gov't accountability inst GAI

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ntbcw orig and legit whistleblower protection eg vance v rumsfEld

NO MERRI

SEE TWO AND BRUNER

SEE BANNON AND REB MERCER

SEE PETER SCHWEIZER CLINTON FDN BS

Louis Clark, Government Accountability Project,

est 1977

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

promoted to primary, crypto opp res, dark web, mercer, investigative jrnl

12/19 bak

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1019

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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

==

For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment. A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016. In fact, several of the same players are involved. “There’s no effective mechanism in this country for weeding disinformation out,” Paul Barrett, the deputy director of N.Y.U.’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and the author of the recent study “Disinformation and the 2020 Election,” said. “We’re not doing anything about it at all.”

Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016. A pivotal source of the allegations against the Bidens, for instance, is the Government Accountability Institute, a Florida-based opposition-research operation that was founded by the former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon—the same conservative nonprofit that ginned up questionable stories about the Clintons during the last Presidential campaign. In both instances, much of the coverage of the scandal was kicked off by Peter Schweizer, a longtime conservative political writer who is an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute. Since its founding, in 2012, the group has largely been funded with millions of dollars in tax-exempt donations from the family foundation of the New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, who was a major donor to Trump’s 2016 campaign. In the organization’s most recently available I.R.S. tax filings, for 2017, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah is listed as the board chairman.

Asked about the Government Accountability Institute’s role in this year’s Biden scandal coverage, Bannon e-mailed to say, “It’s key. It was the predicate,” as it had been for much of the previous Clinton scandal coverage. As Joshua Green describes in “Devil’s Bargain,” his book, from 2017, about Bannon’s role in the Trump campaign, Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media. He realized that, though mainstream reporters were suspicious of partisan opinion, they were open to damning facts about public figures, regardless of the sourcing. He set out, with Schweizer, to produce material that would generate mainstream coverage, and right-wing outrage.

Thus, during the last Presidential campaign, under the auspices of the Government Accountability Institute, Schweizer published the best-selling book “Clinton Cash.” In a novel arrangement, he doled out negative scoops about the Clintons from it in advance to a variety of mainstream news outlets, including the Times. The paper disclosed its exclusive deal with the book’s author to its readers, and maintained that it independently verified and expanded on the information. But when it ran a front-page story derived from the book on April 24, 2015, the Times stirred controversy and criticism, including from its own public editor.

The story insinuated that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had risked national security by facilitating the sale of American uranium mines to Russia in exchange for more than two million dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the businessmen behind the deal, who worked for a company called Uranium One. The story enabled Clinton’s opponents to frame her as greedy and corrupt. Even a year after she had lost the race, the Fox News host Sean Hannity was still invoking it on air, calling it “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.”

Yet later reporting poked holes in the story’s insinuation of corruption, revealing that multiple government agencies—not just Clinton’s State Department—had approved the deal, and that the amount of uranium involved was negligible. (Schweizer didn’t respond to phone calls from The New Yorker.) On Thursday, the Daily Beast identified what it said were over a dozen passages in his book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” that were lifted from other sources, such as Wikipedia—a charge that his publisher, HarperCollins, denied amounted to a violation of fair use.

:{:{For those who recall the “Clinton Cash” controversy, the baseless tales claiming that Biden corruptly intervened on behalf of his son’s Ukrainian business interests feel a lot like the movie “Groundhog Day.” In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign. “Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son HunteR}:r. (An additional chapter laid out Hunter Biden’s business deals in China.)

As the book recounted, in 2014, Hunter Biden, a Washington lobbyist, took a profitable post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch, while his father, who was then the Vice-President, handled a drive to rid Ukraine of corruption. Other news organizations, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, had already run stories on the same unethical-seeming morass. (In July, The New Yorker published a piece about the relationship between Joe and Hunter Biden that dismissed allegations of any illegality in the Ukraine matter but included some concerns from Obama Administration officials that Hunter could potentially undermine his father’s work.)}:

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...Jane Mayer of theNew Yorkerexplains how the “Biden/Ukraine” hoax was invented and spread by the same people who invented the “Uranium One” fiction whichFox News and other Republican sludge generators spawned in order to smear Hillary Clinton in the 2016. The cast of characters for both smears is remarkably similar.

...

no lnx

The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine

How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment.

By Jane Mayer October 4, 2019

==

guard uk no links (many)

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

Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

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

Carole Cadwalladr

Sunday 26 February 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sounds creepy, I say.

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play VideoPlay

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

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

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

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

And that requires money?

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

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

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

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

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

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

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

By that definition we’re already there.

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Government_Accountability_Institute

The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) is a "a new conservative investigative research organization."^[1] The GAI states as its mission "to investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other governmental corruption or malfeasance."^[2]

The GAI has several ties to right-wing groups such as Citizens United, the American Conservative Union, Young America's Foundation, and the Hoover Institution, through its key staff and board members:

• Peter Schweizer, president of the GAI, is a researcher for the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.^[3] Mr. Schweizer is also on the Research Advisory Council of the James Madison Institute,^[4] a member of the State Policy Network, which itself is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council.

• Executive Chairman and co-founder of the GAI, Stephen Bannon, is the Executive Chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the parent company of Breitbart.com, a conservative news and opinion website, founded by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart^[5][6].

• Board member, Ron Robinson, is a director of both Citizens United^[7] and the American Conservative Union.^[8][6] Mr. Robinson has also acted as the president of the Young America's Foundation for over thirty years.^[9]

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Personnel
  • 1.1 Executive Officers
  • 1.2 Board of Directors
• 2 Contact Details
• 3 References

Personnel

Executive Officers

• Peter Schweizer, President (Research Fellow, Hoover Institution)
• Rick White, Executive Vice President
• Stuart Christmas, General Counsel and Vice President of Legal Investigation

Board of Directors

• Stephen K. Bannon, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder (Executive Chairman, Breitbart News LLC, parent company of Breitbart.com)
• Owen T. Smith, Esq. (Chairman, Institute of World Politics)
• Ron Robinson (President, Young America's Foundation)
• Rebekah Mercer
• Hunter Lewis

Contact Details

Sandy Schulz, Senior Publicist

Government Accountability Institute

202.244.1460

Sandy.schulz@g-a-i.orgUJH

References

1. Jump up↑ Marc Thiessen, "Why is Obama skipping more than half of his daily intelligence meetings?The Washington Post: Opinions; September 10, 2012
2. Jump up↑ g-a-i mission, organizational website, accessed October 2012.
3. Jump up↑ "Fellows", Hoover Institution website, accessed October 2012
4. Jump up↑ "James Madison Institute: Research Advisory Council", organizational website, accessed October 2012
5. Jump up↑ "Andrew Breitbart, Conservative Blogger, Dies at 43",The New York Times; March 1, 2012
6. ↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:6.0^ ^6.1 "g-a^-i team", organizational website, accessed October 2012
7. Jump up↑ "Citizens United: Who We Are", organizational website, accessed October 2012,
8. Jump up↑ "American Conservative Union: Board of Directors", organization website, accessed October 2012
9. Jump up↑ "Ron Robinson, President", Young America's Foundation website, accessed October 2012

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Rebranding Steve Bannon: Inside the PR Campaign to Rehab Trump Adviser’s Image

How a cagey publicist is trying to fight the bad press about the president-elect’s new chief adviser

Tim Molloy | November 16, 2016

If you see any stories in the next few days about how Steve Bannon was a great boss at Breitbart News and excelled during his time in the U.S. Navy, you’ll know that publicist Maria Sliwa is thriving in her job.

On Sunday, Trump named Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart and CEO of his presidential campaign, as his chief adviser. Since then, Bannon has gotten lots of bad press, some of it accusing him of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism.  (A New York Times news story said critics see him as a “voice of racism.” An opinion piece in the Washington Post called him a “dead lizard wrapped in the Confederate flag.”)

So someone decided to take the initiative and get Bannon some good PR. The question is who.

On Wednesday, Sliwa sent out two emails to reporters offering interviews with two men available to talk about Bannon: U.S. Navy Seal (Ret.) Carl Higbie, and Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.

But Sliwa insisted on Wednesday that she isn’t working for Bannon.

Also Read:

Steve Bannon Illegally Paid Via Movie Company, Watchdog Group Says

“I’m not working for Bannon,” she told TheWrap in a brief interview. “I have a client who is.”

In two brief talks with a Wrap reporter, Sliwa wouldn’t say who actually hired her. When the reporter noted that she has worked for Breitbart in the past (see press release, below) she replied, “Oh God, please no,” and hung up.

She also asked why it was necessary to ask about the publicist behind a story.

The answer, in this case, is that it illustrates how people push Bannon’s agenda in ways that leave no sign of his involvement.

Also Read:

Cory Booker Blasts Trump Appointment Steve Bannon: He 'Won't Build Bridges, He Will Burn Them'

It is not unusual for prominent people to hire publicists, or to seek positive stories. But it is unusual for publicists to refuse to say who they work for. (The Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics says publicists should “reveal the sponsors for causes and interests represented.”)

Higbie and Klein were only part of the effort to rebrand Bannon in a more positive light. The Huffington Post noted that Trump spokesman Jason Miller cast Bannon on Wednesday as someone who has “embraced diversity.”

Sliwa’s emails to reporters on Wednesday were not the first time she has been involved in advancing Bannon’s agenda. She has promoted the work of a group Bannon helped establish in 2012, a nonprofit called the Government Accountability Institute. According to Bloomberg, it “partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience.”

Also Read:

Even Glenn Beck Is Terrified of Steve Bannon's Alt-Right Movement (Video)

Sliwa also helped promote “Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel,” based on the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (The press release is below.) The New York Times cited some of the book’s findings in an April 2015 story.

The book was written by GAI president Peter Schweitzer. Bannon became GAI’s founding chairman in 2012, Bloomberg reports. Schweizer’s e-book, “Bush Bucks: How Public Service and Corporations Helped Make Jeb Rich,” was published during the Republican primaries.

Both books cast an unfavorable light on political rivals of Trump’s as he sought to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency.

Sliwa’s bio notes that she is the president of Freedom Now Communications, Inc. and M. Sliwa Public Relations, as well as the press agent for the Sudan Campaign, and has “played a major role in publicizing the genocide, slavery and rape of civilians in Sudan and Darfur.” It says she is also part of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University and a former New York City undercover police officer. And she is the sister of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.

Also Read:

How Steve Bannon Made a Fortune Off of 'Seinfeld'

Sliwa’s press release about Higbie on Wednesday quotes him saying that Bannon “has excelled in every single role he has held dating back to his service in the US Navy. I cannot imagine a better person to be advising an already successful businessman taking on the biggest business in the world, the US Government.”

On Wednesday night, hours after this story was initially published, Higbie got into a PR crisis of his own: Fox News’ Megyn Kelly gave him an on-air scolding after he said that the Japanese internment camps of World War II helped establish a precent for a national registry of Muslims.

Here are screen grabs of the two press releases from Sliwa:

clinton graphic novel

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Peter Schweizer • President

Peter Schweizer is the President of Government Accountability Institute and a best-selling author. He is a partner in the Washington, D.C. firm Oval Office Writers which provides speechwriting and communications services for corporate executives and political figures.From 2008-9 he was a consultant to the Office of Presidential Speechwriting in the White House. He has also served as a member of the Ultraterrorism Study Group at the U.S. government’s Sandia National Laboratory and is a former consultant to NBC News.His books have been translated into eleven languages and include several New York Times or Washington Post bestsellers.Peter is the author of the book Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets. Both Extortion and his previous book, Throw Them All Out were New York Times bestsellers and were featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes

:{His other non-fiction books include Reagan’s War (Doubleday, 2002), which the Washington Post praised as “A fascinating, well-written, useful and important look at one of the three or four most important American political leaders of the 20th century. No serious assessment of the 40th president of the United States can ignore the central importance of anti-communism in his career; after Schweizer none will.” The Los Angeles Times called it “A rousing and compelling case that Reagan’s personal and political odyssey…was central to bringing down the ‘evil empire.”

He is also the co-author of The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (Doubleday, 2004), which the New York Times called “Fascinating…Provides illuminating insights into the internal dynamics of the Bush family dynasty.” The New York Post declared “If you want to know as fully as can be told the story of how the Bushes rose from Midwestern obscurity to equal the records of families like the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and the Adamses—this is the book.”}:

Other non-fiction works include Architects of Ruin (Harper, 2009) Victory (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994) , Do As I Say (Not As I Do) (Doubleday, 2005) and Makers and Takers (Doubleday, 2008).

His academic books include Landmark Speeches of the American Conservative Movement (Texas A&M University Press, 2006) The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and The Fall Of The Wall: Reassessing the Causes and Consequences of the End of the Cold War (Hoover Institution Press, 2000). He was also a contributor to Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2008)

His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Review, and elsewhere. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs.

Peter received his M.Phil. from Oxford University and his B.A. from George Washington University. He lives in Florida with his wife, Rhonda, and his children.

Board of Directors

Stephen K. Bannon•

Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of the Government Accountability Institute •Mr. Bannon is a former Surface Warfare Officer who served aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Paul F. Foster (DD964) in the Pacific Fleet. In addition, Mr. Bannon was a Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. Mr. Bannon is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker in their Mergers & Acquisitions Department. He has been a financier/entrepreneur in the entertainment and media industry for 25 years. He is currently the Executive Chairman of Breitbart News LLC the parent company of Breitbart.com.Mr. Bannon is an award-winning conservative filmmaker who has written and directed such films as: Generation Zero; The Undefeated; Occupy Unmasked and The Hope & The Change.From 2007-2011, Mr. Bannon was Chairman/CEO of Affinity Media, the world’s leading digital asset trading company with operations in Korea and China. Affinity Media was financed by Oak Investment Partners and Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Bannon is a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and holds a Masters Degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Government. In 1985, Mr. Bannon received his MBA from Harvard Business School with honors.Mr. Bannon is a native of Virginia who now resides in Laguna Beach, CA. Mr. Bannon’s eldest daughter graduated from The United States Military Academy at West Point in 2010. She is a First Lieutenant and Logistics Officer with a combat engineering battalion recently returned from Iraq where she served with the 101st Airborne Division.

Owen T. Smith, Esq. is the Chairman of the Institute of World Politics Board of Trustees and Professor Emeritus at Long Island University and a businessman. Mr. Smith has served as chairman of the New York State Board of Elections (1991-1996), and directed the Center for Long Island Studies at Long Island University (1987-1995).Mr. Smith has also been deputy county executive of Nassau County, N.Y. (1980-1987), chairman of the Nassau County Planning Commission (1976-1980), counsel to the New York Senate Committee on Crime and Correction (1972-1976), and counsel to the New York Senate Committees on Villages, Towns and Counties (1966-1972).The author or co-author of more than 20 books and dozens of articles in legal journals, Mr. Smith earned his law degree from the St. John’s School of Law, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and government from Trinity College.

Ron Robinsonhas served as Young America’s Foundation’s president for more than three decades. Time magazine wrote that Young America’s “[F]oundation—run by a former Reagan Administration advisor, Ron Robinson—is now the nation’s largest advocacy group devoted to student politics.” Time referred to Robinson as one of the “seasoned generals of the right” who is leading the “diverse and well funded” generation of conservatives who are “winning battles on campus.”??Insight Magazine reported that under Robinson’s leadership, “Young America’s Foundation is leading the conservative charge to win the hearts and minds of impressionable college-age students…Indeed, the Foundation organizes so many programs on so many campuses that it’s difficult to find a conservative activist younger than 30 who hasn’t had some contact with its activities.”??

Robinson has led the Foundation through two successful landmark Supreme Court victories for student rights, the inauguration and development of the National Conservative Student Conference and the National High School Leadership Conference held annually in Washington; and the Foundation’s effort to save Ronald Reagan’s ranch. ??Robinson is a native of Buffalo, New York. He received a bachelors of arts degree in political science at Canisius College and a juris doctor degree at The Catholic University of America. Robinson served as executive director of Young Americans for Freedom (1977-79), president of the United States Youth Council (1983-85), and president of the International Youth Year Commission (1983-84). He was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration. He is also co-author of

Funding Fathers: The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement (Regnery, 2008).??Robinson served as a trustee of the Philadelphia Society, is currently a trustee of The Phillips Foundation, a director of Citizens United and the Citizens United Foundation, a director of the American Conservative Union, and he is the vice-president of the Free Speech Defense and Education Fund. He also serves on the boards of the Strong Charitable Trust and the D.J. Findley Family Foundation.Robinson is a member of the Virginia and U. S. Supreme Court Bars and resides with his wife, Michelle Easton, president of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, in Reston, Virginia.

Hunter Lewis is the former CEO of Cambridge Associates, a leading investment advisor to foundations and endowments, private wealth, and corporate and government entities. He is a former board of member of the World Bank.Mr. Lewis is the author of six books, Where Keynes Went Wrong being his most recent work. He is also the co-founder of AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.Mr. Lewis has served on boards and committees of fifteen not-for-profit organizations, including environmental, teaching, research, and cultural organizations.

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Intro

The Institute of World Politics, founded in 1990, describes itself as an "independent graduate school of statecraft and national security affairs."

Quote: "The Institute's superb curriculum and fine faculty create a well-integrated program that produces professionals well-grounded in the real world." - R. James Woolsey, Jr., Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

"IWP's mission includes educating current and aspiring foreign affairs professionals in the art of statecraft by offering a unique multi-disciplinary program. The Institute currently offers two M.A. degrees (M.A. in Statecraft and National Security Affairs and M.A. in Statecraft and World Politics), Certificates of Graduate Study, and individual courses.

"The Institute distinguishes itself from other professional schools by having a faculty composed almost entirely of scholar-practitioners with high-level government experience in defense of the United States."[1]

Faculty

Faculty Biographies

• Norman A. Bailey, Ph.D.
• Kenneth deGraffenreid
• John J. Dziak, Ph.D.
• Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
• Roger Fontaine, Ph.D.
• Paul A. Goble
• Christopher C. Harmon
• Walter Jajko
• Sven F. Kraemer
• Mark P. Lagon, Ph.D.
• John Lenczowski, Ph.D.
• Joshua Muravchik, Ph.D.
• Alberto M. Piedra, Ph.D.
• Juliana Geran Pilon, Ph.D.
• Herbert Romerstein, Independent researcher
• Henry Sokolski
• David L. Thomas, D-Phil.
• John J. Tierney, Jr., Ph.D.
• J. Michael Waller, Ph.D.

Contact

The Institute of World Politics

1521 16th Street, NW

Washington, DC 20036

Tel: 202-462-2101 / 888-KNOW-IWP

info@iwp.edu

URL: www.iwp.edu

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