016, when SCL Director Alexander Nix transferred all 100 original shares of SCL Elections from himself to the company SCL Analytics. Formed a year prior, SCL Analytics is 70% owned by Nix and 30% owned by its parent company SCL Group.

As far as is known at presstime, SCL Group and Nix currently co-own all shares of SCL Analytics, which owns all shares of SCL Elections, which owns all shares of [what was originally named SCL USA Ltd but as of 13 April 2016 is officially known as] Cambridge Analytica (UK) Limited.

However, that CA-UK is technically separate from the American subsidiary Cambridge Analytica LLC, which was registered in Delaware on 31 Dec 2013, over two years sooner. To confuse us even further, 22 Apr 2014 saw the DE registration of SCL USA Inc., which is also wholly owned by SCL Elections but is separate from the 12 Feb 2003 establishment of SCL USA LLC.

If you followed all that, give yourself a pat on the back and a candy.

TEXTIFIRE peer edited this tremendous chart by Wendy Siegelman & Ann Marlowe]

SEEKING A Ph.D. IN EXPLOITATIVE AD-TECH

Cambridge Analytica LLC — the US company which will henceforth be referred to as CA or CambAnal — has garnered a large amount of public interest over the last year and a half for its use of big data in elections, just like Rebekah Mercer wanted. The primary subject of that media attention has been debate over the controversial merits of CA’s claimed use of Five Factor Model or BIG5 personality profiling — aka OCEAN, an acronym derived from Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — with much less of a focus on either the sourcing of the identifying datapoints or the origination of the tools & methodology CA deployed.

A December 2016 article in Das Magazin — a sensation in Germany at the time, which spread virally upon its English translation published by VICE’s Motherboard in January — told a story relayed byMichal Kosinski, formerly Director of Operations for Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit. Kosinski seemed to be suggesting SCL and CA might have stolen (or at least repurposed without permission) his team’s research into third-party use of millions of Facebook interactions as data point items, which Kosinski et al collected using a Facebook quiz app and then ran through OCEAN profiling for personality cataloguing purposes.

Cambridge University played a major role in an earlier TEXTFIRE article, as it has become a hotbed of international spy chatter over the last several months, encompassing rumors about Gen. Michael Flynn and Russian influence at the renowned spycraft coffee klatch,the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (where 15 POG’s Stephen Jolly is said to be a frequent attendee). Switching gears, however, it is important to note that Cambridge was partnering with another organization on this and other psychometrics projects: Microsoft Research.

But How Does It Work?!? (Source)]

At the time of his key March 2013 journal article, Kosinski was also a research advisor to the Online Services and Advertising group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. One of his two article co-authors was Dr. Thore Graepel, who “is a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge leading the Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group, where their work is focused on the application of large scale machine learning and probabilistic modelling techniques to a wide range of problems including online advertising, web search, and games,” according to his still-active Cambridge online profile.

Perhaps Cambridge simply needs to update its website, for Dr. Graepel currently works as Research Lead at Google DeepMind and Professor of Computer Science at University College London. DeepMind is a company Google purchased in 2014, which seeks to conquer quantum computing but now primarily develops “the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms,” and which has come under fire for its mishandling of millions of UK patients’ health data while under contract from Britain’s NHS.

The other significant co-author on that publication (and its several predecessors, starting in Feb 2012) was Dr David Stillwell, Deputy Director of The Psychometrics Centre, whose Cambridge profile labels the barely-30y/o as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Psychometrics.” Stillwell originally wrote the myPersonality app which gathered the studies’ data from millions of Facebook profiles, doing so while preparing for his graduate studies in 2007. Just one year after Facebook first became available to the general public, myPersonality began hoarding user profiles.

Stillwell also created a Facebook app called You Are What You Like, a product released no later than October 2013. “By linking the myPersonality database to Facebook Likes we have created an application that is able to predict your personality simply by logging in to your Facebook account,” boasted its deactivated Cambridge webpage.

Another tool developed from myPersonality (and its cousin myIQ) was LikeAudience, described in the 2010–11 annual Cambridge report as “a breakthrough research and marketing tool developed by Michal Kosinski that provides detailed psycho-demographic profiles of brands, products, ideas, and all the other things people like on Facebook.”

The Psychometrics Centre was working on “gender difference in intelligence” and “perceptions of intelligence in Facebook images and their relationship to actual IQ and to personality, the validity of social network likes as predictors of product preference and the relationship between personality and product preference,” the report went on to say. “Michal Kosinski established a continuing collaboration with the Microsoft Laboratory at Cambridge, on several projects including an exploration of crowd sourcing of intelligence in the Amazon Mechanical Turk.”

“Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers,” said Kosinski in a 22 Apr 2011 article by Cambridge. “We think [LikeAudience] will revolutionise marketing, because it introduces a completely new dimension by adding scientifically robust personality tests to other demographic information.”

The same article announced Kosinski and Stillwell “believe that [LikeAudience] will be of particular value to marketers, who will be able to uncover new potential audiences for their advertising campaigns, and exploitable niches based on the fans of their closest rivals. The potential significance for politicians, particularly when on the election trail, is also clear.”

LikeAudience’s dashboard (Source)]

Identifying politics and elections as potential use case scenarios has been a common theme with these products. The “How Does It Work?” page on YouAreWhatYouLike.composited, “If most of the things you like are liked by liberal people (e.g. Quentin Tarantino) — it is quite likely that you are also liberal.”

“Sarah Palin appeals to a rather different personality type. Her followers are likely to be more traditional in mindset, disciplined, dutiful, and older than the average Obama fan.” Further analysis of Palin-approving LikeAudience users found those with similar profiles “still track the fortunes of the last President, George W. Bush, and also enthuse about Pizza Hut and the Seattle Seahawks.”

PreferenceTool, the successor of the deprecated LikeAudience, seems quite sure of its efficacy in applying all this knowledge to behavioural modification. “PreferenceTool enables marketers to significantly improve targeting and reduce the cost of marketing campaigns,” said its splash page. “It is used by leading online marketing agencies and is proved to have increased campaign effectiveness by up to 140%. [emphasis theirs]”

Dr. Graepel explains Cambridge & Microsoft’s psychometric Facebook study; compare this to CA/SCL Elections’ explanation of their methodology HERE]

Despite an outward veneer of academically pure intention, this research is clearly being conducted for specific purposes. To get a better sense of their work, Cambridge has helpfully provided us with a litany of online demonstrations of what appears to be its currently most hyped [and administratively sanctioned] product, the online psychometric assessment creation tool Concerto. We can quickly see the difference between Cambridge Psychometric’s historical topics of focus, such as preschool activities and mental disorders, as compared to the names of quizzes performed in Concerto, including several titled “Advertisement Test”.

Both the Psychometrics Centre and Microsoft Research websites plainly hawk their myPersonality-derived services to interested clients, using keywords of ‘advertising’ and ‘machine learning’. Cambridge offers the use of myPersonality data as a service, on both the Psychometrics homepage and and its flagship Apply Magic Sauce site, and also offers open-source data to hundreds of active researchers at myPersonality.org.

Apply Magic Sauce hosts a sample personality quiz, which likely distracts rubberneckers more interested in the self-help quizzes found on Cambridge’s DiscoverMyProfile.com, but its business2business page boasts of services which will sound very familiar if you’ve read this far. “We enable instant psychological assessment of your users based on their online behaviour,” it excitedly exclaims, by using a range of tools “from multi-channel keyword targeting to psycholinguistic tailoring.”

Apply Magic Sauce pricing (Source)]

“In a fraction of a second, you can now adjust the presentation, delivery and content of your message to suit the distinct psychological make-up of the person viewing it,” if you are simply willing to pay a few hundred or thousand quid per month, depending on the extent of your customised needs. To be clear, Cambridge University’s publicly available Apply Magic Sauce product is openly offering to perform high-frequency advertisement creation based on psychographic profiling data culled from Facebook, in what is likely a very lucrative setup for the school.

On the private sector side, “Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group” sounds rather self-explanatory, so it is relatively clear what Microsoft has intended to accomplish through its Cambridge funding. Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC) research is being funneled into Microsoft’s Cortana AI tool and its Azure Cognitive Services AI platform, as well as “voting games” and internet ads. An MSRC study from Sept 2014 is titled “Efficient Advert Assignment”, focusing on algorithmic pay-per-click schemes in online search results.

“Only in the recent literature have computationally efficient methods been considered for market and auction design,” the paper reminds us. “In the context of electronic commerce and specifically sponsored search auctions, these computational considerations are of critical importance given the increased diversity and competition associated with online advertising.”

Cambridge and Microsoft’s team-up has produced algorithm-to-algorithm HFT of consumers’ personalities and their custom-targeted online adverts. No wonder the Psychometrics Centre changed departments in 2016, moving from Social and Developmental Psychology to Stephen Jolly’s Judge Business School.

MS Cognitive Services AI isn’t NEURTRAL, it’s RAYCYST (Source)]

TAKING THE CAMBRIDGE OUT OF CAMBANAL

With fingers pointing at CambAnal and CambUni as a result of all the recent media coverage, blame has begun to be shifted around. School, tech company, and professors are all turning on each other. In an attempt to uncover their true relationships, data protection advocate and researcher Paul-Olivier Dehaye has filed a number of Freedom Of Information requests with Cambridge, but has thus far only received refusals; instead, the University has appeared to be attempting to distance itself from the research in question. Their stance seems to be that they have no claim to the data or results, that Michal Kosinski owns it all, and that Microsoft is solely responsible for its existence.

In the aforementioned Das Magazin article, Kosinski absolved himself and Cambridge of any responsibility, saying, “This is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists.” He instead laid nearly all the blame at the feet of a young Cambridge professor, then known as Dr Aleksandr Kogan. Kosinski said Kogan approached him in late January 2014, attempting to purchase access to myPersonality on behalf of a deep-pocketed company, and it was not until some time later that Kosinski remembered it was SCL. Kogan went on to start his own company and began harvesting Facebook information from unsuspecting Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, paying the going rate of pennies per full profile download, and then turned that info over to SCL in some sort of licensing deal.

In a public Facebook conversation, Kogan denies almost all of this. He says he and Kosinski knew each other and continued to stay in touch after SCL entered the frame; SCL also met and had direct interactions with Kosinski; and SCL was by that time heavily into machine learning and microtargeting applications of psychological data for political purposes.

As he noted in his lengthy Facebook rebuttal, Kogan legally changed his married name to Aleksandr Spectre in 2016, making him Dr Spectre. He only has a small handful of published papers to his name(s), focused exclusively on emotionality neuroscience, though that didn’t stop him from becoming Director aka “beloved commander” of the Cambridge Prosociality and Well-Being Lab as early as July 2013. His full birth name was Aleksandr Borisovich Kogan, owing to his Moldovan birth and Russian ancestry.

As easy as it would be to cast the Russian mad scientist Dr Spectre as the villain in this British spy story, the problem is Kosinski’s timeline doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The word on the street is CambAnal hired researchers from Cambridge University as part of its original staff, which is allegedly where the “Cambridge” came from when naming the company on its first 31 Dec 2013 Delaware registration, along with the perceived instant name cachet. But that this would be less than a month before Spectre allegedly approached Kosinski on behalf of SCL — or before SCL met Kosinski — is an enormous coincidence, especially since the Psychometric Centre’s Facebook-related research publications and marketing products had been making the rounds for 3–5 years at that point.

Not to mention, the first pre-CA “unpaid pilot project to show how SCL might work” for electioneering purposes was in the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race, which culminated on 5 Nov 2013. What was their ‘value add’ in mid/late 2013 if SCL was merely offering UK military psyops techniques (as described in our companion article), if Cambridge Analytica and its fancy-sounding name wouldn’t be officially established until two months later, and if they weren’t testing out any BIG5 methodology or offering up psycho-demographic profile data from Facebook?

Of course, it’s possible these shortcomings contributed to their candidate Ken Cuccinelli’s loss, despite another $600,000 of Mercer Money given to Cuccinellisupporters at Virginia Principles Fund, which is the only donation ever listed for that PAC. Perhaps they emerged from the losing battle with a better sense of their big data needs, but as the next few years unfolded, this model where Mercer donates to a campaign or PAC just prior to Cambridge Analytica’s employment would quickly become de rigueur.

Cuccinelli, who would later advise Ted Cruz, said he met Mercer on a fundraising trip to New York. “He’s very solid and understated. You wouldn’t know you were talking to someone with that kind of force,” said Cuccinelli. “He just thinks our country is off track and he’s in a position to do something to get it back on track.”

It’s unlikely CambAnal/SCL was the reason for the recent FBI raid of Strategic Campaign Group, a firm which also worked for Cuccinelli’s 2013 campaign and the Mercer-funded/CA-assisted John Bolton SuperPAC. Still, it’s unclear if SCL was legally allowed to do unpaid electioneering work in 2013, since SCL USA LLC’s 12 Feb 2003 Delaware establishment as a defense contractor made it the only American SCL subsidiary in existence at that time. And why is SCL USA LLC currently listed as a Foreign Company in VA records if it’s registered to Steve Bannon’s Beverly Hills business address…?

After recommending that the Mercers fund the startup SCL Elections in 2012, which was the major catalyst for the creation of CambAnal,Steve Bannon continued his push into UK affairs. He flew to England in late 2013 to meet with Raheem Kassam, a young far-right blogger and frequent thinktank employee. Bannon invited him to guide the hand of the upcoming Breitbart London bureau expansion site, which Kassam agreed to do.

Breitbart London successfully launched in February 2014 and began working surprising magic on the fortunes of UKIP, which would gain its biggest head of steam yet as it made huge gains in Parliamentary seats and pushed for an exit of Britain from the EU. This seems to be partially due to Kassam’s positioning as Bannon’s UK avatar. Kassam not only tirelessly supported the cause on Breitbart, but switched his voting allegiance from Conservative to UKIP at the time Bannon visited in 2013, and then suddenly rose to become UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s chief of staff in 2014.

Unfortunately for Farage’s bizarrely alleged good friend Robert Mercer, this was a few months before Renaissance Technologies would again be mentioned in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Farage: “Well Done Bannon; Well Done Breitbart” (Source)]

MR. MERCER GOES TO WASHINGTON

On 22 July 2014, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by US Senators Carl Levin (D) and John McCain (R), held a hearing titled, “Abuse of Structured Financial Products: Misusing Basket Options to Avoid Taxes and Leverage Limits.” Called in to testify were six financial heavyweights: the Managing Director of Barclays, the CEO of Barclays Capital, a Managing Director and the President of Deutsche Bank Securities, and two executives from Renaissance Technologies.

After a 6-year investigation, the firms were being accused of nearly 15 years of tax evasion through the use of “basket contracts” aka “basket options”, which are too complicated to necessitate a full explanation in this space. The end result is the conversion of short-term trading profits into long-term capital gains, which lowered the tax rate on their gains/profits from 35% to 15%, saving RenTec et al billions of dollars in taxes.

Using algorithms written to identify and exploit opportunities for statistical arbitrage — aka StatArb, which focuses on tiny and very brief pricing anomalies of publicly-traded assets, which occur for various reasons and are only visible to computers — Rentec would execute more than 100 thousand trades a day, and more than 30 million a year. Deutsche and Barclays then assisted RenTec and two hedge funds in covering up the digital paper trail, skirting the outermost edges of the tax law in the process.

This type of high frequency trading is among many different strategies that act as one, including the implementation of machine-learning technologies to make and implement investment decisions. In contrast to algorithms that make short-term market forecasts, incredibly powerful computer arrays use big data to look far into the future, continually buying and selling securities based on those predictions. To power this, RenTec developed its own programming language to run those modeling systems. Medallion Fund, its most profitable fund — perhaps the most profitable in the world, though it’s open only to RenTec employees — includes several million lines of code in its algorithmic instructions.

As RenTec founder Dr Jim Simons — the 2nd largest Democratic donor in 2016 and one of the first people Barack Obama visited in his first post-presidential trip to NYC — once said, “It’s 100% automated. It’s as automated as it can be. The computer does its thing. It generates its trade, and the trade gets executed. No one sticks its head to the door, and says: ‘Jeez! You should buy IBM!’ We couldn’t model that.”

Big winners in HFT need the best computers, the most bandwidth, and the closest proximity to stock exchanges in order to maximize their chances of finding exploits, but this is all much more useful when combined with constantly refreshed input on the state of the planet’s activities. RenTec is said to maintain one of the largest data troves in the world, compiling information on every bit or byte they can get their hands on. Just as with BlackRock, another financial firm with incredible success leveraging big data & information surveillance due to their decades-old data facility in Washington State and ten more elsewhere, the storage of eclectic trivia empowers their algorithms to make decisions based on all available data points & variables.

As Dr Peter Brown, Robert Mercer’s co-CEO and co-President testified in front of McCain, “We collect all the publicly available data we can find that we believe might bear on the movement of the prices of tradable instruments — news stories, analysts’ reports, energy reports, crop reports, weather reports, regulatory filings, accounting data, and, of course, quotes and trades from markets around the world. Our models use this data to make predictions about future price changes.”

Another huge source of the information constantly being compiled by enormous data warehouses like these comes from private distributors of pure social media output, known as the Firehose. Facebook and Twitter are the most important generators of this info flow, but nearly all social media companies make their raw data streams available for harvesting and analysis. A slew of companies have offered paid access to view the mountains of data via slick interfaces, as well as feed into hungry algorithms. All of these online interactions are near-instantly categorized, contextualized, and transformed into stock trades and/or ad purchases.

Mercer hoards his chips]

Despite all this money constantly changing hands, which is encoded in law as an important event for tax purposes, between 2010 — the midterm election cycle year when Republicans & Tea Partiers took control of the House of Representatives — and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent.Just to reiterate, RenTec is thought to have kept over $6,000,000,000 in tax money away from the I.R.S. and federal government simply through the use of basket contract schemes, which was then paid out to RenTec employees and funneled back into the coffers of the ad & PR agencies who work for Citizens United v FEC-enabled SuperPACs.

Nothing much came of the McCain hearing, except suggestions by the I.R.S. in 2015 that basket contracts would come under scrutiny, before backing off of that threat a few months later. Hillary Clinton had proposed HFT taxes as part of her platform, which may help explain Mercer’s hatred of her, and the loopholes may get another look this year, possibly maybe, but not if Robert Mercer or his friends in the White House have anything to say about it.

Any rage over the embarrassment of RenTec’s perceived persecution in 2014—later more fully addressed through thefunding of an opposing GOP candidate in McCain’s next Senate race— found an easy outlet that summer, as Cambridge Analytica LLC added psychographic profiles to the data warehouses and high-frequency personality trading algorithms finally became operational.

A landmark moment for CambAnal arrived a month before the RenTec hearing, as it was rewarded for all of its convoluted preparation when it received its first publicly recorded paycheck on June 10th, 2014: $20,000 for working on urine hoarder Art Robinson’s third attempt to unseat HFT critic Peter DeFazio in Oregon. The two PACs which donated enough to Robinson to cover that bill were America Inc ($21,000), run by conservative media activist L. Brent Bozell, and Ending Spending Action Fund ($732,712), which received $1.75m of Mercer Money during the 2014 election cycle.

It has recently been revealed that June was CA’s first claimed month with its heavyweight Vice President/Secretary, who is primarily known as the former stock trader, Pentagon employee, executive chairman of the most influential online news outlet of the past few years, and Tea Party & Brexit supporter extraordinaire who initially helped kickstart SCL as it rolled down its current path. All of this describes just one person: Mr Stephen K. Bannon.

CATCHING UP TO THE PRESENT TENSION

Steve Bannon — the current White House Chief Strategist who still attends National Security Council meetings, as of this article’s publication date — has owned at least a hefty chunk of Cambridge Analytica LLC, the Facebook-powered, international military psyops-based, Mercer-funded, Microsoft-enabled, finance-loopholed, Amazon-trained, far-right-affiliated, foreign-born, algorithmic-advertising-driven media machine which participated in both the victorious Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns.

In fact, Bannon is the only publicly documented shareholder/owner of Cambridge Analytica LLC to date. Every SCL subsidiary in the UK has reported their shareholders on a regular basis for public dissemination, as is the lawful standard, but similar information is generally not available in the US. As a result of Bannon’s required White House financial disclosures, however, we learned he owned between $1m-$5m in CambAnal, though in defiance of legality he had not sold it as of at least late April 2017.

Now, there is no shortage of marketing & PR agencies looking to exploit technology for political or financial gain, as evidenced by a private psychological operations firm-for-hire like Bell Pottinger, British Army psyops-based Verbalisation, or any number of boutique advertising startups. Even frequent GOP candidate vendorCampaign Solutions did so back in 2014 for the radically right wing John Bolton SuperPAC, which received $4m of Robert Mercer’s money between Apr 2014-Sep 2016.

Their job was to help microtarget DirectTV advertisements by cross-checking state voter files with consumer data such as magazine subscriptions, so the voters could then be sorted into 100 personality types, arranged into 28 clusters, and sent a specific version of a political ad tailored to each of those clusters through their satellite TV. This was a far cry from SCL’s in-person questionnaires of mere hundreds of YUMs for UK’s MoD, but Cambridge Analytica was also hired to work closely with Campaign Solutions on the 2014 campaigns to create those varying TV ads. In 2015 & 2016, CambAnal was repeatedly contracted by John Bolton SuperPAC to work with Connell Donatelli, which shares an owner with Campaign Solutions, to produce more targeted ads.

Even so, when Bannon’s CambAnal later joined Trump’s GOP data team in employing the same high-speed AI advertising and algorithmic purchasing strategies laid out by Microsoft, Cambridge University, Verbalisation, and even RenTec while partnering with Facebook & Google’s ad deployment platforms during the 2016 elections, it was a very big deal. Here we had highly motivated, massively funded, ideologically driven, career specialist military, psychology, and technology minds from both sides of the Atlantic working closely together to achieve specific outcomes at any cost.

For example, Liam Fox is the first-ever UK Secretary of State for International Trade, despite all of his outrageous behavior just a few short years ago. Apparently someone who profits off of private deals with international military contractors, all while taking a government paycheck to represent the public’s best interests, is exactly who should be in charge of Trade as Britain prepares to exit the European Union. Brexit’s success paved the way for Fox to triumphantly reclaim his lost power, which makes his role clear.

Brexit kingpin and former financial trader Nigel Farage was invited to speak at Heritage Foundation in 2015, along with Roger Helmer & other UKIP “Patriotic Voices from Europe”, delivering a barrage of Obama attacks to the delight of the crowd. In fact, Farage’s Leave campaigns were entirely unafraid of identifying their friends across the pond, as evidenced by the namecheck in Go Movement Ltd’s (GML) application for Leave designation: “GML will further coordinate with the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks that support an EU referendum, which will provide a strong ‘outside’ voice within the echo chamber.” Predictably, the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom is elated about Brexit.

Heritage Foundation was credited with formulating the exact blueprint for Trump’s first 100 days, which mostly worked perfectly (if we can agree its true intent was to deconstruct the administrative state). Even its slight failure might explain why President Jim DeMint was recently ousted, after which time Steve Bannon was floated as a replacement candidate. Things are now looking like they might go very bad in the Trump administration, but the suggestion that a White House Chief Strategist would leave that post for a thinktank should clarify the extent of Heritage’s power and influence. Rebekah Mercer’s placement as a strong Heritage board member, along with her donations of millions of Mercer Money, is likely stoking the coals under a Bannon-Heritage matchup.

Club for Growth, which has received at least $2,000,000 of Mercer Money since 2011, is welcoming the new administration with open arms. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Spring 2017 Club event on 19 March, in which he mentioned Tea Partiers Pat Toomey & Mike Lee by name and regaled the crowd with stories of the Club’s strong support for Pence since way back in 2000.

Atlantic Bridge’s former partner ALEC has also filled the halls of the US government and especially the White House, with supporters, donation recipients, and members running the show at the highest possible level. Those names include CIA chief Mike Pompeo, EPA head Scott Pruitt, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, United Nations representative Nikki Haley, and — wait for it — VP Mike Pence.

Renaissance Technologies is a legend in the trading industry, partially because they have consistently been pioneers of automated financial prediction. In 2017, human quants across the market spectrum are being increasingly laid off and replaced by AI & algorithms. Machine learning is so prevalent in finance, with so much more predictive power than humans, that HFT and algos are the new normal. However, Robert Mercer is poised to dominate the industry with RenTec’s new HFT-killing patent, which will essentially elbow out all but the largest black box houses, leaving him King of FinTech.

These are the people that profited from techniques and software honed by the world’s largest militaries and tech corporations, merging media production intended to craft weapons out of art with… well, actually that perfectly describes both psyops and advertising, but merging those with total information awareness and special access to the control panels of the ubiquitous technologies used by billions of people. Theirs is the money that flowed freely in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, and that money has steered the conversations that buoyed their ascendancy.

At least two more enormous components to their success were glossed over in these pages, and we didn’t even get a chance to talk about the entire situation’s legality.

Amazingly, there is still so much more story to tell.

Stay tuned to TEXTIFIRE to catch up on the events of the last three years!

Thank you for reading and thanks to all the sourced researchers & artists.

NOTE: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that an Aleksandr Kogan who was the chief of a physiology school in Russia and has a neurocybernetics lab named after him is not the former Dr Spectre’s grandfather, according to Dr Kogan. We deeply regret the error.

==

hmn blog annotations no pix lnx twt

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102941084336848896.html

(5/15) Alexander Nix (Cambridge Analytica) meeting with Rodrigo Duterte campaign assocs, at national press club in Manila, Phillippines:

Brexitshambles

@brexit_sham

What links #Brexit - #Trump - and 'populist' Philippine president (and friend of Liam Fox) Rodrigo #Duterte? Yes, you've guessed it...   'Alexander Nix dined with Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign advisers in 2015.'#SCL #CambridgeAnalytica

(via @raissawriter)http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2140782/cambridge-analytica-boss-alexander-nix-dined-two-rodrigo …

Cambridge Analytica boss dined with Duterte campaign staff in 2015

Cambridge Analytica boss Alexander Nix dined with two of Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign advisers in 2015

scmp.com

145

1:05 PM - Apr 8, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

150 people are talking about this

"Guardian has seen an email from Nix (1/26/15), ref'g to the “Israeli team”.

It says: “Although it is outside of our remit, I have asked for an update on what the Israeli team has been working on & what they will be delivering between now/the election.”

Cambridge Analytica was offered politicians' hacked emails, say witnesses

Hackers offered personal data about future Nigerian president and future PM of St Kitts and Nevis, sources say

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/cambridge-analytica-offered-politicians-hacked-emails-witnesses-say

"They were planning on stealing the election’: Explosive new tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression, manipulation and bribery

Prev unknown recording reveals extraordinary ‘black ops’ on three continents"

(h/t @karolcummins )

‘They were planning on stealing the election’: Explosive new tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression, manipulation and bribery

Previously unknown recording reveals extraordinary ‘black ops’ on three continents – exploiting weaknesses in democracies left wide open by governments and Silicon Valley.

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

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

"In the recordings, Nix describes one of his major clients, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, as a "fascist". And he sheds more light on the nexus of data, money and power that Cambridge Analytica deployed as it backed Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency.

"It was almost six years ago, in a London sushi bar, that Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix first sought to enlist Brittany Kaiser, saying: “Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets.”

"Nix had teamed up in 2013 with the alt-right entrepreneur Steve Bannon and the family of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer to launch Cambridge Analytica. Their mission was to arm a rising populist right to defeat the big data machine built by Obama."

"[Brittany Kaiser] testified against her former colleagues, providing arresting new evidence about their unpaid data work on Brexit for the controversial businessman Arron Banks (now under investigation by the National Crime Agency) and his Leave.EU campaign..."

"...as well as possible abuses of Facebook and insurance data. She provided the first real proof of Steve Bannon’s role in setting up these deals for Nix, and of Cambridge Analytica’s exclusive data relationship with Bannon’s alt-right propaganda platform, Breitbart News."

"In 4/18 Kaiser testified before the British parliament’s ‘fake news’ inquiry. She covered a dizzying array of topics alongside Cambridge Analytica, including her friends’ cryptocurrency-powered telecomms schemes in MX, and her time working w/WikiLeaks’ British lawyers..."

"The parliamentarians wanted to know more about a group of hackers – alumni of Israeli intelligence – who she had introduced to oil-billionaire clients, and who had infiltrated the Nigerian political opposition as part of a 2015 campaign by Nix’s firm...."

"...But when it came to the inflammatory content of that campaign, Kaiser pointed the finger firmly atSAM PATTEN, a long-standing fixture on Cambridge Analytica’s roster of globe-trotting political strategists."

"Immediately after running the controversial Nigeria campaign for Nix, Patten went into biz w/the RU operative KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK. His new partner was not only the right hand of...Paul Manafort in Ukraine, but also a suspected Russian military intelligence asset."

"Patten has recently pleaded guilty to channelling donations from a Ukranian oligarch into Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Kilimnick himself is wanted for questioning by special counsel Robert Mueller, and has recently fled to Moscow."

"One of the British parliamentarians asked Kaiser the obvious question: “Have you ever worked for, paid or unpaid, or provided info to, any country’s intelligence agency, their representatives or associated organisations?” Her answer was “No;” but pressed..."

"...she acknowledged having been “approached” in the past, before her time at Cambridge Analytica, “although they wouldn’t properly identify themselves... I’ve been taught what to look out for: my grandfather was a military intell officer for 27 yrs...

"...and knew when I was young that would be a possibility, and told me what to look out for… and to say no.”

"Damian Collins MP, the chair of the fake news inquiry, had one final question for Kaiser. “If Alex Nix wanted to reach out to Assange, couldn’t he do it through you?” W/o losing her self-possession, she laughed for a split second and responded: “That’s what I was wondering…”

"Collins then announced that Nix was pulling out of his own scheduled interrogation the following day. Within wks, Cambridge Analytica and Nix’s wider network of data, political and security consulting ops had filed for bankruptcy...."

"It took another month before the silver-tongued, polo-playing Etonian consultant [Alex Nix] accepted his third summons from Parliament. Wriggling under the spotlight, he claimed to be the real victim of the Cambridge Analytica scandal."

"According to his telling... "

Fuck him.

"Kaiser had originally acknowledged in Parliament that she introduced Nix to her friends in Julian Assange’s London legal team in 2015, but said she knew nothing of her boss’s own contacts with him...."

"[Kaiser's] cryptocurrency donation to WikiLeaks (made with gifted Bitcoin she had no other use for) had taken place several years earlier, while she was working on human rights issues in countries like Iraq. "

I'm skipping a bit, it's a long piece.

Linking back midpoint in case you want to read the full article:

‘They were planning on stealing the election’: Explosive new tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression, manipulation and bribery

Previously unknown recording reveals extraordinary ‘black ops’ on three continents – exploiting weaknesses in democracies left wide open by governments and Silicon Valley.

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

"One former employee of Cambridge Analytica compared others’ reticence to “the omertà of the Mafia”, not least because people were afraid of the company’s powerful principals..."

"The fam of Robert Mercer, not only a billionaire but also a data scientist accused of white supremacist views, were its controlling investors. The Mercers’ consigliere...Bannon sat on Nix’s board w/Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who Nix sometimes referred to as his “work wife”.

"Materials revealed to me and testimony provided by Brittany Kaiser and other sources...confirm that Bannon was actively involved in brokering Cambridge Analytica’s relationships w/Trump, Brexit campaigners and a flotilla of Mercer-linked organisations."

"Bannon admitted last spring that he “put the co together”, but continues to claim he knew nothing of Cambridge Analytica’s misdeeds during his time on its board...."

"Earlier this mo he launched The Movement, [Bannon's] latest attempt to lay waste to the politics of the Eu and empower the populist far right w/data and strategic advice."

"n the course of my investigation, I nonetheless managed to speak w/ almost a doz sources with close knowledge of the co’s ops....One senior source who originally wanted to save the company swiftly realised that they had to “kill the dragon”.

"[Cambridge Analytica] 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."

"Last March...Ch 4 News released undercover recordings of Nix and his fellow execs. 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 info into the bloodstream of the internet… w/no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable”.

"But even in the Ch 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 to be rolled out across the U.S. initially. To help us to target people at an individual level in a way that would increase COMPLIANCE through communications."

Shit, they're talking about brainwashing.

"Our inventory has questions like, are you frequently lonely, do you enjoy taking part in new initiatives? It's not an opinion survey. B/c we're not interested in what you think about the president. We're interested in you, and trying to work out...“WHAT ARE YOUR BUTTONS?"

"A few yrs 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."

AHEM: ??

“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."

Sound familiar?

"Trump doubles down on unsubstantiated claims of election 'stealing' in Florida"

Trump doubles down on unsubstantiated claims of election 'stealing' in Florida

After a recount was ordered in the Florida races for U.S. Senate and governor on Saturday, President Donald Trump tweeted, "Trying to STEAL two big elections. We are watching closely!"

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/10/trump-doubles-down-on-claims-of-election-stealing-in-florida.html

"And the reason we did this was TO INOCULATE THEM. We ran this campaign for about 12 mos saying, oh, the govt's going to steal the election. And then, when the Jimmy Carter Center 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."

*"In the course...

"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 THE OPPOSITION SUPPORTERS FROM VOTING..."

Voter suppression.

"...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.”

"This previously unknown recording provides irrefutable evidence of [Alex Nix] boasting to prospective clients about his experience in voter suppression, his comfort with sowing apathy and fatalism about corruption..."

"...and [Alex Nix's] 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 OPS under way” [PARSCALE], made to Bloomberg in 10/16. 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 NRA; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies."

Next Section entitled:

"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..."

"...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:"

@Deoliver47

mentions "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...."

mentions "but not so for the Afro-Caribbeans. And that was enough info to inform the entire campaign.

“We said to the client, we only want to do one thing...to run a campaign where we target the youth – all youth, all the Blacks and all the Indians – and WE TRY TO INCREASE APATHY."

mentions "...they didn't really understand why… but they allowed us to do this campaign, and [it] 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."

mentions "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…"

mentions "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… "

mentions "“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."

mentions

"And the reason why this was such a good strategy is b/c 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, vote."

"And so all the Indians went out, voted, and the difference on the 18-35-yr-old turnout is like 40%, and that SWUNG THE ELECTION by...6%...all we needed!”

Again, Nix was selling his co’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’."

"Nix’s closing comments in his summer 2016 pitch were tantalising: “We’ve got an in-house intel team, so we can do full intel protection… Opposition don’t hack your emails and everything else. And we're pretty good at getting intel too…WE DO A LOT OF COUNTER OPS."

"You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys IN TO 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 Alex Nix was most proud of. This is how he pitched his co around the world...This is the man who the Mercers and Bannon enlisted to help them reshape the American political mind."

"...Nix talks cynically about his work in the Republican primaries: w/TED CRUZ, w/BEN CARSON, and then w/Trump. He claims to have turned Cruz from “the most hated man in US politics” into the front runner before Trump’s wildcard surge. It was not out of love: “WE HATED THIS GUY."

mentions

mentions "[CRUZ] is far right wing, he's like, you know, FASCIST,” Nix says of his own candidate. The success factor was big data, which “allows you to literally go in and target every single individual...”

"...What about Brexit? “We don’t talk about that,” he says knowingly, after including it in a list of campaigns they were involved in. Kaiser adds ironically, “Oops – we won!”

"As Nix gleefully claims of another campaign in which the son of a billionaire African liberation leader COVERTLY FUNDED the youth movement which then drafted him as their candidate for president, “We created everything. We created a need that didn’t exist.”

"A yr after this recording, Nix was negotiating an abortive acquisition deal with Martin Sorrell’s world-leading WPP conglomerate of advertising and marketing firms. In 1/18, he finally raised almost $20M for a new co called Emerdata."

"Papers obtained by my investigation indicate the Mercers were joined by CHINESE AND GULF INVESTORS in this effort, although the ultimate sources of their funds remain unclear. Johnson Ko, the Chinese state-linked biz partner of American mercenary Erik Prince..."

"...[Johnson Ko] briefly joined Emerdata’s board alongside one of his associates. (Cambridge Analytica China was also incubated at Ko’s firm Reorient Capital during 2017.)"

"The majority of the new funds injected into Emerdata seem to have been extracted personally by Nix through various different pretexts, according to conversations I had w/well-placed sources and review of bankruptcy documents..."

"The biggest withdrawal of $8.7 Million took place after Kaiser’s whistleblowing, and before Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections went into administration. Many employees were never paid their outstanding salaries and severance: the general sacrificed his footsoldiers..."

"I first discovered Brittany Kaiser’s support for BERNIE SANDERS via a YouTube video of a company party at the dog races, arrestingly subtitled “WE 'RIGG" ELECTIONS”. It shows a comedy routine performed by one of Cambridge Analytica’s data scientists..."

"...who notes Kaiser’s past involvement with the Obama campaign, suggests she may still be working for the Democrats, and includes this memorable line about Alexander Nix: “He could sell an anchor to a drowning man.”

"Listening again to the pitch recording, I felt that Nix, who continues to protest his innocence and attempt to reboot his career, is now the one sinking under the weight of accumulating evidence. What about those who enabled him?"

"There is no question that Cambridge Analytica’s tactics were somewhat effective in pulling “the wires which control the public mind”, although I have found little evidence that their much-vaunted psychographics actually worked...."

"...What seems to have had the most impact was the dubious data hoard they assembled to target DARK ADS ON FACEBOOK, combined with the brutal efficacy of their messages and tactics."

"Central players in the subversion of our open societies regularly attend conferences of the global elite, such as last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Most still seem to operate with impunity. "

"During our debrief in Thailand, Kaiser soon started connecting the dots between her fury at the powerful men who had been pulling her strings, her conviction that the greatest abuses of power were taking place in Silicon Valley, and the way her own company had...."

"..been used to “manipulate millions of voters across America”. Her curiosity started to sharpen: how had she and countless others been so misled?

“Brittany spent a long time in the underworld,” I say toward the end of 'The Great Hack'..."

"Nix memorably describes in his pitch how much more effective it is to protect a private beach from trespassers by putting up a sign that says “Sharks! Keep Out”....

"The ultimate goal of Russian interference and billionaire voter suppression campaigns alike is to get us to ‘Keep Out’ of politics: to accept the dominance of transnational oligarchs, and to lose hope that things can change."

"The Federal Trade Commission is reported to be considering imposing an “unprecedented” fine on Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, which has also been indicted by Washington DC’s attorney general for facilitating the breach of users’ data without our consent."

"I spoke on the phone w/Kaiser shortly before Christmas. “I was being too nice,” she said. “It gets worse every day. You can’t fix it now, it’s not fixable, not in its current form. Break it up with anti-trust laws. Pull away WhatsApp and Instagram… reorg their business model. "

"It’s completely out of control, and they never thought anything would happen. They’re not really keeping any of it secret; it’s all in the open, but they thought nobody would notice or care.”

OK, this is towards the end now. I will link back to the article again, here:

‘They were planning on stealing the election’: Explosive new tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression, manipulation and bribery

Previously unknown recording reveals extraordinary ‘black ops’ on three continents – exploiting weaknesses in democracies left wide open by governments and Silicon Valley.

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

I am going to go back up to the top, and look at more of Nix's/Cambridge Analytica's misdeeds...

Going to look at that article linked here:

"The parliamentarians wanted to know more about a group of hackers – alumni of Israeli intel – who she had intro'd to OIL-BILLIONAIRE CLIENTS, and who had infiltrated the Nigerian political oppos as part of a 2015 campaign by Nix...."

"Cambridge Analytica was offered politicians' hacked emails, say witnesses

Hackers offered personal data about future Nigerian president and future PM of St Kitts and Nevis, sources say"

Cambridge Analytica was offered politicians' hacked emails, say witnesses

Hackers offered personal data about future Nigerian president and future PM of St Kitts and Nevis, sources say

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/cambridge-analytica-offered-politicians-hacked-emails-witnesses-say

The data analytics firm that worked on the Donald Trump election campaign was offered material from Israeli hackers who had accessed the private emails of two politicians WHO ARE NOW HEADS OF STATE, witnesses have told the Guardian."

"Multiple sources have described how senior directors of Cambridge Analytica – including its chief executive, Alexander Nix – gave staff instructions to handle material provided by computer hackers in election campaigns in Nigeria and St Kitts and Nevis."

"They claim there were two episodes in 2015 that alarmed members of staff and led them to refuse to handle the data, which they assumed would have been obtained illegally."

"SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, denied taking possession of or using hacked or stolen personal information from such individuals for any purpose in either campaign."

"In all, the Guardian and Observer has spoken to seven individuals with knowledge of Cambridge Analytica and its campaign in Nigeria in early 2015.

Hired by a Nigerian billionaire to support the re-election of Goodluck Jonathan...."

"...[in Nigeria] Cambridge Analytica was paid an estimated £2m to orchestrate a ferocious campaign against his rival, the opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari. Jonathan lost out to Buhari in the presidential race. There is no suggestion Jonathan knew of the covert operation."

"Staff working on the campaign say in early 2015 they met Israeli cybersecurity contractors in Cambridge Analytica’s offices in Mayfair, London. Employees say they were told the meeting was arranged by Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at the firm."

"The Guardian and Observer have been told the Israelis brought a laptop from their office in Tel Aviv and handed employees a USB stick containing what they believed were HACKED PERSONAL EMAILS."

Gross.

"Sources said Nix...and other sr directors told staff to search for incriminating material that could be used to damage opposition candidates, including Buhari.

“It made everyone feel really uncomfortable...They wanted people to load it into their email programs.”

"People “freaked out”, another employee said. “They wanted to have nothing to do with it.”

One member of the campaign team told the Guardian and Observer that the material they believed had been hacked included BUHARI'S MEDICAL RECORDS."

From another thread from last year....

now that I think about, it the Israeli firm could also be Black Cube, but I'm just guessing:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

WaterBluSky

@MsMariaT

Replying to @MsMariaT

"Harris encountered SCL’s work in 2015, when he was running for ofc against Denzil Douglas on a pledge to reform the country’s passport program: Nix, according to a report in the Guardian, TURNED A TEAM OF ISRAELI HACKERS to obtain the candidate’s priv emails & medical records.??

38

1:22 PM - Jul 1, 2018

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Back to Guardian: "I’m 99% sure of that. Or if they didn’t have his medical records they at least had emails that referred to what was going on.”

When news of the London meeting filtered back to Cambridge Analytica staff working on the ground in Nigeria, it caused panic..."

"Local security advisers told the firm’s team to leave the country immediately because if opposition supporters found out, they could turn on them.

“What is clear is that the security of their employees didn’t even seem to have occurred to them..."

"In a second episode in early 2015, sources said the same Israeli team that had worked on the Nigeria campaign obtained private information of the St Kitts and Nevis politician Timothy Harris. At the time he was an opposition leader, and is now prime minister."

Nix and his buddies were trying to get their preferred passport fixer into that election:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

WaterBluSky

@MsMariaT

Replying to @MsMariaT

"Harris encountered SCL’s work in 2015, when he was running for ofc against Denzil Douglas on a pledge to reform the country’s passport program: Nix, according to a report in the Guardian, TURNED A TEAM OF ISRAELI HACKERS to obtain the candidate’s priv emails & medical records.??

38

1:22 PM - Jul 1, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

22 people are talking about this

"Sources have said staff did not want to handle what appeared to be STOLEN MATERIAL. “Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” one employee said."

A statement from SCL Elections said:

Mierda, basura, garbage....

Link to the other article I did a THREAD on if you want to read aboutNix and his passport fixers:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

WaterBluSky

@MsMariaT

"But the investment programs have also proved popular with a Who’s Who of fugitives and fraudsters. Convicted felons Paul Bilzerian [Dan Bilzerian's dad] and Roger Ver gave up their U.S. citizenship and now use Saint Kitts passports." https://twitter.com/annmarlowe/status/1013506651314442242 …

Ann Marlowe

@annmarlowe

my new article! How Cambridge Analytica fueled a shady global passport bonanza https://www.fastcompany.com/40571052/how-cambridge-analytica-fueled-a-shady-global-passport-bonanza …

118

1:08 PM - Jul 1, 2018

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Here's the investigative reporter's work on that, worth a read, shocking details:

Good night all! ??

Ann Marlowe

@annmarlowe

my new article! How Cambridge Analytica fueled a shady global passport bonanza https://www.fastcompany.com/40571052/how-cambridge-analytica-fueled-a-shady-global-passport-bonanza …

How Cambridge Analytica fueled a shady global passport bonanza

A controversial billion-dollar citizenship-for-sale business led the elections firm to conduct clandestine campaigns across the Caribbean, insiders say.

fastcompany.com

211

11:36 AM - Jul 1, 2018

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I’m reading elsewhere, that: Buhari (former pres Johnathan’s opposition) retained PPG, via Burson-Marsteller. PPG is Charlie Black. That’s Charlie Black of BMS&K - Manafort’s & Stone’s LP partner ?? They worked both sides? ??

medium .com

https://medium.com/textifire/a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambridge-analytica-97633129cb06

no lnx

A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica

Bridging the Atlantic to bring radical nativists of Trump & Brexit together via military tech & ad money, one donation or dataset at a time.

May 19,2017 · 46 min read

Steve Bannon-owned Cambridge Analytica LLC, a US subsidiary of UK defense contractor SCL Group, has been increasingly faulted for its dual role in both Donald Trump and Brexit’s victories. Its elevated & expensive role in the Trump digital marketing team’s self-proclaimed voter suppression rollout was the culmination of several years of preparation by military and anti-government interests on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as nationless finance & technology kingmakers seeking to enhance their own profit power.

As a direct result of the reporting led by the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica is already under active investigation for violating United Kingdom data protection laws, as related to their involvement with Leave.EU. It’s unclear if anything will come of this, as Leave’s ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ seem quite confident they were able to skate through some loopholes and use some creative accounting to their advantage.

Separate issues have been under the microscope of UK authorities. For example, one is the improper collection & use of voters’ personal data via the internet for political marketing/advertising purposes, and another is the question of foreign (read: non-UK) money being used to fund the Leave campaigns. Cambridge Analytica is at the center of the data inquiry, and US-based stock trader Robert Mercer has been identified as the primary source of the foreign money, but in both cases political media production & dissemination is the underlying issue.

Our previous article looked at the undertold history of the nonprofit organization Citizens United regarding highly influential American political media & advertising from 1988 to 2011, and we’ll continue just prior to where we left off. SCL was in a down period at the beginning of our tale, and its Cambridge Analytica did not yet exist.

Donald Trump would soon begin early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012 presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal aspirations on hold.

Still, the fire rises.

Dukakis to Donald: 30 Years of Citizens United - TEXTIFIRE - Medium

1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of…

medium.com

PROFIT BOTS

Bannon & Bossie began releasing their political issue advocacy film collaborations in 2010, months after Bossie’s Citizens United v FEC case received its big Supreme Court victory, but they were among many looking to exploit the new election [de]regulations. One such up-and-coming major player was half-billionaire Robert Mercer.

Mercer had won awards in his first career, working for IBM’s Watson AI project in the field of natural language processing, where he wrote code teaching computers how to understand humans. The avid yachtsman changed tacks slightly in 1993, as he went on to make his sudden fortune with the wildly profitable private hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, also known as RenTec, of which he is now co-CEO. Its stock-in-trade, if you will, is using quantitative analysis and high frequency trading (HFT) to win big on the global financial markets.

Quantitative analysis is a blanket term that covers a range of techniques, but the basic idea is to execute financial transactions based on predictions made by calculating large groups of historical alphanumeric sets; i.e., using existing patterns to predict future outcomes. When you’re anticipating future numbers, you might naturally expect to first inspect past numbers.

However, the standard human brain can only do so much these days, so the vast majority of work involved in this field is performed by computers. Even experts in the field — unsurprisingly called ‘quants’, though RenTec is known for exclusively employing mathematicians, physicists, and cryptographers — are still only able to quickly & accurately calculate a small grouping of historical variables. As a result, giant datasets — consisting of any number of different variables tracked over time — are fed into computers which calculate them using complex math equations, following repeatable series of preprogrammed steps that are known as algorithms.

Not only do quants employ algorithms to spit out robotically identified market trends, but they frequently direct the algorithms to buy and sell stocks all on their own. This outsourcing of labor is known as algorithmic trading, and since the computers involved are usually employing algorithms on both sides of these transactions, the trades can happen incredibly quickly (nanoseconds) and in high volumes (around half of all US equity trades). Now we’re describing the quant subgenre of high frequency trading.

HFT is very controversial within the financial industry, with supporters saying it helps keep the markets liquid & transparent and detractors saying it increases volatility, but it’s probably safe to say most outside observers think it’s very dangerous. It’s been responsible for “flash crashes”; allowed for massive accumulations of private wealth for no reason other than automated exploitation of loopholes, timezones, and bandwidth;played a sizable (or at least very profitable) role in the 2008 global financial meltdown; and put the planet’s resources under the control of larval artificial intelligence.

For these reasons, it should be no surprise HFT came under the scrutiny of regulators, but only after a decade of algorithmic trading that was enabled by the 2000 changeover to stock decimalization (pricing shares by pennies instead of quarter-dollars). The EU had been fairly vigilant in that regard, but the US government hadn’t pricked up its ears until after the July 2009 arrest of Sergey Aleynikov, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, for allegedly stealing ‘proprietary’ algorithms from his employer Goldman Sachs.

Aleynikov was accused of sticking his digital avatar hand into the “black box” — the batches of algorithms that are kept secret by HFT firms — of Goldman Sachs, but his still-active case has been in & out of courts for these past 8 years, partially because some of the laws he broke had not yet been fully written. That genre of legislative inefficiency sparked the interest ofPeter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, which in turn caught the eyes of quants and black box houses like RenTec.

4 minutes of HFT

DeFazio spearheaded the idea of a financial transactions tax — to impose a micropercent tax on trades that would only affect the high-volume HFT in any tangible way— and teamed up with a couple colleagues to bring bills to the floor of Congress. He got nowhere in 2009, two years after the “Quant Quake”, nor in 2010, even after the May 6th “Flash Crash” again alerted the public to the dangers of HFT. Despite the failure to ignite substantial interest, his dedication to reform did not go unnoticed.

TEST DRIVING CITIZENS UNITED

DeFazio’s 2010 reelection campaign was nearly derailed by the appearance of highly-funded ads which attacked him and supported his ‘Tea Party’ Republican opponent, Art Robinson. Created by a PAC calling itself Concerned Taxpayers of America (CTA), it had been an ongoing mystery at the time as to who put up the big money for that organization. Only a few weeks before the election, as per the then-newly lax criteria set forth by the Citizens United decision earlier that year, was it revealed that one of the only two funders was Mr Robert Mercer, who contributed $643,750.

Investigation by the Washington Post prior to the reveal turned up even more curiosities, including a denial of the existence of CTA by a PR rep standing in the doorway of its registered address and directly to DeFazio’s face. Also, we should not be surprised to learn CTA’s treasurer was Jason Miller, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign communications director starting 30 June 2016. Miller was briefly named White House communications director in December 2016, before recusing himself a few days later after a fellow campaign worker accused the otherwise married Miller of fathering her unborn child.

Mercer’s attacks on DeFazio are easily attributable to HFT tax proposals, but his support of political then-novice Art Robinson is also notable. Robinson is a crackpot pseudoscientist whose mentor was Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling, before they acrimoniously parted ways in a divorce which ultimately ended in Robinson’s $25.5m lawsuit against the Pauling Institute (which he settled for $575k).

Robinson then became a supporter of homeopathic disease cures via exposure to raw radioactive elements, as well as a well-known climate change denier, an obsessive hoarder of 14,000+ human urine samples, and a forest-dwelling widower who homeschooled his 6 children using his own Bible-based, available-for-sale “Robinson Curriculum” (all of which basically makes him the Anti-Captain Fantastic).He lost to DeFazio in 2010 and lost again & again & again in 3 subsequent elections, but managed to become the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party from 2013–15, and has recently been considered for the role of Trump’s chief Science Adviser.

Robert Mercer and his politically powerful daughter Rebekah are said to have become fans of Robinson’s after reading his newsletter “Access to Energy”, which argues such things as Chernobyl radiation and carbon pollution are ultimately beneficial to planetary life. However, Mercer has privately “downplay[ed] the dangers posed by nuclear war” when excitedly expressing his belief that Hiroshima & Nagasaki radiation made the greater population of Japan healthier, and Robinson has published a book & multi-DVD set on Nuclear War Survival Skills, so they have that hobby in common.

After bringing someone like Robinson close to victory in 2010, the Mercers’ fresh taste for political power brought them the privileges and lifestyles of the rich & famous. They soon found themselves at a2011 conference of the Club For Growth, a pro-business activist group for the conservative elite, which spent $6m of its own in support of 2010 GOP/Tea Party contenders. The Club is perhaps best known for being sued and fined by the FEC in 2005 for violating fair election laws. Its Executive Director David Keating then formed SpeechNow, a group which sued the FEC and did even more damage to campaign finance regulations via their Ninth Circuit Court victory in the immediate wake of Citizens United v FEC, but right now we’re focused on the Club as the place where Mercer first met Andrew Breitbart.

BREITBART OUT, BANNON & MERCER IN

Three years after meeting Steve Bannon in 2004 — at the Beverly Hills movie premiere of Bannon’s directorial debut In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed — Breitbart left The Drudge Report to start his own media outlet,Breitbart News, which he said was intended to be “unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel.” Breitbart rapidly became the darling of the ultraconservatives and elbowed his way into mainstream relevance, becoming a driving force in the 2009–10 rise of the explicitly anti-Obama Tea Party.

With their respective stars on the rise, it’s impossible to know who was more smitten with whom at the Spring 2011 Club For Growth meeting, but Breitbart took enough interest in the Mercers to later introduce them to his man Bannon. Having been with Breitbart News since its inception, Bannon ended up hitting it off with the Mercers and they immediately joined forces. In June 2011, the Mercers invested $10m in Breitbart, becoming co-owners in the process, but one of their contract stipulations demanded that their brand new friend Bannon be promoted to the board of directors.

Bannon & Breitbart, aka the Three Men and A Baby ghost

Around that same time in 2011, the 42yo Breitbart suffered a heart attack. Within a year, he collapsed on an L.A. street and died on 1 March 2012, with his autopsy blaming another massive heart attack due to an enlarged heart. Later that very same day, Bannon has said he met with New York investors to plan the future of Breitbart News, and he would quickly be named Executive Chairman on 19 March.

This was a crucial time period for all of these players. In February2012, Bannon founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) with $2m in seed funding from the Mercers. Rebekah Mercer became Chairwoman, and Bannon installed Peter Schweizer — author of Reagan’s War, the book adapted into Bannon’s first “documentary” — as president of GAI. Like Bossie and Mercer, Schweizer is yet another Clinton-hating, Reagan-adoring, tax reform & financial deregulation advocate and conspiracy theorist.

A couple of the first ‘reports’ out of the gate for GAI: a treatise attesting to the horrors of food stamps, as well as another which itemized every instance of President Barack Obama’s attendance at his daily briefings. Breitbart predictably publishes multiple stories each time GAI puts out a press release, but both of those early missives were picked up for publication and discussion in major media outlets, such as ABC News, Washington Times, National Review, and Washington Post.

Peter Schweizer on Russia Today

What we’ll call ‘Mercer Money’ was also funneled into Citizens United’s coffers, to the tune of another 2 million dollars. This cash was at least partly used to fund Bannon & Bossie’s 4th Citizens United Productions collaboration, The Hope and the Change, an anti-Obama movie which premiered at the August Republican National Convention and played in theatres & on cable TV up through Election Day. Once again, the Citizens United v FEC decision enabled that release schedule.

And yet despite all of this intrigue, perhaps the most important development and deployment of Mercer Money in 2012 came in the form of a $5,000,000 investment in a relatively unknown British defense contractor, then called Strategic Communication Laboratories Ltd but now known as SCL Group. The Mercers tossed the pounds across the pond to enable data analytics research, with Rebekah wanting a “results-oriented consultant.”

This investment has been noted elsewhere as a natural fit for Robert Mercer, as his background in algorithms and language processing mesh with what we now know about SCL’s recent use of big data to enhance electioneering communications, but thatactually didn’t yet make sense at the time. Back then, the only technology strongly tied to SCL would have been communications hardware (as opposed to database software), but only as one aspect of their rather straightforward advertising-cum-propaganda tactics.

SCL had worked on some elections, in a few war zones, and for the Pentagon over the years, with perhaps their most notable appearance being in 2004 Ukraine at the time of the Orange Revolution (allegedly on behalf of the vested interests of British intelligence, according to one untrustworthy source, as previously noted by TEXTIFIRE). SCL carries a Secret clearance as a ‘List X’ contractor for the British Ministry of Defence and had always portrayed themselves as experts in the field of behavioral dynamics and psychological warfare, but had no known background in the algorithmic data processing with which they are now associated.

So why would an ill-equipped foreign defense contractor like SCL be called upon by the Mercers to do big data research? The answer again appears to lie somewhere in the weeds near Steve Bannon.

Header for Nigel Farage’s dozens of Breitbart essays (Source)

WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?

Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation.He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly those tied in withNigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A hard right party commonly disparaged as fascist, UKIP sought to restore what it saw as true conservatism. Bannon was greatly invested in the USA Tea Party ‘movement’ at the time, as evidenced by his movie productions and speaking engagements, so he viewed UKIP as a natural comrade in arms.

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UKIP had been stagnating as a political force while known as a single platform party, focused almost entirely on immigration crackdown and demand for UK’s exit from the European Union. Co-founder Farage had returned to lead the party for a 2nd time in November 2010 — later in the same week as the first Tea Party Republicans were elected in the US midterms — after failing in his bid to become House of Commons Speaker earlier that year, and began to incorporate a wider variety of populistmessaging with a focus on local elections to increase growth.

Soon after Bannon took over Breitbart in the summer of 2012, he brought Farage to the USA for a grand tour of New York and Washington, D.C. During this trip, Bannon introducedFarage to a number of movers & shakers, including the staff of Jeff Sessions, the then-senator from Alabama who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.

Throughout the previous year, a UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge was garnering a lot of press for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox, after being founded in 1997 by Fox and Reagan BFF/ex-UK-PM Margaret Thatcher, its stated goal was to protect the 80's holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special relationship’ from “the European integrationistswho would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States.”

Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]

Atlantic Bridge fell into the sea in late 2011, after extensive investigations found Fox had been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” by internationally courting a variety of corporate lobbyists and military contractors via the dark money donated to Bridge as a falsely-labeled charity. Fox then resigned his Cabinet position, taking a few others down with him.

One of those affected was yet another powerful hedge fund manager, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, climate-change denier & funder, and longtime Tory/Conservative donor named Michael Hintze who provided the majority of those donations and lent his private jet to Fox for schmoozy jaunts to meet with D.C. defence contractors. With a strong interest in geopolitical wargames, a habit of supporting Defence Secretaries, and a predilection for hiring senior military officials at his powerful firm Convertible & Quantitative Strategies, it’s small wonder Hintze sought to establish a Western security superhighway before the Bridge collapsed.

Back in 2007, however, Atlantic Bridge was still in its prime, and it gained even more power when a giant among US political activist groups began an official partnership with it. The American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, so they may further the ideals exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”

Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]

ALEC’s decades-old modus operandi is to write complete versions of new legislation, which invariably benefits only its powerful corporate members, to be passed off to complicit politicians and introduced in Congress as original products. An official ALEC newsletter from Dec 2007 bragged of the Bridge Project’s new plans to enact “a series of events aimed at conservative leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia — exposing them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.”

Catherine Bray is pictured in the newsletter as the Director of International Relations for Atlantic Bridge; she had previously worked for prominent UKIP member & climate change denier Roger Helmer and subsequently worked for Tory Daniel Hannan, “the man who brought you Brexit.”In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen, Atlantic Bridge’s Washington DC Director, and J.D. Gordon, a retired Pentagon spokesman and well-traveled defense lobbyist. Lee Cohen is now an ardent Trump supporter, publishing an IJR essay in November 2016 predicting Trump and new UK PM Theresa May will be the new Reagan & Thatcher.

Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director for Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier Cain promised to reduce corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA. Cain began briefly leading Obama in the polls at that time and was the most reported-on GOP candidate in 2011, but quit the race less than 2 months later after sexual misconduct charges arose.

Gordon was slightly controversial when he originally joined up as one of Cain’s foreign policy advisers, as he had recently left a fellowship position at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank (or perhaps hate group) devoted to advancing founder and former Reagan official Frank Gaffney’s pet cause of extreme Islamophobia. Cain’s campaign also absorbed the staff of Gordon’s own embryonic thinktank, the Center for Security and Democracy, which included a former Heritage Foundation manager.

J.D. Gordon is most recently known for his work as a key foreign policy adviser to Cain clone Donald Trump, who counted Herman among his early campaign rally speakers/surrogates, and about whom Gordon wrote a pro-Trump Breitbart article in April 2016. Gordon was also Jeff Sessions’ deputy, allegedly traveled to Budapest six times during the campaign, participated in the infamous July 2016 Republican National Convention meeting — hosted by the Heritage Foundation — involving co-adviser Carter Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and is said to have previously recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow. Gordon also claims he personally asked to water down the RNC platform with noncommittal language omitting lethal weapons support for Ukraine, and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.

(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio

Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, then frequently cited as one of the farthest-right sitting Senators. An ardent tax reformer, Family member, and anti-immigration crusader, he was on board with the Tea Party from its inception in early 2009, setting the stage with the establishment of his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC in 2008. The Fund attacked Republicans for being too ‘moderate’ and then gave millions to the successful 2010 Senate campaigns of such first-time Tea Party candidates as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey. Also in 2010, DeMint introduced the first bill intended to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few months later with his first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage, so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which heendorsed Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.

A large chunk of the money for that tactical assault was provided by Robert Mercer, with other miniature morsels of Mercer Money going to DeMint, Toomey, and Rubio at various times. Unsurprisingly, Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time, with Lee and Demint tying for the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.

“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]

DeMint resigned from the Senate less than two months after the 2012 election in order to become president of Heritage — a thinktank which shares an enormous number of historical, practical, and membership commonalities with ALEC — by which time Atlantic Bridge had been dead [in the UK] for over a year. Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, Liam Fox, J.D. Gordon, and/or any of the other Atlantic Bridge ambassadors still managed to make their way to any one of the legendary parties thrown at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a four-story townhouse rented (?) by Breitbart near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

As for the gregarious and cigar-chomping heavy drinker Nigel Farage, we don’t have to imagine anything. He was treated as the guest of honor at a Breitbart Embassy dinner & cocktail party in September 2014, where the stars of the new right rubbed shoulders with journalists from across the media spectrum. Other guests that night included LifeZette’s Laura Ingraham, a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannon had been partially living at the Embassysince at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially expected to serve as a means to rub shoulders with the movers & shakers of the DC political elite. “Andrew [Breitbart] said that if you didn’t have a place within spitting distance of the Capitol, no one would come,” Bannon told The Washington Post at an Embassy blowout schmooze-and-boozefest CPAC rager in 2014. “He loved to throw big parties.”

But regardless of the precise circumstances by which Bannon became enmeshed with the UK’s conservative elite prior to mid-2012, engrossing as the detailed story may be, his friendship with UKIP & Brexit’s Farage tells us all we need to know. As such, we should be unsurprised to learn it wasallegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.

PSYOPS GOES MAINSTREAM

In October 2012, a month before Mitt Romney’s loss initiated the Bannon-driven deposit of Mercer Money toward new election management technology, a Strategic Communication Laboratories subsidiary named SCL Elections was registered in the UK. All company shares were initially owned by Alexander Nix, Director of SCL Group and public face of the conglomerate, but its first and current Managing Director is Mark Turnbull.

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Turnbull had previously worked for the tremendously influential public relations and strategic communications firm Bell Pottinger — co-founded by infamous PR guru Lord Timothy Bell — spending 18 years at the company. In 2004, he founded and led Bell Pottinger Public Advocacy (BPPA, fka Bell Pottinger Special Projects), which claimed to specialize in “understanding and influencing the human and social dynamics of conflict and cooperation…[using]…people’s identities, interests, networks and narratives that are the focal point for communications designed to deliver measurable change in support of political, social, developmental or military objectives.”

Bell Pottinger (B-PC) landed a 2004 Pentagon contract in Iraq devoted to manufacturing pro-Coalition media — including in-house advertising, video production, and paid placement of newspaper/TV/radio news items — in support of post-Saddam Hussein nation building and anti-Daesh messaging. The creative team of BPPA collaborated on the media directly with US military intelligence, with the crews working side-by-side in the most highly secured locations, such as Baghdad’s Camp Victory.

Though initially intended to be a 4-month contract, first granted by Ian Tunnicliffe’s Office of Strategic Communications of the Coalition Provisional Authority under USA’s pseudo-viceroy of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the project ultimately extended all the way to 2011. Upwards of 40 ‘stratcom’ companies — including BKSH & Associates, formed from the ashes of Black, Manafort, and Stone — followed B-PC’s lead, creating a veritable vortex of political propaganda and psychological operations experimentation.B-PC came out as the big winner of the free-for-all, as by the end of its time in Iraq, B-PC’s contract payouts had ballooned from US$5.8m to a total of $540m–660m.

Also present in Iraq during those years was a specialized British Armed Forces tri-service unit, the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, formerly known as Shadow. Its stated objective was to “influence attitudes in order to affect behaviour” with “planned, culturally sensitive, truthful and attributable activities directed and disseminated by various means to an approved target audience.” It drew from the Army, Navy & Air Force, seeking out Reserves who were also “TV & film producers, camera operators, radio presenters, [and] graphic designers/illustrators for print/web.”

Two important members of 15 (UK) PSYOPS (aka 15 POG) were Stephen Jolly of the Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham, both graduates of Cambridge University-affiliated schools. A linguistic scientist, certified psyops planner, and instructor for 15 POG, Jolly went on to serve as the UK’s Director of Defence Communications, starting in Dec 2012. He retired in 2015 as the most senior serving psyops officer in British Defence, moving on to become Fellow of the UK Defence Academy and Fellow in Communications at the Cambridge University Judge Business School.

As Defence Comms Director, Jolly embraced the new ‘Army 2020’ holistic reform initiative, pushing a “full spectrum” approach which combines the fields of public relations, media operations, information operations (IO) and psyops. This led to the creation of the 77th Brigade of the British Army, which absorbed several specialized units, including the 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group. Its establishment received a fair amount of media coverage, due to the claim it would partially focus on utilizing social media to wage the ‘dark arts’ of asymmetric warfare, but its ?1 Column focuses on “the behavioural analysis of actors, audiences and adversaries.”

Commander Steve Tatham served with 15 POG in Iraq, but commanded its Afghanistan regiment for years. He also plied his trade as Director of Communication Research at the UK Defence Academy, and was the UK’s longest continuously serving Influence Activities officer. Upon retirement he became Director of Operations at IOTA-Global, a UK company owned by Nigel Oakes, the founder of SCL and its research arm, Behavioural Dynamics Institute (BDi).

Grown just outside battlefields across the globe, Tatham designed a course titled “Target Audience Analysis” for the National Defence Academy of Latvia on behalf of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, teaching several agencies how to counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe. Originally a 9-week intensive training, delivered as a collaboration between IOTA-Global, BDi, and SCL Defence (formerly an SCL Group subsidiary), Tatham has repeated the course in Moldova and Ukraine. As IOTA-Global recently disbanded its corporate status, Tatham is currently Director of Defence Operations at SCL Group.

Verbalisation’s RAID

Another pair of 15 (UK) PSYOPS veterans and avowed fans of the new 77th Brigade, Sven Hughes and David Stanhope, are leaders at the behavioral marketing firm Verbalisation, which bills itself as “the world’s first consultancy dedicated to changing behaviour by precision-engineering language.” Hughes, a former head of elections at SCL from 2009–10 who also assisted NATO forces in Afghanistan, says his staff members are “largely ex-military personnel and political campaigners.” Stanhope spent eight years with 15 POG, serving under Cdr Tatham for a spell in Afghanistan, and also worked in 2011 for SCL (briefly joining fellow ex-IO/psyops agents Jerry Knight & the aforementioned Ian Tunnicliffe, both former SCL directors). The POG vets claim Verbalisation’s RAID aka Rapid Audience Insight Diagnostics® software tool can help military and marketing clients — including several News Corp media outlets — “decode” personalities based on 24 set parameters, including language, cognition, susceptibility, and culture.

Despite years of effort and billions of international dollars, the Iraq and Afghanistan information operations (IO) projects were deemed by experts to have been a failure. Cdr Tatham even co-wrote a UK Defence Academy report lamenting “the corporate failure to adapt IO and PSYOPS’s operating practices to the 21st century, instead relying upon ages-old methods of communication,” as well as an “over reliance of IO and PSYOPS on commercial advertising and marketing strategies.”

“Commercial marketing and advertising methods are designed to increase the hit rate of customers in a target group. A conversion of 10% would be considered outstanding and highly profitable. But in military operations achieving a 10% change in the behaviour of an insurgent group or a hostile community would be operationally insignificant,” Tatham wrote in the NATO StratCom Target Audience Analysis (TAA) course summary. He instead advocates for TAA and the use of scientific research into behavior predictors, such as language, likes, and motivation, as opposed to focusing the majority of resources on creative media production glitz.

To this end, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), a trading fund of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which is the equivalent of USA’s DARPA, conducted a study between May-Sept 2013 called ‘Project DUCO’ which contracted SCL and BDi to test out their TAA capabilities. The evaluation was undertaken as part of the Human and Social Influence project, funded from the MoD Science and Technology research budget. In-person questionnaires were verbally completed byyoung unmarried males (“YUMs”) in target regions, with SCL-trained interviewers canvassing neighborhoods like standard solicitors, simply because no other means existed to gain insight into individual personalities and groupthink.

It seems that the psyops startup incubators of Iraq and Afghanistan failed to overwhelmingly win the hearts and minds of the target audiences in those locales, but succeeded in honing the methodological requirements of the IO traffickers. As Tatham suggested, giant billboards and radio jingles aimed at a large population based on small sample size indicators weren’t effective enough, so a product like Verbalisation — listed under “Counter Terrorism and Security” on R-Cloud, Dstl’s marketplace for partnered contractors — was born, ready and able to pinpoint individuals & target groups for analysis and alteration.

Of course, all of this sounds exactly like the TAA work SCL was contracted in early 2017 to perform for the US State Department’s new Global Engagement Center, a reboot of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) and its famously failed 2010s online propaganda & surveillance program.

[SCL Group Joins the US State Dept.

Robert Mercer-funded Cambridge Analytica’s foreign parent company signs deal to do propaganda work for State’s Global…

medium.com]

SCL and State’s CSCC were not strangers prior to 2017, though, as Nigel Oakes had spoken at a January 2012 CSCC seminar on “The Most Common Mistakes in Designing Influence Campaigns,” at which Oakes was pitching the State Dept on knowledge acquired from Iraq and Afghan 15 POG work. The seminar’s BDi-provided video description explains, “Nigel highlighted four very common errors made in designing influence campaigns, especially if one is trying to induce significant behavior change.”

Bits and pieces of the 2000s Middle Eastern psyops extravaganza had trickled out back then, but the full extent of B-PC/BPPA’s Iraq work under Mark Turnbull was only revealed in a October 2016 report entitled “Fake News and False Flags” by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK nonprofit devoted to extended and unbiased investigations.

Five years previous, the Bureau conducted another well-publicized investigation into Turnbull’s BPPA, in which B-PC executives were caught on tape boasting about their unique “dark arts” ability to initiate political change via their deep infiltration into the highest levels of UK government. The execs also boasted of their skills in hiding bad PR by manipulating Google results with juiced-up ‘Google bombing’, and how they had a team devoted to Wikipedia reputation management, which is common now but was rather cutting-edge at the time.

NOT EXACTLY MAGGIE & GORBY

Also back in 2004 — the same year BPPA formed and their work began in Iraq — B-PC took on a contract to spin their web in Ukraine for Yulia Tymoshenko in the time of the Orange Revolution, which would have seen them working against Paul Manafort’s clients in the Party of Regions, as well as in the vicinity of fellow contractor SCL. A previous article published by TEXTIFIRE explored SCL’s role in those events and the related history, which involves billionaires, rigged elections, the most glamorous Russian spy in history, and a mythical war room SCL billed as “The Most Powerful Weapon In The World.”

SCL Group’s Eurasian Vacation

SCL once had their defense contractors’ conference booth made by a design team from Goldeneye 007. Here’s a pitch for…

medium.com]

Bell’s involvement in Ukraine did not end in 2004, for even though they had been employed by future Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, it was her frequent antagonist and Party of Regions bigwig Dmytro Firtash who retained the long-term services of B-PC. Firtash is an oil & natural resources magnate who also owns Ukraine’s largest TV station, but is now an internationally wanted criminal suspect trailing a long history of personal relationships with Vladimir Putin and Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich. Just as with the American PR firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, whose client list is littered with objectively unsavory characters, Bell Pottinger has long made itself available to the highest bidder.

Bell advised the Firtash Foundation while Anthony Fisher, senior consultant with Bell Pottinger, served as director of the Foundation. Fisher also co-founded the Firtash front Scythian Limited, which came under fire for funneling foreign funds to Tory politicians in a scandal which prevented a National Security Adviser nominee from being confirmed, and is a board member of the Firtash-supported group British Ukrainian Society (BUS). Chairman of BUS is Lord Risby, an economics graduate of Cambridge University, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, and current member of the House of Lords.

Firtash’s direct ties to several well-placed UK Conservatives is a curiosity. Despite his heavy baggage, Firtash has stayed active in politics via his BUS, and he donated a truck full of cash to help establish Cambridge University’s Ukrainian Studies school. Perhaps his open checkbook and loose lips have allowed him to avoid extradition to the USA, instead roaming free in Vienna while out on US$125,000,000 bail from long-unprosecuted charges. Without speculating too much about his actual place in this tale, Firtash’s story in particular is reminiscent of the days of Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev era Cold War double agents.

What’s old is apparently new again, however, as the Parliamentary members of the short-lived group Conservative Friends of Russia would no doubt decline to attest. Conservative Friends rapidly fizzled after public outcry but quickly relaunched as the Westminster Russia Forum, yet those ex-Friends could be expected to assure us that their original so-called “Tories for Putin” group was strictly on the up and up.

As Friends co-founder Richard Royal explained at the time in his 2012 Guardian op-ed, the Tories had turned their backs on the more liberal Labour leadership but found their increasingly hardlining nativist gaze met in Eurasia. “We must remember, however, that being a Friend of Russia is not the same as being a Friend of the Russian government,” said Royal. “By that reckoning, our Conservative members were not friends of Britain between 1997 and 2010[.]”

Margaret Thatcher & Lord Tim Bell (Source)

Retro ’80s stylings abound, in fact, as Conservative bedfellow Lord Bell was nominated for his knighthood by Margaret Thatcher, for whom he served as personal media adviser throughout her time as UK Prime Minister, with their close friendship illustrated by Bell’s official announcement of her 2013 death.

The Iron Lady left behind quite the well-connected coterie, with her Atlantic Bridge co-founder Liam Fox overseeing the aforementioned psyops work while Shadow Defence Secretary & Defence Secretary from 2005–2011, his megadonor patron Michael Hintze a client of Lord Bell’s during the time of Atlantic Bridge, and old friend Sir Geoffrey Pattie — another former vice-chair of the Conservative party who served as Thatcher’s Minister of State for Industry & Information Technology and Undersecretary for Defence Procurement — spending a few years as a Director of SCL.

Though Sir Pattie had switched from Director to President of SCL Group four years prior, SCL Elections’ official registration in the month preceding President Obama’s reelection — with Mercer Money in its coffers and Lord Bell’s ‘Special Projects’ ex-director Mark Turnbull at its helm — set off a chain reaction of SCL corporate maneuverings that extended across the following four years.

A flurry of declarations of new subsidiaries and subsequent name changes of those companies culminated on 7 September 2016, when SCL Director Alexander Nix transferred all 100 original shares of SCL Elections from himself to the company SCL Analytics. Formed a year prior, SCL Analytics is 70% owned by Nix and 30% owned by its parent company SCL Group.

As far as is known at presstime, SCL Group and Nix currently co-own all shares of SCL Analytics, which owns all shares of SCL Elections, which owns all shares of [what was originally named SCL USA Ltd but as of 13 April 2016 is officially known as] Cambridge Analytica (UK) Limited.

However, that CA-UK is technically separate from the American subsidiary Cambridge Analytica LLC, which was registered in Delaware on 31 Dec 2013, over two years sooner.To confuse us even further, 22 Apr 2014 saw the DE registration of SCL USA Inc., which is also wholly owned by SCL Elections but is separate from the 12 Feb 2003 establishment of SCL USA LLC.

If you followed all that, give yourself a pat on the back and a candy.

TEXTIFIRE peer edited this tremendous chart by Wendy Siegelman & Ann Marlowe]

SEEKING A Ph.D. IN EXPLOITATIVE AD-TECH

Cambridge Analytica LLC — the US company which will henceforth be referred to as CA or CambAnal — has garnered a large amount of public interest over the last year and a half for its use of big data in elections, just like Rebekah Mercer wanted. The primary subject of that media attention has been debate over the controversial merits of CA’s claimed use of Five Factor Model or BIG5 personality profiling — aka OCEAN, an acronym derived from Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — with much less of a focus on either the sourcing of the identifying datapoints or the origination of the tools & methodology CA deployed.

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A December 2016 article in Das Magazin — a sensation in Germany at the time, which spread virally upon its English translation published by VICE’s Motherboard in January — told a story relayed by Michal Kosinski, formerly Director of Operations for Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit. Kosinski seemed to be suggesting SCL and CA might have stolen (or at least repurposed without permission) his team’s research into third-party use of millions of Facebook interactions as data point items, which Kosinski et al collected using a Facebook quiz app and then ran through OCEAN profiling for personality cataloguing purposes.

Cambridge University played a major role in an earlier TEXTFIRE article, as it has become a hotbed of international spy chatter over the last several months, encompassing rumors about Gen. Michael Flynn and Russian influence at the renowned spycraft coffee klatch, the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (where 15 POG’s Stephen Jolly is said to be a frequent attendee). Switching gears, however, it is important to note that Cambridge was partnering with another organization on this and other psychometrics projects: Microsoft Research.

But How Does It Work?!? (Source)

At the time of his key March 2013 journal article, Kosinski was also a research advisor to the Online Services and Advertising group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. One of his two article co-authors was Dr. Thore Graepel, who “is a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge leading the Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group, where their work is focused on the application of large scale machine learning and probabilistic modelling techniques to a wide range of problems including online advertising, web search, and games,” according to his still-active Cambridge online profile.

Perhaps Cambridge simply needs to update its website, for Dr. Graepel currently works as Research Lead at Google DeepMind and Professor of Computer Science at University College London. DeepMind is a company Google purchased in 2014, which seeks to conquer quantum computing but now primarily develops “the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms,” and which has come under fire for its mishandling of millions of UK patients’ health data while under contract from Britain’s NHS.

The other significant co-author on that publication (and its several predecessors, starting in Feb 2012) was Dr David Stillwell, Deputy Director of The Psychometrics Centre, whose Cambridge profile labels the barely-30y/o as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Psychometrics.”Stillwell originally wrote the myPersonality app which gathered the studies’ data from millions of Facebook profiles, doing so while preparing for his graduate studies in 2007. Just one year after Facebook first became available to the general public, myPersonality began hoarding user profiles.

Stillwell also created a Facebook app called You Are What You Like, a product released no later than October 2013. “By linking the myPersonality database to Facebook Likes we have created an application that is able to predict your personality simply by logging in to your Facebook account,” boasted its deactivated Cambridge webpage.

Another tool developed from myPersonality (and its cousin myIQ) was LikeAudience, described in the 2010–11 annual Cambridge report as “a breakthrough research and marketing tool developed by Michal Kosinski that provides detailed psycho-demographic profiles of brands, products, ideas, and all the other things people like on Facebook.”

The Psychometrics Centre was working on “gender difference in intelligence” and “perceptions of intelligence in Facebook images and their relationship to actual IQ and to personality, the validity of social network likes as predictors of product preference and the relationship between personality and product preference,” the report went on to say. “Michal Kosinski established a continuing collaboration with the Microsoft Laboratory at Cambridge, on several projects including an exploration of crowd sourcing of intelligence in the Amazon Mechanical Turk.”

“Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers,” said Kosinski in a 22 Apr 2011 article by Cambridge. “We think [LikeAudience] will revolutionise marketing, because it introduces a completely new dimension by adding scientifically robust personality tests to other demographic information.”

The same article announced Kosinski and Stillwell “believe that [LikeAudience] will be of particular value to marketers, who will be able to uncover new potential audiences for their advertising campaigns, and exploitable niches based on the fans of their closest rivals. The potential significance for politicians, particularly when on the election trail, is also clear.”

LikeAudience’s dashboard (Source)

Identifying politics and elections as potential use case scenarios has been a common theme with these products. The “How Does It Work?” page on YouAreWhatYouLike.com posited, “If most of the things you like are liked by liberal people (e.g. Quentin Tarantino) — it is quite likely that you are also liberal.”

“Sarah Palin appeals to a rather different personality type. Her followers are likely to be more traditional in mindset, disciplined, dutiful, and older than the average Obama fan.” Further analysis of Palin-approving LikeAudience users found those with similar profiles “still track the fortunes of the last President, George W. Bush, and also enthuse about Pizza Hut and the Seattle Seahawks.”

PreferenceTool, the successor of the deprecated LikeAudience, seems quite sure of its efficacy in applying all this knowledge to behavioural modification. “PreferenceTool enables marketers to significantly improve targeting and reduce the cost of marketing campaigns,” said its splash page. “It is used by leading online marketing agencies and is proved to have increased campaign effectiveness by up to 140%. [emphasis theirs]”

Dr. Graepel explains Cambridge & Microsoft’s psychometric Facebook study; compare this to CA/SCL Elections’ explanation of their methodology HERE

Despite an outward veneer of academically pure intention, this research is clearly being conducted for specific purposes. To get a better sense of their work, Cambridge has helpfully provided us with a litany of online demonstrations of what appears to be its currently most hyped [and administratively sanctioned] product, the online psychometric assessment creation tool Concerto. We can quickly see the difference between Cambridge Psychometric’s historical topics of focus, such as preschool activities and mental disorders, as compared to the names of quizzes performed in Concerto, including several titled “Advertisement Test”.

Both the Psychometrics Centre and Microsoft Research websites plainly hawk their myPersonality-derived services to interested clients, using keywords of ‘advertising’ and ‘machine learning’. Cambridge offers the use of myPersonality data as a service, on both the Psychometrics homepage and and its flagship Apply Magic Sauce site, and also offers open-source data to hundreds of active researchers at myPersonality.org.

Apply Magic Sauce hosts a sample personality quiz, which likely distracts rubberneckers more interested in the self-help quizzes found on Cambridge’s DiscoverMyProfile.com, but its business2business page boasts of services which will sound very familiar if you’ve read this far. “We enable instant psychological assessment of your users based on their online behaviour,” it excitedly exclaims, by using a range of tools “from multi-channel keyword targeting to psycholinguistic tailoring.”

Apply Magic Sauce pricing (Source)

“In a fraction of a second, you can now adjust the presentation, delivery and content of your message to suit the distinct psychological make-up of the person viewing it,” if you are simply willing to pay a few hundred or thousand quid per month, depending on the extent of your customised needs. To be clear, Cambridge University’s publicly available Apply Magic Sauce product is openly offering to perform high-frequency advertisement creation based on psychographic profiling data culled from Facebook, in what is likely a very lucrative setup for the school.

On the private sector side, “Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group” sounds rather self-explanatory, so it is relatively clear what Microsoft has intended to accomplish through its Cambridge funding. Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC) research is being funneled into Microsoft’s Cortana AI tool and its Azure Cognitive Services AI platform, as well as “voting games” and internet ads. An MSRC study from Sept 2014 is titled “Efficient Advert Assignment”, focusing on algorithmic pay-per-click schemes in online search results.

“Only in the recent literature have computationally efficient methods been considered for market and auction design,” the paper reminds us. “In the context of electronic commerce and specifically sponsored search auctions, these computational considerations are of critical importance given the increased diversity and competition associated with online advertising.”

Cambridge and Microsoft’s team-up has produced algorithm-to-algorithm HFT of consumers’ personalities and their custom-targeted online adverts. No wonder the Psychometrics Centre changed departments in 2016, moving from Social and Developmental Psychology to Stephen Jolly’s Judge Business School.

MS Cognitive Services AI isn’t NEURTRAL, it’s RAYCYST (Source)

TAKING THE CAMBRIDGE OUT OF CAMBANAL

With fingers pointing at CambAnal and CambUni as a result of all the recent media coverage, blame has begun to be shifted around. School, tech company, and professors are all turning on each other. In an attempt to uncover their true relationships, data protection advocate and researcher Paul-Olivier Dehaye has filed a number of Freedom Of Information requests with Cambridge, but has thus far only received refusals; instead, the University has appeared to be attempting to distance itself from the research in question. Their stance seems to be that they have no claim to the data or results, that Michal Kosinski owns it all, and that Microsoft is solely responsible for its existence.

In the aforementioned Das Magazin article, Kosinski absolved himself and Cambridge of any responsibility, saying, “This is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists.” He instead laid nearly all the blame at the feet of a young Cambridge professor, then known as Dr Aleksandr Kogan. Kosinski said Kogan approached him in late January 2014, attempting to purchase access to myPersonality on behalf of a deep-pocketed company, and it was not until some time later that Kosinski remembered it was SCL. Kogan went on to start his own company and began harvesting Facebook information from unsuspecting Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, paying the going rate of pennies per full profile download, and then turned that info over to SCL in some sort of licensing deal.

In a public Facebook conversation, Kogan denies almost all of this. He says he and Kosinski knew each other and continued to stay in touch after SCL entered the frame; SCL also met and had direct interactions with Kosinski; and SCL was by that time heavily into machine learning and microtargeting applications of psychological data for political purposes.

As he noted in his lengthy Facebook rebuttal, Kogan legally changed his married name to Aleksandr Spectre in 2016, making him Dr Spectre. He only has a small handful of published papers to his name(s), focused exclusively on emotionality neuroscience, though that didn’t stop him from becoming Director aka “beloved commander” of the Cambridge Prosociality and Well-Being Lab as early as July 2013. His full birth name was Aleksandr Borisovich Kogan, owing to his Moldovan birth and Russian ancestry.

As easy as it would be to cast the Russian mad scientist Dr Spectre as the villain in this British spy story, the problem is Kosinski’s timeline doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The word on the street is CambAnal hired researchers from Cambridge University as part of its original staff, which is allegedly where the “Cambridge” came from when naming the company on its first 31 Dec 2013 Delaware registration, along with the perceived instant name cachet. But that this would be less than a month before Spectre allegedly approached Kosinski on behalf of SCL — or before SCL met Kosinski — is an enormous coincidence, especially since the Psychometric Centre’s Facebook-related research publications and marketing products had been making the rounds for 3–5 years at that point.

Not to mention, the first pre-CA “unpaid pilot project to show how SCL might work” for electioneering purposes was in the2013 Virginia gubernatorial race,which culminated on 5 Nov 2013. What was their ‘value add’ in mid/late 2013 if SCL was merely offering UK military psyops techniques (as described in our companion article), if Cambridge Analytica and its fancy-sounding name wouldn’t be officially established until two months later, and if they weren’t testing out any BIG5 methodology or offering up psycho-demographic profile data from Facebook?

Of course, it’s possible these shortcomings contributed to their candidate Ken Cuccinelli’s loss,despite another $600,000 of Mercer Money given to Cuccinelli supporters at Virginia Principles Fund, which is the only donation ever listed for that PAC. Perhaps they emerged from the losing battle with a better sense of their big data needs, but as the next few years unfolded, this model where Mercer donates to a campaign or PAC just prior to Cambridge Analytica’s employment would quickly become de rigueur.

Cuccinelli, who would later advise Ted Cruz, said he met Mercer on a fundraising trip to New York. “He’s very solid and understated. You wouldn’t know you were talking to someone with that kind of force,” said Cuccinelli. “He just thinks our country is off track and he’s in a position to do something to get it back on track.”

It’s unlikely CambAnal/SCL was the reason for the recent FBI raid of Strategic Campaign Group, a firm which also worked for Cuccinelli’s 2013 campaign and the Mercer-funded/CA-assisted John Bolton SuperPAC. Still, it’s unclear if SCL was legally allowed to do unpaid electioneering work in 2013, since SCL USA LLC’s 12 Feb 2003 Delaware establishment as a defense contractor made it the only American SCL subsidiary in existence at that time. And why is SCL USA LLC currently listed as a Foreign Company in VA records if it’s registered to Steve Bannon’s Beverly Hills business address…?

After recommending that the Mercers fund the startup SCL Elections in 2012, which was the major catalyst for the creation of CambAnal, Steve Bannon continued his push into UK affairs. He flew to England in late 2013 to meet with Raheem Kassam, a young far-right blogger and frequent thinktank employee. Bannon invited him to guide the hand of the upcoming Breitbart London bureau expansion site, which Kassam agreed to do.

Breitbart London successfully launched in February 2014 and began working surprising magic on the fortunes of UKIP, which would gain its biggest head of steam yet as it made huge gains in Parliamentary seats and pushed for an exit of Britain from the EU. This seems to be partially due to Kassam’s positioning as Bannon’s UK avatar. Kassam not only tirelessly supported the cause on Breitbart, but switched his voting allegiance from Conservative to UKIP at the time Bannon visited in 2013, and then suddenly rose to become UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s chief of staff in 2014.

Unfortunately for Farage’s bizarrely alleged good friend Robert Mercer, this was a few months before Renaissance Technologies would again be mentioned in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Farage: “Well Done Bannon; Well Done Breitbart” (Source)

MR. MERCER GOES TO WASHINGTON

On 22 July 2014, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by US Senators Carl Levin (D) and John McCain (R), held a hearing titled, “Abuse of Structured Financial Products: Misusing Basket Options to Avoid Taxes and Leverage Limits.” Called in to testify were six financial heavyweights: the Managing Director of Barclays, the CEO of Barclays Capital, a Managing Director and the President of Deutsche BankSecurities, and two executives from Renaissance Technologies.

After a 6-year investigation, the firms were being accused of nearly 15 years of tax evasion through the use of “basket contracts” aka “basket options”, which are too complicated to necessitate a full explanation in this space. The end result is the conversion of short-term trading profits into long-term capital gains, which lowered the tax rate on their gains/profits from 35% to 15%, saving RenTec et al billions of dollars in taxes.

Using algorithms written to identify and exploit opportunities for statistical arbitrage — aka StatArb, which focuses on tiny and very brief pricing anomalies of publicly-traded assets, which occur for various reasons and are only visible to computers — Rentec would execute more than 100 thousand trades a day, and more than 30 million a year. Deutsche and Barclays then assisted RenTec and two hedge funds in covering up the digital paper trail, skirting the outermost edges of the tax law in the process.

This type of high frequency trading is among many different strategies that act as one, including the implementation of machine-learning technologies to make and implement investment decisions. In contrast to algorithms that make short-term market forecasts, incredibly powerful computer arrays use big data to look far into the future, continually buying and selling securities based on those predictions. To power this, RenTec developed its own programming language to run those modeling systems. Medallion Fund, its most profitable fund — perhaps the most profitable in the world, though it’s open only to RenTec employees — includes several million lines of code in its algorithmic instructions.

As RenTec founder Dr Jim Simons — the 2nd largest Democratic donor in 2016 and one of the first people Barack Obama visited in his first post-presidential trip to NYC — once said, “It’s 100% automated. It’s as automated as it can be. The computer does its thing. It generates its trade, and the trade gets executed. No one sticks its head to the door, and says: ‘Jeez! You should buy IBM!’ We couldn’t model that.”

Big winners in HFT need the best computers, the most bandwidth, and the closest proximity to stock exchanges in order to maximize their chances of finding exploits, but this is all much more useful when combined with constantly refreshed input on the state of the planet’s activities. RenTec is said to maintain one of the largest data troves in the world, compiling information on every bit or byte they can get their hands on. Just as with BlackRock, another financial firm with incredible success leveraging big data & information surveillance due to their decades-old data facility in Washington State and ten more elsewhere, the storage of eclectic trivia empowers their algorithms to make decisions based on all available data points & variables.

As Dr Peter Brown, Robert Mercer’s co-CEO and co-President testified in front of McCain, “We collect all the publicly available data we can find that we believe might bear on the movement of the prices of tradable instruments — news stories, analysts’ reports, energy reports, crop reports, weather reports, regulatory filings, accounting data, and, of course, quotes and trades from markets around the world. Our models use this data to make predictions about future price changes.”

Another huge source of the information constantly being compiled by enormous data warehouses like these comes from private distributors of pure social media output, known as the Firehose. Facebook and Twitter are the most important generators of this info flow, but nearly all social media companies make their raw data streams available for harvesting and analysis. A slew of companies have offered paid access to view the mountains of data via slick interfaces, as well as feed into hungry algorithms. All of these online interactions are near-instantly categorized, contextualized, and transformed into stock trades and/or ad purchases.

Mercer hoards his chips

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Despite all this money constantly changing hands, which is encoded in law as an important event for tax purposes, between 2010 — the midterm election cycle year when Republicans & Tea Partiers took control of the House of Representatives — and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent. Just to reiterate,RenTec is thought to have kept over $6,000,000,000 in tax money away from the I.R.S. and federal government simply through the use of basket contract schemes, which was then paid out to RenTec employees and funneled back into the coffers of the ad & PR agencies who work for Citizens United v FEC-enabled SuperPACs.

Nothing much came of the McCain hearing, except suggestions by the I.R.S. in 2015 that basket contracts would come under scrutiny, before backing off of that threat a few months later. Hillary Clinton had proposed HFT taxes as part of her platform, which may help explain Mercer’s hatred of her, and the loopholes may get another look this year, possibly maybe, but not if Robert Mercer or his friends in the White House have anything to say about it. Any rage over the embarrassment of RenTec’s perceived persecution in 2014—later more fully addressed through the funding of an opposing GOP candidate in McCain’s next Senate race — found an easy outlet that summer, as Cambridge Analytica LLC added psychographic profiles to the data warehouses and high-frequency personality trading algorithms finally became operational.

A landmark moment for CambAnal arrived a month before the RenTec hearing, as it was rewarded for all of its convoluted preparation when it received its first publicly recorded paycheck on June 10th, 2014: $20,000 for working on urine hoarder Art Robinson’s third attempt to unseat HFT critic Peter DeFazio in Oregon. The two PACs which donated enough to Robinson to cover that bill were America Inc ($21,000), run by conservative media activist L. Brent Bozell, and Ending Spending Action Fund ($732,712), which received $1.75m of Mercer Money during the 2014 election cycle.

It has recently been revealed that June was CA’s first claimed month with its heavyweight Vice President/Secretary, who is primarily known as the former stock trader, Pentagon employee, executive chairman of the most influential online news outlet of the past few years, and Tea Party & Brexit supporter extraordinaire who initially helped kickstart SCL as it rolled down its current path. All of this describes just one person: Mr Stephen K. Bannon.

CATCHING UP TO THE PRESENT TENSION

Steve Bannon — the current White House Chief Strategist who still attends National Security Council meetings, as of this article’s publication date — has owned at least a hefty chunk of Cambridge Analytica LLC, the Facebook-powered, international military psyops-based, Mercer-funded, Microsoft-enabled, finance-loopholed, Amazon-trained, far-right-affiliated, foreign-born, algorithmic-advertising-driven media machine which participated in both the victorious Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns.

In fact, Bannon is the only publicly documented shareholder/owner of Cambridge Analytica LLC to date. Every SCL subsidiary in the UK has reported their shareholders on a regular basis for public dissemination, as is the lawful standard, but similar information is generally not available in the US.

As a result of Bannon’s required White House financial disclosures, however, we learned he owned between $1m-$5m in CambAnal, though in defiance of legality he had not sold it as of at least late April 2017.

Now, there is no shortage of marketing & PR agencies looking to exploit technology for political or financial gain, as evidenced by a private psychological operations firm-for-hire like Bell Pottinger, British Army psyops-based Verbalisation, or any number of boutique advertising startups. Even frequent GOP candidate vendor Campaign Solutions did so back in 2014 for the radically right wing John Bolton SuperPAC, which received $4m of Robert Mercer’s money between Apr 2014-Sep 2016.

Their job was to help microtarget DirectTV advertisements by cross-checking state voter files with consumer data such as magazine subscriptions, so the voters could then be sorted into 100 personality types, arranged into 28 clusters, and sent a specific version of a political ad tailored to each of those clusters through their satellite TV.This was a far cry from SCL’s in-person questionnaires of mere hundreds of YUMs for UK’s MoD, but Cambridge Analytica was also hired to work closely with Campaign Solutions on the 2014 campaigns to create those varying TV ads. In 2015 & 2016, CambAnal was repeatedly contracted by John Bolton SuperPAC to work with ConnellDonatelli, which shares an owner with Campaign Solutions, to produce more targeted ads.

Even so, when Bannon’s CambAnal later joined Trump’s GOP data team in employing the same high-speed AI advertising and algorithmic purchasing strategies laid out by Microsoft, Cambridge University, Verbalisation, and even RenTec while partnering with Facebook & Google’s ad deployment platforms during the 2016 elections, it was a very big deal. Here we had highly motivated, massively funded, ideologically driven, career specialist military, psychology, and technology minds from both sides of the Atlantic working closely together to achieve specific outcomes at any cost.

For example, Liam Fox is the first-ever UK Secretary of State for International Trade, despite all of his outrageous behavior just a few short years ago. Apparently someone who profits off of private deals with international military contractors, all while taking a government paycheck to represent the public’s best interests, is exactly who should be in charge of Trade as Britain prepares to exit the European Union. Brexit’s success paved the way for Fox to triumphantly reclaim his lost power, which makes his role clear.

Brexit kingpin and former financial trader Nigel Farage was invited to speak at Heritage Foundation in 2015, along with Roger Helmer & other UKIP “Patriotic Voices from Europe”, delivering a barrage of Obama attacks to the delight of the crowd. In fact, Farage’s Leave campaigns were entirely unafraid of identifying their friends across the pond, as evidenced by the namecheck in Go Movement Ltd’s (GML) application for Leave designation: “GML will further coordinate with the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks that support an EU referendum, which will provide a strong ‘outside’ voice within the echo chamber.” Predictably, the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom is elated about Brexit.

Heritage Foundation was credited with formulating the exact blueprint for Trump’s first 100 days, which mostly worked perfectly (if we can agree its true intent was to deconstruct the administrative state). Even its slight failure might explain why President Jim DeMint was recently ousted, after which time Steve Bannon was floated as a replacement candidate. Things are now looking like they might go very bad in the Trump administration, but the suggestion that a White House Chief Strategist would leave that post for a thinktank should clarify the extent of Heritage’s power and influence. Rebekah Mercer’s placement as a strong Heritage board member, along with her donations of millions of Mercer Money, is likely stoking the coals under a Bannon-Heritage matchup.

Club for Growth, which has received at least $2,000,000 of Mercer Money since 2011, is welcoming the new administration with open arms.Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Spring 2017 Club event on 19 March, in which he mentioned Tea Partiers Pat Toomey & Mike Lee by name and regaled the crowd with stories of the Club’s strong support for Pence since way back in 2000.

Atlantic Bridge’s former partner ALEC has also filled the halls of the US government and especially the White House, with supporters, donation recipients, and members running the show at the highest possible level. Those names include CIA chief Mike Pompeo, EPA head Scott Pruitt, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, United Nations representative Nikki Haley, and — wait for it — VP Mike Pence.

Renaissance Technologies is a legend in the trading industry, partially because they have consistently been pioneers of automated financial prediction. In 2017, human quants across the market spectrum are being increasingly laid off and replaced by AI & algorithms. Machine learning is so prevalent in finance, with so much more predictive power than humans, that HFT and algos are the new normal. However, Robert Mercer is poised to dominate the industry with RenTec’s new HFT-killing patent, which will essentially elbow out all but the largest black box houses, leaving him King of FinTech.

These are the people that profited from techniques and software honed by the world’s largest militaries and tech corporations, merging media production intended to craft weapons out of art with… well, actually that perfectly describes both psyops and advertising, but merging those with total information awareness and special access to the control panels of the ubiquitous technologies used by billions of people. Theirs is the money that flowed freely in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, and that money has steered the conversations that buoyed their ascendancy.

At least two more enormous components to their success were glossed over in these pages, and we didn’t even get a chance to talk about the entire situation’s legality.

Amazingly, there is still so much more story to tell.

Stay tuned to TEXTIFIRE to catch up on the events of the last three years!

Thank you for reading and thanks to all the sourced researchers & artists.

atl mo nat b

A longtime Republican operative with ties to the controversial data firm hired by President Donald Trump’s campaign team also has a nearly two-decade-long friendship and business relationship with a suspected Russian intelligence agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, who has landed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s crosshairs.

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The Washington-based operative, Sam Patten,would not tell me whether he has been interviewed by Mueller’s team as part of their investigation into Russia’s election interference and potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. But Patten said that his relationship with Kilimnik—a former officer in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) who worked closely with Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, for over a decade—has “been thoroughly explored by relevant government entities.”

Patten’s long friendship with Kilimnik—which stems from their time working together at the International Republican Institute in Moscow between 2001 and 2003—would likely be enough to draw scrutiny from Mueller, who appears to have homed in on Kilimnik as a potentially significant link between the Trump campaign and Russia. The special counsel’s office alleged in a court filing late last month that Kilimnik still had ties to Russian intelligence services in 2016, and that his conversations with Gates in September of that year are relevant to the investigation. Manafort and Gates’s arrival to the campaign team coincided with the most pivotal Russia-related episode of the election: the release of emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee by hackers working for the GRU, Russia’s premier military-intelligence unit.

MORE STORIES

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NATASHA BERTRAND

Paul Manafort, American Hustler

FRANKLIN FOER

How the House Intelligence Committee Broke

NATASHA BERTRAND

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

DAVID A. GRAHAM]

“We’ve known each other for more than 15 years, and we periodically look for places we can work together,” Patten told me of Kilimnik. Their relationship is also proof that Kilimnik’s ability to ingratiate himself with American political consultants went beyond Manafort and Gates—a fact that could serve as a new data point in examining Russia’s ties to Republican operatives in the U.S. By the spring of 2015—when, as my colleague Frank Foer wrote, Manafort’s “life had tipped into a deep trough”—Kilimnik was already working on a new venture with Patten that appeared to be focused on targeted messaging in foreign elections.

That venture, first reported by The Daily Beast this week, was a private LLC incorporated in February 2015 called Begemot Ventures International (BVI) with a mission to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences.” Kilimnik is listed as the firm’s principal and Patten is listed as an executive, according to company records, and the company is registered to Patten’s office address in Washington. A website for Begemot—which was built almost two years after the company was incorporated—links to Patten’s email for inquiries, but does not list the company’s clients.

It is not clear why Patten, who already had a consulting firm registered in D.C., decided to open a brand-new company with Kilimnik.Asked whether any of the firm’s clients were in Russia or Ukraine, Patten replied, “It would be poor business to talk about our clients, but I can tell you declaratively that none of the clients have involvement in the particular circus in the U.S. that seems to have become a news industry in and of itself,” an apparent reference to the Russia investigation. He confirmed that the company, which he described as providing “strategic communications advice for clients outside the U.S.,” is still active, but said it has no projects ongoing at this time.

“BVI has only worked for clients outside U.S. in other countries,” Patten said. “As a result of all this, I regret it probably won’t be working for anyone anymore, but you never know. Life can be unpredictable.” Patten said that, “to the best of [his] knowledge,” Kilimnik “was no longer working for Manafort when BVI was formed.” But he acknowledged that Kilimnik and Manafort, who began working together in Kiev in 2005, “remained in touch, as is well-known.” Patten’s work in Ukraine dovetailed with Manafort’s. About eight months after BVI was incorporated, in October 2015, Patten was in Ukraine advising Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko on his reelection campaign. On his website, Patten writes that he “helped steer Mayor Klitschko to reelection in Ukraine’s capital and largest city in one of the toughest anti-government atmospheres in that country’s history.”

Serhiy Lyovochkin—the former chief of staff to ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who hired Manafort to rebrand the pro-Russia Party of Regions in 2014—brought Patten onto Klitschko’s team, Ukrainian media reported at the time. Dmitry Firtash, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Manafort who is known for bankrolling pro-Russia candidates in Ukraine, also boasted in 2015 that he was involved in Klitschko’s campaign. Asked whether Manafort coordinated with Patten and/or Kilimnik on Klitschko’s reelection campaign, a spokesman for Manafort said he had “nothing to add.”

Patten describes himself as an “international political consultant” on his website, but he worked at the Oregon office of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, helping to fine-tune the firm’s voter targeting operations in the runup to the 2014 midterm elections, according to investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, now a columnist for Middle East Eye. Patten alluded to this work on his website, writing that he worked with “one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies” on “a beta run of a cutting-edge electoral approach” that “included taking micro-targeting to the next level” during the 2014 congressional cycle. Those technologies, he wrote, were “adopted by at least one major U.S. presidential candidate.”

Both Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump employed Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 election. Mueller is now scrutinizing the Trump campaign’s ties to Cambridge Analytica, whose board included Trump’s campaign CEO and former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon interviewed Patten in July 2016 for his SiriusXM radio show, Breitbart News Daily, about a group Patten represents called the Committee to Destroy ISIS. There is no evidence that Patten did any work with Cambridge Analytica or the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. But his relationship with the data firm did not end with the 2014 midterm elections. According to The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr, Patten “played a central role” in the firm’s work in Nigeria in early 2015—work that included hiring Israeli computer hackers to search for “kompromat,” or compromising information, on the candidate challenging the incumbent president at the time, Goodluck Jonathan. Patten didn’t respond to a request for comment about the Nigeria campaign.

Patten said that he remains in touch with Kilimnik, who he believes has been unfairly scrutinized. “As you might imagine, the barrage of shade and innuendo that has been cast on him since Manafort had his time in Trump Tower has not been something he’d welcomed, nor anything that could objectively be called fair,” Patten said, referring to Manafort’s role on the campaign, which was headquartered at Trump Tower.

Gates and Manafort—who were indicted by Mueller in late October on charges including money laundering and tax evasion—remained in touch with Kilimnik during the campaign, according to court documents and emails, even though both knew about Kilimnik’s background in Russian intelligence. Kilimnik later acknowledged in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he and Manafort emailed each other “about Trump and everything” during the campaign. “There were millions of emails,” Kilimnik told RFERL in a text message. “We worked for 11 years. And we discussed a lot of issues, from Putin to women.”

A Suspected Russian Spy, With Curious Ties to Washington ...

https://www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2018/04 › a-dc-operative...

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:{Apr 6, 2018 - Dmitry :{Firtash:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Manafort ... the Oregon office of :{Cambridge Analytica's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: parent company, :{SCL Group:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica

https://medium.com › textifire › a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambri...

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:{:{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:/:{Cambridge Analytica's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: elevated role in Trump's digital psyops campaign ... :{Firtash:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is an oil & natural resources magnate who also owns Ukraine's largest ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Dmytro Firtash - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Dmytro_Firtash

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:{Dmytro Vasylovych :{Firtash:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a Ukrainian businessman who heads the board of directors of ... :{Firtash:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is also cited as having part ownership of :{SCL Group:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and thus :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: through various shell companies, by the U.S. ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Business career and assets · ‎Politics · ‎Charity · ‎Controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group

SCL Group^[1] (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories^[1]) was a private British behavioural research and strategic communication company.^[2] In the United States and other countries, SCL has generated public scandal mainly through its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica.^[3] It performed data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications would then be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behaviour in accordance with the goal of SCL's client. The company used to describe itself as a "global election management agency".^[4] London-based SCL was founded by Nigel Oakes who served as its CEO.^[5]

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

In 1990, Nigel Oakes, who had a background in TV production and advertising, founded the Behavioural Dynamics Institute (BDI) as a research facility for strategic communication.^[5] The study of mass behaviour and how to change it led him to establish Strategic Communication Laboratories in 1993.^[4] Oakes thought that to shift mass opinion, academic insights as gained through psychologists and anthropologists at BDI should be applied, and would be more successful than traditional advertising methods.^[6] BDI became a non-profit affiliate of SCL. One of the former directors is Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.^[7]

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

After an initial commercial success, SCL expanded into military and political arenas. It became known for alleged involvement "in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting".^[8] In 2005, "with a glitzy exhibit" at Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), "the United Kingdom's largest showcase for military technology", SCL demonstrated its capacity in "influence operations": "to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception" on the public of a big city like London.^[9] According to its website, SCL has participated in over 25 international political and electoral campaigns since 1994.^[4]

SCL'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.^[6] SCL claimed to be able to help foment coups.^[9] According to its website, SCL has influenced elections in Italy, Latvia, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritius, India, Indonesia, The Philippines,^[10] Thailand, Taiwan, Colombia, Antigua, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Trinidad & Tobago.^[4] 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.^[6]

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.^[11]

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

Main article: Cambridge Analytica

SCL formed Cambridge Analytica to participate in the election process in the United States.^[12] 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.^[3] In 2015 it was disclosed that the company had entered the Republican Party presidential primaries for the 2016 election, primarily in support of Ted Cruz. CA is heavily funded by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major supporter of Cruz^[8] and then Donald Trump,^[12] and is now under investigation by both the UK and the US governments.

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

Emerdata Limited was established in August 2017, by many of the people involved in Cambridge Analytica.^{[13][14][15][16]} Emerdata was established in 2017 by the chief data officer and chairman of Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL Group, which closed operations on 1 May 2018.^[17][18][19] Its headquarters in London is in the same building as Cambridge Analytica.^[20][21][22]

Emerdata's board of directors included Frontier Services Group officer Johnson Chun Shun Ko [zh],^[23][22] Cambridge Analytica investor Rebekah Mercer,^[24][23] and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.^{[25][26][27][28]} In January 2018, Emerdata reportedly raised $19 million from international investors.^[29] Emerdata was widely discussed in the news media. It was portrayed as a potential successor to Cambridge Analytica.^[30][31][20] In May 2018, Nigel Oakes, founder of the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica's British affiliate, acknowledged that Emerdata's intent had been to acquire Cambridge Analytica and SCL, but said that these plans had been abandoned and that Emerdata and its partly-owned subsidiary Firecrest Technologies Ltd., which had been set up by former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, would be wound down.^[32]

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

As of March 2018, the company had four directors: Roger Michael Gabb, Alexander Nix, Nigel John Oakes and Julian David Wheatland.^[33] The company was first incorporated at Companies House on 20 July 2005 as Strategic Communication Laboratories Limited, using the shell company registrar SDG Registrars Limited which has acted on behalf of nearly 4,500 companies.^[34] The latest director is Jacquelyn James-Varga who has previously worked at the Mercer Family Foundation.^[35]

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

On 1 May 2018, SCL Group stated that it would be closing operations because of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.^[36] However, its website and staff continued to operate but have subsequently shut down.^[37] SCL group is owned by its parent company SCL Elections.^[38]

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

• Microtargeting
• Psychographics
• Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
• Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2018)
• Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2019)
• Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum

Reference

Cambridge Analytica - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Cambridge_Analytica

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2.

:{:{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Ltd (CA) was a British political consulting firm which combined data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication during the electoral processes. It was started in 2013 as an offshoot of the :{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Group.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

**Founded**‎: ‎2013

**Parent**‎: ‎SCL Group

Headquarters‎: ‎London, UK

Defunct‎: ‎1 May 2018

History · ‎Methods · ‎Elections · ‎Australia

Life Inside S.C.L., Cambridge Analytica's Parent Company ...

https://www.newyorker.com › news › letter-from-the-uk › life-inside-scl-ca...

Mar 26, 2018 - Sam Knight reports on the goings-on at S.C.L. Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which has come under scrutiny for its use of ...

Cambridge Analytica's SCL Group & Emerdata: Who Are They ...

https://heavy.com › Entertainment

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1.

:{Jul 25, 2019 - Learn more about Emerdata and :{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Group, associated with :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Cambridge Analytica is dead – but its obscure network is alive ...

https://www.theguardian.com › uk-news › may › cambridge-analytica-scl-...

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1.

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:{May 5, 2018 - But given the complex business structure of :{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and :{Cambridge Analytica's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: UK and US affiliates, there are reasons to question precisely what ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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Cambridge Analytica parent firm SCL Elections fined over ...

https://www.bbc.com › news › technology-46822439

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1.

:{Jan 10, 2019 - :{Cambridge Analytica's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: parent company :{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Elections Ltd has been fined £15,000 plus costs for failing to hand over the personal data of a US ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

The mysterious afterlife of Cambridge Analytica and its trove of ...

https://www.fastcompany.com › the-mysterious-afterlife-of-cambridge-ana...

:{:(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"):}:

1.

:{Jul 26, 2019 - Julian Wheatland, the former CEO of :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and former director of a number of :{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-connected firms, told Fast Company this ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

As Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections shut down, SCL ...

https://www.opendemocracy.net › opendemocracyuk › as-cambridge-anal...

:{:(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"):}:

1.

:{May 4, 2018 - :{Cambridge Analytica's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: parent company, :{SCL:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, and its founder, Nigel Oakes, have done everything they can to distance themselves from ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Cambridge Analytica scandal: All the countries where SCL ...

https://qz.com › cambridge-analytica-scandal-all-the-countries-where-scl-el...

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1.

:{Mar 28, 2018 - That's the astounding, self-proclaimed track record o:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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