BIG DATA -BASE

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see BIG DATA 2

new Surveillance Capitalism

promoted primary 4/18 on cambr anal

HMO risk assessment? IBM

see online privacy, AI machine learning price gouging / extraction

also gerrymander

cambridge anal micro-target (anti-union door knocks)

GOTV

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an 1 25

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan announced that the FTC released its findings from a study on "how companies track consumer behaviors to inform surveillance pricing."

"Last summer @FTC launched an inquiry into whether people's private data is being used to set the prices they pay & whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service," Khan wrote via X. "Today @FTC published initial findings," she added, including a link to the report.

Max Fisher, co-host of the Crooked Media podcasts "Offline" and "How We Got Here," replied, "Jesus. FTC finds companies are exploiting your data – browsing history, location, buying patterns, even 'mouse movements on a webpage' – to gouge you with higher prices shown specifically to you. Just shocking."

READ MORE:**'Raking in billions': report shows Drug middlemen jack up prices by nearly 8,000%**

The FTC's report also noted:

*The staff perspective found that some 6(b) respondents can determine individualized and different pricing and discounts based on granular consumer data, like a cosmetics company targeting promotions to specific skin types and skin tones. The perspective also found that the intermediaries the FTC examined can show higher priced products based on consumers’ search and purchase activity. As one hypothetical outlined, a consumer who is profiled as a new parent may intentionally be shown higher priced baby thermometers on the first page of their search results.

"Should go without saying that charging higher prices based on 'skin tone' is not what you want to do," former George Washington Law Professor Rob Freund wrote via X.

READ MORE:['A gift to the oligarchs': Trump pick vowed to end 'war on mergers'

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an 2 24

Sen. Ron Wyden and privacy rights advocates this week are sounding the alarm about an anti-abortion group using cellphone location data to send misinformation to people who visited hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country.

"If a data broker could track Americans' cellphones to help extremists target misinformation to people at hundreds of Planned Parenthood locations across the United States, a right-wing prosecutor could use that same information to put women in jail," Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement Tuesday.

"Federal watchdogs should hold the data broker accountable for abusing Americans' private information," he added. "And Congress needs to step up as soon as possible to ensure extremist politicians can't buy this kind of sensitive data without a warrant."

"That data brokers can track people visiting Planned Parenthood is terrifying enough. That law enforcement agencies can simply buy this type of sensitive data—rather than getting a warrant—is even worse."

Since the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court reversedRoe v. Wade with its June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, anti-choice state policymakers have ramped up attacks on abortion rights, elevating concerns about patient privacy.

Wyden explained in a Tuesday letter that his office launched an investigation after The Wall Street Journalreported last May that the Veritas Society, a nonprofit established by Wisconsin Right to Life, hired the advertising agency Recrue Media for an anti-abortion ad campaign targeting clinic visitors, whose locations were tracked by the data broker Near Intelligence.

As Wyden wrote to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler:

My staff spoke with Steven Bogue, the co-founder and managing principal of Recrue Media on May 19, 2023, who revealed that to target these ads, his employees used Near's website to draw a line around the building and parking lot of each targeted facility. On May 26, 2023, my staff spoke with Near's chief privacy officer, Jay Angelo, who confirmed that, until the summer of 2022, the company did not have any technical controls in place to prevent its customers targeting people who visited sensitive facilities, such as reproductive health clinics. On a webpage that has since been taken down, but was saved by the Internet Archive, the Veritas Society stated that in 2020 in Wisconsin alone, it delivered 14.3 million ads to people who visited abortion clinics, and "served ads to those devices across the women's social pages, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat." The scale of this invasive surveillance-enabled ad campaign remains unknown, however, Mr. Bogue told my staff that the company used Near to target ads to people who had visited 600 Planned Parenthood locations in the lower 48 states.

Justin Sherman, who studies data brokers at Duke University, toldPolitico that "this is the largest targeting campaign we've seen to date against reproductive health clinics based on brokered data."

In case you missed this yesterday, I discovered that data brokers are helping anti-abortion extremists exploit location data to target patients. The prospect of how red-state prosecutors could abuse this information should terrify every single American with a smartphone.

— (@)

Wyden also highlighted Journalreporting from October about Near selling location data to defense contractors that resold it to U.S. Defense Department and intelligence agencies. He wrote that Angelo, the privacy officer, "confirmed that the company had for three years sold location data to the defense contractor AELIUS Exploitation Technologies."

"Mr. Angelo revealed that after joining Near in June of 2022, he conducted a review of the company's practices and discovered that the company was facilitating the sale of location data to the U.S. government that had been obtained without user consent," the senator continued, noting the removal of "misleading statements" from Near's website.

"The former executives that led Near during the period in which it engaged in these egregious violations of Americans' privacy are now under criminal investigation, according to a statement made by the company's lawyer during a December 11, 2023, bankruptcy hearing. But prosecuting those individuals for engaging in financial fraud will not address Near's corporate abuses," Wyden argued, urging the FTC and SEC to take various actions over the company's "outrageous conduct" that "recklessly harmed the public and investors."

Wyden's letter comes as the Republican-controlled U.S. House plans to take up the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, which would reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spying powers temporarily extended late last year that agencies—especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—have abused.

Section 702 only allows warrantless surveillance targeting foreigners located outside the United States, but Americans' data is also swept up, and privacy advocates within and outside of Congress—including Wyden—have long been pushing for warrant protections, a key issue in this week's debates about the Republican-led reform bill.

A shocking invasion of privacy that lays bare just how far forced-birth extremists will go to track, monitor, intimidate & scare women.\n\nI am deeply concerned with how this data could be used by states that criminalize abortion. This must be investigated. \nhttps://t.co/TO0Y2QMgx4

— (@)

Responding to Wyden's letter, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that "this is outrageous. Americans' most personal private health data is being bought and sold for politics. Major surveillance changes are needed. i.e. If Congress acts, reforms from our Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act must be part of a FISA reform."

Reintroduced by Lofgren, Wyden, and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers last July, that bill would require the U.S. government to get a court order compelling data brokers to disclose information as well as bar law enforcement and intelligence agencies from buying data on people in the U.S. and Americans abroad if it was obtained from a user's account or device, or deceptive practices.

Privacy rights campaigners and experts also responded to Wyden's letter with renewed calls for closing the data broker loophole.

"That data brokers can track people visiting Planned Parenthood is terrifying enough. That law enforcement agencies can simply buy this type of sensitive data—rather than getting a warrant—is even worse," said Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's National Security Project. "This Thursday, Congress must vote to close the loophole for law enforcement purchases from data brokers. The government shouldn't be able to buy its way around the Fourth Amendment."

The organizations Demand Progress and EPIC concurred in social media posts sharing Politico's reporting on the letter.

"The continued sale of our most sensitive information to and by shady data brokers not only fuels harmful surveillance advertising systems, but enables government agencies—from local police departments to state attorneys general to the FBI—to sidestep the Fourth Amendment," said EPIC counsel Sara Geoghegan in a statement. "We urgently need to rein in data brokers and enact comprehensive privacy rules to protect us from these grave harms in the post-Roe era we live in."

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Powerful International Backers

Founded in 2013—the same year as Vox—CitizenGo was set up to be an ultra-conservative version of the progressive online campaign platforms Avaaz.org and MoveOn.org. It has run powerful campaigns globally, including in Kenya where it helped get the reproductive health charity Marie Stopes temporarily banned from providing abortion services last year.

CitizenGo also has some very powerful international backers and partners. As previously mentioned, Alexey Komov, a close associate of the “Orthodox Oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev, and Luca Volonte, the Italian politician currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges, both serve on the group’s board of trustees.

Bank statements from Volonte’s Novae Terrae Foundation in Italy, seen by openDemocracy, show that it paid CitizenGo €12,000 in 2014—at the same time as the foundation was receiving money from entities later identified as part of a “laundromat” pumping illicit cash into Europe from Azerbaijan and Russia. There is no evidence to suggest that the money paid to CitizenGo came from these illicit sources.

Meanwhile Arsuaga told openDemocracy’s undercover reporter that Patrick Slim, son of the Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim, gave his group €40,000, which “for him is just a very small amount,” said Arsuaga—although it is close to the maximum individual donation to a political party permitted under Spanish law (and four times election campaign limits).

It was not clear whether this money was for CitizenGo or HazteOir, neither of which are political parties. At the time of publication, Patrick Slim had not replied to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

Another CitizenGo board member is Brian Brown, a prominent American anti-LGBTQ activist who leads the World Congress of Families (WCF) network that recently met in Italy, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini from the far-right Lega party among its speakers.

Arsuaga told openDemocracy’s reporter that he met Brown at the World Congress of Families meeting in Madrid in 2012 and that CitizenGo gets advice “every couple of months or so” from a “senior expert” in fundraising and technology who is “paid by Brian Brown.” This is Darian Rafie, Brown’s partner at a U.S. group called ActRight, which describes itself online as a “clearinghouse for conservative action.”

Previously, CitizenGo has presented itself in the logo on its website as a “member of the ActRight family,” and openDemocracy understands that ActRight paid for a CitizenGo staff member in 2013, a claim that Rafie did not deny in emailed comments.

On its website, ActRight is currently encouraging people to “thank president Trump for stopping transgender insanity in the military.” On Facebook, its recent posts include those supporting Trump; those mocking the appearances of left-wing women; and asking “How much do you think Barack Obama paid Harvard to admit his pot-head daughter?”

Your Phone Is Leaking Information

ActRight’s Darian Rafie is an experienced political consultant in the United States who has played key roles in a number of companies that have worked for the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party in Ohio and Michigan; received payments from a super PAC supporting Texas Republican Ted Cruz (as did ActRight in 2015); and worked with the Tea Party group Think Freely Media.

Speaking to openDemocracy’s undercover reporter, Rafie said he “did a lot of fundraising politically with Trump,” mostly through political action committees (PACs) but also “directly with the campaign… [and] directly with the party” and that he expects one of his companies to be working “in the majority of states” in the 2020 presidential election campaigns.

“There is a lot of stuff to be done with mobile phones and geo-fencing areas,” he told the reporter. “Say there’s a rally somewhere, one of these big Trump campaign rallies. What we’ll do is we’ll draw a polygon around that event and then we’ll register all the phones that were there… Then we follow those phones home, then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways.”

Rafie said, “you can do that in Europe” too, though “it’s a little more limited… because the privacy laws are better [there], for the consumer.”

He said: “It’s actually really scary, when you peek beneath the covers, and realize that this phone that you’re carrying around with you is leaking everywhere all of your information,” which can be correlated with personal data “very quickly.” In the United States, he explained, “all of the data is routinely collated and correlated and available for sale.”

Over email, Rafie clarified to openDemocracy that this company uses “ad networks” as do “many political campaigns and businesses in the United States…. to delineate an area and identify unique device IDs and their associated advertising profiles.”

“We should all be frightened by the amount of data routinely collected, collated and sold by ad networks (such as Google and Facebook),” he added.

Friends Across Europe’s Far Right

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also soc media:

Even in the wake of a recent mixed earning report and volatile stock prices, Netflix remains the media success story of the decade. The company, whose user base has grown rapidly, now boasts almost 150 million global subscribers.

But as someone who studies the television industry, I’ve always wondered how Netflix can provide so much unlimited ad-free content for such a low monthly rate, which currently averages around US$14.

After all, didn’t MoviePass just fall apart using a similar model of offering ad-free content for a monthly subscription fee? And Netflix is burning through cash, with negative cash flow of $3 billion in 2018 alone.

What if we’re looking at Netflix through the wrong lens? What if its primary long-term business model is not as a media content or distribution company, but as a data aggregation company?

Seeing Netflix this way might better explain its current strategy and clue us into the company’s future plans, while raising red flags about ethics and privacy.

Spending more and charging less

For a century of screen entertainment, there were only a few ways for Americans to pay for media:

• You could purchase a book, album or DVD, “lease” a movie theater seat or rent a tape at a video store;
• You could pay with your attention by consuming ads alongside “free” radio or television programming;
• Or you could subscribe to cable TV, and pay a large monthly fee to access an array of scheduled programming.

Netflix doesn’t follow any of these three models. Instead it most resembles HBO’s subscription service, which similarly provides ad-free original programming alongside a library of older content for a monthly fee.

While they may seem analogous, there are key differences. HBO is part of a larger media company, which gives it access to vast content libraries. And even though HBO charges more than Netflix, it spends far less for original content. In 2017, HBO spent $2.5 billion to Netflix’s $8 billion. The latter’s spending grew to $13 billion in 2018.

Relying on subscribers, not ads

Pouring money into content might generate hits, but not direct profits: Netflix’s sole revenue stream is subscriptions, so its primary goal is to gain and retain subscribers. Having popular content generates buzz, and Netflix hypes its brand by using self-reported numbers to claim that its original films and series like “Bird Box” and “Sex Education” attract millions of viewers. Yet Netflix only yields the same monthly fee per household, regardless of how much subscribers watch.

This makes Netflix distinct from other media companies that use highly profitable hits to generate revenue. This will then subsidize the production of new films, television shows, albums and video games.

Meanwhile, competing streaming platforms Hulu and Amazon Prime Video have other revenue sources – advertising and retail, respectively – and their larger diversified companies can better leverage hits.

Netflix needs to produce and acquire desirable content to make the service indispensable. But making original content is expensive. Hiring talent and producing movies and television series costs the company more than $15 billion annually. Netflix spends much more cash than it brings in, leading to consistent negative cash flow and a mountain of debt that amounts to more than $10 billion.

Even though it reported a record $1.2 billion in profit in 2018, those profits are based on an accounting model that ignores many costs and debts. This has led some financial analysts, like NYU professor Aswath Damodaran, to believe that Netflix’s business model is unsustainable.

“The more Netflix grows,” he wrote last fall, “the more its costs grow and the more money it burns. I’m not sure how it’s ever going to turn that around.”

So with only one stable, inflexible revenue source, how might Netflix’s business model become more sustainable?

More analogous to Facebook?

One theory is that Netflix is playing the long game, pitting itself against social media companies like Facebook and YouTube, rather than just film studios or TV networks.

Media commentator Matthew Ball argues that Netflix is in a race with the social media giants to occupy “every minute of leisure time available.”

Yet Netflix’s financial model is the inverse of Facebook’s and YouTube’s. The social media giants generate huge advertising revenues from free, user-generated content. Perhaps Netflix could balance content costs with higher subscription fees and its growing global user base. It seems unlikely, however, that this model could lead to anything beyond small profit margins.

But what if the parallel between Netflix and Facebook runs deeper than cost and revenue?

From its inception as a DVD rental service, Netflix has touted its competitive advantage through its algorithm – the predictive engine that claims to deliver the most user-specific content from its vast library. Netflix has always been a technology firm first and foremost, invested in mining its library of vast user data to deliver what viewers want to watch.

For instance, the Netflix engineering team strives “to have customers click on a show in the first 10 seconds.” Such obsessive interface tweaking helps promote programming – as Ball notes, “the most valuable real estate in the world is the top fold of Netflix home page.” But it doesn’t generate revenue.

This emphasis on viewing optimization, internal promotion and maximizing engagement resonates with another recent Netflix offering: the “Black Mirror” episode “Bandersnatch.” Netflix’s highest-profile experiment in interactive narrative, “Bandersnatch” allows viewers to choose how the story unfolds from dozens of options.

Netflix collects data from viewers of “Bandersnatch,” charting the narrative choices they made during the episode. Such viewer activity feeds into Netflix’s tracking efforts that it uses to make programming decisions and customize promotion to each subscriber.

A logical next step would be product integration. Based on your choices within the narrative around specific brand names, Netflix could then sell customized micro-targeted product placements within programs – a strategy that could actually lead to increased revenue.

A data gold mine?

Based on all we know about Silicon Valley’s aggressive monetization of user data, what else could Netflix do, beyond product integration, with this valuable information?

Netflix logs everything you have ever watched and how you watch – every time you pause, what programs you consider watching but choose not to and when you’re most likely to binge on “Friends” reruns.

When linked to website trackers, Netflix could, for example, cross-reference that viewing data with your social media accounts, your purchasing habits, your search history and even your emails.

In the age of surveillance capitalism, such data could be worth a fortune to marketers, political campaigns and advertisers.

As far as we know, Netflix has not started using its data to track us online, package us to marketers or cross-reference our private messages (even though Facebook has provided Netflix access to this information). And I doubt Netflix will violate its core brand by incorporating ads into its interface. Partnering with or acquiring a marketing firm to suffuse every subscriber’s online experiences with micro-targeted ads seems more likely.

All of these potential uses of viewing data are still speculative. But since profits regularly eclipse tech companies’ ethical standards, it’s important to be asking these questions before, rather than after, the damage is done.

the conv 419

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/heres-what-the-humanities-can-teach-big-data/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/most-americans-dont-realize-just-how-much-companies-can-predict-from-their-data/

Sixty-seven percent of smartphone users rely on Google Maps to help them get to where they are going quickly and efficiently.

A major of feature of Google Maps is its ability to predict how long different navigation routes will take. That’s possible because the mobile phone of each person using Google Maps sends data about its location and speed back to Google’s servers, where it is analyzed to generate new data about traffic conditions.

Information like this is useful for navigation. But the exact same data that is used to predict traffic patterns can also be used to predict other kinds of information – information people might not be comfortable with revealing.

For example, data about a mobile phone’s past location and movement patterns can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where they attend religious services and the age range of their children based on where they drop them off for school.

These predictions label who you are as a person and guess what you’re likely to do in the future. Research shows that people are largely unaware that these predictions are possible, and, if they do become aware of it, don’t like it. In my view, as someone who studies how predictive algorithms affect people’s privacy, that is a major problem for digital privacy in the U.S.

How is this all possible?

Every device that you use, every company you do business with, every online account you create or loyalty program you join, and even the government itself collects data about you.

The kinds of data they collect include things like your name, address, age, Social Security or driver’s license number, purchase transaction history, web browsing activity, voter registration information, whether you have children living with you or speak a foreign language, the photos you have posted to social media, the listing price of your home, whether you’ve recently had a life event like getting married, your credit score, what kind of car you drive, how much you spend on groceries, how much credit card debt you have and the location history from your mobile phone.

What Brokers Know

Data brokers can collect data and make predictions about a wide array of your personal traits, such as those listed below.

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guard UK

who sets the rules for all these games? It is 12.30am on a Friday night and the “Lyft drivers lounge”, a closed Facebook group for active drivers, is divided. The debate began, as many do, with an assertion about the algorithm. “The algorithm” refers to the opaque and often unpredictable system of automated, “data-driven” management employed by ride-hailing companies to dispatch drivers, match riders into Pools (Uber) or Lines (Lyft), and generate “surge” or “primetime” fares, also known as “dynamic pricing”.

The algorithm is at the heart of the ride-hailing game, and of the coercion that the game conceals. In their foundational text Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers, Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark write: “Uber’s self-proclaimed role as a connective intermediary belies the important employment structures and hierarchies that emerge through its software and interface design.” “Algorithmic management” is the term Rosenblat and Stark use to describe the mechanisms through which Uber and Lyft drivers are directed. To be clear, there is no singular algorithm. Rather, there are a number of algorithms operating and interacting with one another at any given moment. Taken together, they produce a seamless system of automatic decision-making that requires very little human intervention.

For many on-demand platforms, algorithmic management has completely replaced the decision-making roles previously occupied by shift supervisors, foremen and middle- to upper- level management. Uber actually refers to its algorithms as “decision engines”. These “decision engines” track, log and crunch millions of metrics every day, from ride frequency to the harshness with which individual drivers brake. It then uses these analytics to deliver gamified prompts perfectly matched to drivers’ data profiles.

Because the logic of the algorithm is largely unknown and constantly changing, drivers are left to speculate about what it is doing and why.Such speculation is a regular topic of conversation in online forums, where drivers post screengrabs of nonsensical ride requests and compare increasingly lacklustre, algorithmically generated bonus opportunities. It is not uncommon for drivers to accuse ride-hailing companies of programming their algorithms to favour the interests of the corporation. To resolve this alleged favouritism, drivers routinely hypothesise and experiment with ways to manipulate or “game” the system back.

When the bars let out after last orders at 2am, demand spikes. Drivers have a greater likelihood of scoring “surge” or “primetime” fares. There are no guarantees, but it is why we are all out there. To increase the prospect of surge pricing, drivers in online forums regularly propose deliberate, coordinated, mass “log-offs” with the expectation that a sudden drop in available drivers will “trick” the algorithm into generating higher surges. I have never seen one work, but the authors of a recently published paper say that mass log-offs are occasionally successful.

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https://www.alternet.org/koch-brothers-are-watching-you-and-new-documents-reveal-just-how-much-they-know

new documents uncovered by the Center for Media and Democracy show that the billionaire Koch brothers have developed detailed personality profiles on 89 percent of the U.S. population; and are using those profiles to launch an unprecedented private propaganda offensive to advance Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms.

The documents also show that the Kochs have developed persuasion models — like their "Heroin Model" and "Heroin Treatment Model" — that target voters with tailored messaging on select issues, and partner with cable and satellite TV providers to play those tailored messages during “regular” television broadcasts.

Over the last decade, big data and microtargeting have revolutionized political communications. And the Kochs, who are collectively worth $120 billion, now stand at the forefront of that revolution — investing billions in data aggregation, machine learning, software engineering and Artificial Intelligence optimization.

In modern elections, incorporating AI into voter file maintenance has become a prerequisite to producing reliable data. The Kochs’ political data firm, i360 states that it has “been practicing AI for years. Our team of data scientists uses components of Machine learning, Deep Learning and Predictive Analytics, every day as they build and refine our predictive models.”

Thanks to that investment (and the Supreme Court’s campaign finance rulings that opened the floodgates for super PACs), the Koch network is better positioned than either the Democratic Party or the GOP to reach voters with their individually tailored communications.

That is a dangerous development, with potentially dramatic consequences for our democracy.

The Kochs and i360

The Kochs formally entered the data space nine years ago, developing the “Themis Trust” program for the 2010 midterms — an uncommonly impactful election cycle where Republican operatives executed their REDMAP program and algorithmically gerrymandered congressional maps across the country in their favor.

In 2011, the Kochs folded Themis into a data competitor it acquired, i360 LLC, which was founded by Michael Palmer, the former chief technology officer of Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Palmer still leads the organization.

Back then, as journalists Kenneth Vogel and Mike Allen documented, the Kochs’ long-term funding commitments to i360 allowed the organization to think bigger than their political competitors.

“Right now, we’re talking about and building things that you won’t see in 2016, because it’s not going to be ready until 2018,” Michael Palmer said in the wake of the 2014 midterm cycle.

Those programs are now operational. And according to a successful GOP campaign manager, i360 is the “best in the business” at providing Republicans with voter data.

i360’s client list reflects that data superiority. The country’s most notorious and effective political spenders, like the National Rifle Association, use the platform to identify and influence voters, as do Republican party committees, and U.S. House and Senate campaigns.

(A full list of i360’s clients is available here. Some clients, like the Republican Party of Wisconsin, have multiple sub-campaigns they run. It is also important to note that many Koch political groups, like Americans for Prosperity and the Libre Initiative, signed data sharing agreements with i360 in 2016 that are most likely still in effect.)

i360 sweetens the deal to its clients by offering its services at below-market rates. And once clients are locked into the i360 platform, they have access to the company’s voter file — the beating heart of modern political campaigns.

Conservatives agree that the Kochs are subsidizing i360. The losses they sustain by undercharging clients, however, are a pittance compared to the down-stream public policy returns and political power the Kochs receive from operating what amounts to a shadow political party in the United States — one that vigilantly guards the fossil fuel subsidies, deregulatory schemes, and regressive tax structures that enable Koch Industries to bring in $115 billion annually in private revenue.

Inside the i360 Voter File

i360’s voter file identifies “more than 199 million active voters and 290 million U.S. consumers,” and provides its users with up to 1,800 unique data points on each identified individual.

As a result, i360 and the Kochs know your vitals, ethnicity, religion, occupation, hobbies, shopping habits, political leanings, financial assets, marital status and much more.

They know if you enjoy fishing — and if you do, whether you prefer salt or fresh water. They know if you have bladder control difficulty, get migraines or have osteoporosis. They know which advertising mediums (radio, TV, internet, email) are the most effective. For you.

i360 has the following attribute tags, among hundreds of others, ranked 1-10, or subdivided otherwise in their voter file.

Here’s an example of an i360 attribute tag and code name, using a 1-10 value scale:

But i360 attribute codes are not limited to that 1-10 scale. Their knowledge of your financial standing is granular, from how much equity you have in your home to your net wealth and expendable income.

They know where you live, what your mortgage status is and even how many bathrooms are in your house.

i360 has also created a set of 70 “clustercodes” to humanize its data for campaign operatives. These categories range from “Faded Blue Collars” to “Meandering Millennials,” and have flamboyant descriptions that correspond with their attribute headings.

Here are some examples:

Koch Persuasion Models

Additionally, i360 has developed a series of persuasion models for its voter file. These models are often regionally sensitive — since voters have regional concerns — and are being used in federal elections and down-ballot races to assist Republicans across the country.

In 2016, i360 created a set of regional models while working with Sen. Rob Portman’s 2016 re-election campaign in Ohio. Portman started out the race polling nine points behind his Democratic opponent, Gov. Ted Strickland, but ultimately won with 58 percent of the vote.

The company developed a model that could predict whether a voter supported Portman or Strickland with 89 percent accuracy, and others that predicted voter policy preferences. Well aware of the 2016 landscape, i360 also made a Trump/Clinton model, an Anti-Hillary model, and a Ticket Splitter model.

Much of i360’s success in the race, however, was linked to understanding (after conducting extensive polling) that a “key local issue facing Ohio was the opioid epidemic.” In response, the company created a “heroin model” and a “heroin treatment model” that were particularly effective at convincing voters to support Portman.

When describing how they employed their “heroin model,” i360 was clear that Portman’s “position” on the crisis depended on the voter, emphasizing health care solution communications for some, and criminal justice solution communications for others.

Here is i360 on the subject:

…the issue of opioid abuse was particularly complex in that it was relatively unknown whether it was considered a healthcare issue or a criminal justice issue. The answer to this would dictate the most effective messaging. In addition, this was a particularly personal issue affecting some voters and not others.

By leveraging two predictive models — the Heroin model identifying those constituents most likely to have been affected by the issue of opioid abuse and the Heroin Treatment model determining whether those individuals were more likely to view the issue as one of healthcare or of criminal justice — the campaign was able to effectively craft their messaging about Senator Portman’s extensive work in the Senate to be tailored to each individual according to their disposition on the topic.

This manipulation of the opioid crisis for political gain has a perverse irony given the Kochs’ long-running work to provide corporate interests, including health care and pharmaceutical interests, with undue political power and influence over public policy decisions. The Kochs have gifted over a million dollars to ALEC, for example, an organization that counts Purdue Pharma — the unconscionable manufacturer of OxyContin — as a member.

The company also stated it joined Portman’s campaign 21 months before the election, and that, “Together, i360 and the campaign strategized a plan to execute one of the most custom-targeted, integrated campaigns to date with a focus on getting the right message to the right voter wherever that might be.”

This is notable because during the 2016 election, i360 also ran $11.7 million worth of “independent” expenditures for the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund, Freedom Partners Action Fund, and Americans for Prosperity in Portman’s race.

These outside spenders, two of which are Koch-funded groups, and Portman’s campaign all used i360 to coordinate their digital marketing, phone banks and television ad buys, in the same market, in the same election.

Additionally, i360 supplied Portman’s campaign with other issue-based models on gun control, gay marriage and abortion that the company continues to supply to its clients in 2018.

Here are some examples of i360’s issue-based models:

The list goes on, but the structure stays the same. The Kochs are tailoring their advertising to you, because they know nearly everything about you.

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

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

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

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

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ut political advertising, like the ads you probably scroll past in your Facebook feed, has changed drastically over the past couple of decades. Unlike TV ads, which reach voters with undifferentiated mass messages, when it comes to online political ads, campaigns actually know a TON about you. They can target you based on your age, sex, income, where you live — even if you’re a Beyoncé fan. And they can tailor their messaging to how they think you, specifically, will respond.

How do they do that?

Political advertising online is more like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist than a traditional television ad: It uses lots of information about what you’ve done in the past to match you to the ads that you see today. Political campaigns and advocacy groups don’t have this data themselves; they enlist the help of so-called data brokers.

Data brokers gather public information about mortgages, car ownership and marital status, as well as consumer data like your income, education and which magazines you subscribe to. With this information, they make informed guesses about your political beliefs and assign you to a profile, which they sell to political advertisers. Campaigns then show you ads they think will persuade someone like you to vote for their candidate (or against the other one).

These ads appear lots of places online. You see them on search engines like Google, social networks like Twitter and, thanks to the services of online advertising networks that connect advertisers to digital promo opportunities, nearly any website that hosts ad space.

But Facebook (chef kiss) is the crème de la crème of political ad targeting. Everything you do on Facebook is being tracked — by Facebook.

Every time you …

• Like a post
• Tag a photo
• Update your favorite movies
• Post a comment
• Visit a page with a FB share button
• Use Instagram or WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook)

… Facebook uses all this data to guess your political leanings and interests, offering you up to candidates who want to target super specific groups of people.

So, the problem is …

Online ads are are hard to track. They appear on some people’s screens (sometimes for just a few hours), while never being shown to others. There’s also no way to monitor if political campaigns are changing their messaging based on the groups they are targeting — or whether they’re sending out ads that are misleading, contradictory or false.

The Federal Election Commission has strict rules about political ads broadcast on television and radio, but those rules haven’t kept up with the new power of online targeting. They tried recently — and failed.

Basically, in online political advertising, nearly anything goes.

Perhaps you’ll recall:

• During the 2016 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump’s operatives bragged to the press that they tried to dissuade African Americans from voting by targeting them with anti-Clinton Facebook posts.
• Last spring, a year and a half after Trump was elected, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads placed by Russian operatives to influence the 2016 election.

We don’t know the full impact of this, but with no accountability, they open the door for disinformation.

Homework: Find Out How You’re Being Targeted.

To learn more about how candidates target you on Facebook, check out how the site has categorized you. Does Facebook think you’re very liberal, very conservative or somewhere in between?

• Go to https://facebook.com/ads/preferences on your browser. (You may have to log in to Facebook first.)
• That will bring you to a page with your ad preferences. Under the “Your Information” header, click the “Your categories” tab.
• Then look for a box titled “US Politics.” In parentheses, it will show what Facebook says it knows about you (and how it sells you to advertisers), with a description like liberal, moderate or conservative. Does it match up with how you actually identify yourself?
• See what else Facebook thinks you’re interested in on this page under the “Your interests” section at the top (it has a heart icon). Political advertisers sometimes use this information to reach potential voters, too.
• In your newsfeed, click the dots at the top right corner of any Facebook ad and select “Why am I seeing this?” It will give a brief explanation about some of the choices the advertiser made in showing it to you. It may be because of the state you live in, or your age, or because Facebook thinks you’re interested in a specific political party.

Homework: See the Ads You’re NOT Seeing.

Because Facebook thinks they have you all figured out, it’s important to remember there are a lot of ads that they won’t ever show you. To learn more about what other people see, there are a few steps you can take.

1. Visit the Facebook Political Ad Collector, our searchable database designed to create more transparency in targeted online ads. It lets you step into someone else’s shoes and see the Facebook ads that they see.
2. Browse Google’s library of political ads. This summer Google published a searchable archive of political ads that have run on the platform, searchable by candidate or advertiser.

Extra Credit

While ProPublica has collected almost 53,000 political ads from more than 11,000 users for our Facebook Political Ad Collector, we want to monitor more. If you use Chrome or Firefox, you can help by downloading our browser extension, which lets us collect the ads you see.

So far the add-on has found political ads that were actually scams and malware, ads that ignored FEC rules by failing to disclose who paid for and approved them, and Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray’s made-up news pages.

Important privacy note: The extension doesn’t collect any personal information about its users; we just collect the ads you see, automatically. We don’t see any of your or your friends’ posts. Learn more here.

https://www.propublica.org/article/users-guide-to-democracy-political-advertising

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https://www.propublica.org/article/politic-il-insider-additional-gang-databases-illinois-cook-county

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Most of us have a growing sense that something’s deeply wrong with the way that digital data is used to track and monitor us.  But most of us don’t realize that the poorest among us are particularly vulnerable. Virginia Eubanks argues that such data is used to criminalize and turn the poor away from public resources to which they are entitled.

Resources:

Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor St. Martin’s Press, 2018

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-july-18-2018/

partner attacked, hurt, ER bills, days later told had no coverage, no start date (a new policy) not married, painkillers, red flag for insurance fraud, suspend.

homeless: 168? agncy have info, keeps 7 yrs, even if expugded, sometimes not: are you trade sex for durgs, debts? warrants , can take pix...

allegheny tries to predict child endanger; not all ppl in db b/c pay babysitter or psych are pvt. feedback loop, poor ppl watched more carefully; // to policing.

mitch daniels billion? $ contract to automate snap b/c public sector workers make decison, thus collusions: church indianapolis fake acc'ts anecdote, ibm

sever connection to person, aplly online (1/2 have PC) call ctr i mill failure to cooperate in est'b eligibility 7-14 days, ppl in hosp w/ cancer missed appt

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https://www.alternet.org/health-insurers-are-vacuuming-details-about-you-and-it-could-raise-your-rates

no lnx pro publ

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

Without any public scrutiny, insurers and data brokers are predicting your health costs based on data about things like race, marital status, how much TV you watch, whether you pay your bills on time or even buy plus-size clothing.

By Marshall Allen / ProPublica July 18, 2018, 4:03 AM GMT

To an outsider, the fancy booths at last month’s health insurance industry gathering in San Diego aren’t very compelling. A handful of companies pitching “lifestyle” data and salespeople touting jargony phrases like “social determinants of health.”

But dig deeper and the implications of what they’re selling might give many patients pause: A future in which everything you do — the things you buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV — may help determine how much you pay for health insurance.

With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

Are you a woman who recently changed your name? You could be newly married and have a pricey pregnancy pending. Or maybe you’re stressed and anxious from a recent divorce. That, too, the computer models predict, may run up your medical bills.

Are you a woman who’s purchased plus-size clothing? You’re considered at risk of depression. Mental health care can be expensive.

Low-income and a minority? That means, the data brokers say, you are more likely to live in a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood, increasing your health risks.

“We sit on oceans of data,” said Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, during a conversation at the data firm’s booth. And he isn’t apologetic about using it. “The fact is, our data is in the public domain,” he said. “We didn’t put it out there.”

Insurers contend they use the information to spot health issues in their clients — and flag them so they get services they need. And companies like LexisNexis say the data shouldn’t be used to set prices. But as a research scientist from one company told me: “I can’t say it hasn’t happened.”

At a time when every week brings a new privacy scandal and worries abound about the misuse of personal information, patient advocates and privacy scholars say the insurance industry’s data gathering runs counter to its touted, and federally required, allegiance to patients’ medical privacy. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, only protects medical information.

“We have a health privacy machine that’s in crisis,” said Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law who specializes in issues related to machine learning and algorithms. “We have a law that only covers one source of health information. They are rapidly developing another source.”

Patient advocates warn that using unverified, error-prone “lifestyle” data to make medical assumptions could lead insurers to improperly price plans — for instance raising rates based on false information — or discriminate against anyone tagged as high cost. And, they say, the use of the data raises thorny questions that should be debated publicly, such as: Should a person’s rates be raised because algorithms say they are more likely to run up medical bills? Such questions would be moot in Europe, where a strict law took effect in May that bans trading in personal data.

This year, ProPublica and NPR are investigating the various tactics the health insurance industry uses to maximize its profits.Understanding these strategies is important because patients — through taxes, cash payments and insurance premiums — are the ones funding the entire health care system. Yet the industry’s bewildering web of strategies and inside deals often have little to do with patients’ needs. As the series’ first story showed, contrary to popular belief, lower bills aren’t health insurers’ top priority.

Inside the San Diego Convention Center last month, there were few qualms about the way insurance companies were mining Americans’ lives for information — or what they planned to do with the data.

The sprawling convention center was a balmy draw for one of America’s Health Insurance Plans’ marquee gatherings. Insurance executives and managers wandered through the exhibit hall, sampling chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne and other delectables designed to encourage deal-making.

Up front, the prime real estate belonged to the big guns in health data: The booths of Optum, IBM Watson Health and LexisNexisstretched toward the ceiling, with flat screen monitors and some comfy seating. (NPR collaborates with IBM Watson Health on national polls about consumer health topics.)

To understand the scope of what they were offering, consider Optum. The company, owned by the massive UnitedHealth Group, has collected the medical diagnoses, tests, prescriptions, costs and socioeconomic data of 150 million Americans going back to 1993, according to its marketing materials. (UnitedHealth Group provides financial support to NPR.) The company says it uses the information to link patients’ medical outcomes and costs to details like their level of education, net worth, family structure and race. An Optum spokesman said the socioeconomic data is de-identified and is not used for pricing health plans.

Optum’s marketing materials also boast that it now has access to even more. In 2016, the company filed a patent application to gather what people share on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and link this material to the person’s clinical and payment information. A company spokesman said in an email that the patent application never went anywhere. But the company’s current marketing materials say it combines claims and clinical information with social media interactions.

I had a lot of questions about this and first reached out to Optum in May, but the company didn’t connect me with any of its experts as promised. At the conference, Optum salespeople said they weren’t allowed to talk to me about how the company uses this information.

It isn’t hard to understand the appeal of all this data to insurers. Merging information from data brokers with people’s clinical and payment records is a no-brainer if you overlook potential patient concerns. Electronic medical records now make it easy for insurers to analyze massive amounts of information and combine it with the personal details scooped up by data brokers.

It also makes sense given the shifts in how providers are getting paid. Doctors and hospitals have typically been paid based on the quantity of care they provide. But the industry is moving toward paying them in lump sums for caring for a patient, or for an event, like a knee surgery. In those cases, the medical providers can profit more when patients stay healthy. More money at stake means more interest in the social factors that might affect a patient’s health.

Some insurance companies are already using socioeconomic data to help patients get appropriate care, such as programs to help patients with chronic diseases stay healthy. Studies show social and economic aspects of people’s lives play an important role in their health. Knowing these personal details can help them identify those who may need help paying for medication or help getting to the doctor.

But patient advocates are skeptical health insurers have altruistic designs on people’s personal information.

The industry has a history of boosting profits by signing up healthy people and finding ways to avoid sick people — called “cherry-picking” and “lemon-dropping,” experts say. Among the classic examples: A company was accused of putting its enrollment office on the third floor of a building without an elevator, so only healthy patients could make the trek to sign up. Another tried to appeal to spry seniors by holding square dances.

The Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from denying people coverage based on pre-existing health conditions or charging sick people more for individual or small group plans. But experts said patients’ personal information could still be used for marketing, and to assess risks and determine the prices of certain plans. And the Trump administration is promoting short-term health plans, which do allow insurers to deny coverage to sick patients.

Robert Greenwald, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, said insurance companies still cherry-pick, but now they’re subtler. The center analyzes health insurance plans to see if they discriminate. He said insurers will do things like failing to include enough information about which drugs a plan covers — which pushes sick people who need specific medications elsewhere. Or they may change the things a plan covers, or how much a patient has to pay for a type of care, after a patient has enrolled. Or, Greenwald added, they might exclude or limit certain types of providers from their networks — like those who have skill caring for patients with HIV or hepatitis C.

If there were concerns that personal data might be used to cherry-pick or lemon-drop, they weren’t raised at the conference.

At the IBM Watson Health booth, Kevin Ruane, a senior consulting scientist, told me that the company surveys 80,000 Americans a year to assess lifestyle, attitudes and behaviors that could relate to health care. Participants are asked whether they trust their doctor, have financial problems, go online, or own a Fitbit and similar questions. The responses of hundreds of adjacent households are analyzed together to identify social and economic factors for an area.

Ruane said he has used IBM Watson Health’s socioeconomic analysis to help insurance companies assess a potential market. The ACA increased the value of such assessments, experts say, because companies often don’t know the medical history of people seeking coverage. A region with too many sick people, or with patients who don’t take care of themselves, might not be worth the risk.

Ruane acknowledged that the information his company gathers may not be accurate for every person. “We talk to our clients and tell them to be careful about this,” he said. “Use it as a data insight. But it’s not necessarily a fact.”

In a separate conversation, a salesman from a different company joked about the potential for error. “God forbid you live on the wrong street these days,” he said. “You’re going to get lumped in with a lot of bad things.”

The LexisNexis booth was emblazoned with the slogan “Data. Insight. Action.” The company said it uses 442 non-medical personal attributes to predict a person’s medical costs. Its cache includes more than 78 billion records from more than 10,000 public and proprietary sources, including people’s cellphone numbers, criminal records, bankruptcies, property records, neighborhood safety and more. The information is used to predict patients’ health risks and costs in eight areas, including how often they are likely to visit emergency rooms, their total cost, their pharmacy costs, their motivation to stay healthy and their stress levels.

People who downsize their homes tend to have higher health care costs, the company says. As do those whose parents didn’t finish high school. Patients who own more valuable homes are less likely to land back in the hospital within 30 days of their discharge. The company says it has validated its scores against insurance claims and clinical data. But it won’t share its methods and hasn’t published the work in peer-reviewed journals.

McCulley, LexisNexis’ director of strategic solutions, said predictions made by the algorithms about patients are based on the combination of the personal attributes. He gave a hypothetical example: A high school dropout who had a recent income loss and doesn’t have a relative nearby might have higher than expected health costs.

But couldn’t that same type of person be healthy? I asked.

“Sure,” McCulley said, with no apparent dismay at the possibility that the predictions could be wrong.

McCulley and others at LexisNexis insist the scores are only used to help patients get the care they need and not to determine how much someone would pay for their health insurance. The company cited three different federal laws that restricted them and their clients from using the scores in that way. But privacy experts said none of the laws cited by the company bar the practice. The company backed off the assertions when I pointed that the laws did not seem to apply.

LexisNexis officials also said the company’s contracts expressly prohibit using the analysis to help price insurance plans. They would not provide a contract. But I knew that in at least one instance a company was already testing whether the scores could be used as a pricing tool.

Before the conference, I’d seen a press release announcing that the largest health actuarial firm in the world, Milliman, was now using the LexisNexis scores. I tracked down Marcos Dachary, who works in business development for Milliman. Actuaries calculate health care risks and help set the price of premiums for insurers. I asked Dachary if Milliman was using the LexisNexis scores to price health plans and he said: “There could be an opportunity.”

The scores could allow an insurance company to assess the risks posed by individual patients and make adjustments to protect themselves from losses, he said. For example, he said, the company could raise premiums, or revise contracts with providers.

It’s too early to tell whether the LexisNexis scores will actually be useful for pricing, he said. But he was excited about the possibilities. “One thing about social determinants data — it piques your mind,” he said.

Dachary acknowledged the scores could also be used to discriminate. Others, he said, have raised that concern. As much as there could be positive potential, he said, “there could also be negative potential.”

It’s that negative potential that still bothers data analyst Erin Kaufman, who left the health insurance industry in January. The 35-year-old from Atlanta had earned her doctorate in public health because she wanted to help people, but one day at Aetna, her boss told her to work with a new data set.

To her surprise, the company had obtained personal information from a data broker on millions of Americans. The data contained each person’s habits and hobbies, like whether they owned a gun, and if so, what type, she said. It included whether they had magazine subscriptions, liked to ride bikes or run marathons. It had hundreds of personal details about each person.

The Aetna data team merged the data with the information it had on patients it insured. The goal was to see how people’s personal interests and hobbies might relate to their health care costs. But Kaufman said it felt wrong: The information about the people who knitted or crocheted made her think of her grandmother. And the details about individuals who liked camping made her think of herself. What business did the insurance company have looking at this information? “It was a dataset that really dug into our clients’ lives,” she said. “No one gave anyone permission to do this.”

In a statement, Aetna said it uses consumer marketing information to supplement its claims and clinical information. The combined data helps predict the risk of repeat emergency room visits or hospital admissions. The information is used to reach out to members and help them and plays no role in pricing plans or underwriting, the statement said.

Kaufman said she had concerns about the accuracy of drawing inferences about an individual’s health from an analysis of a group of people with similar traits. Health scores generated from arrest records, home ownership and similar material may be wrong, she said.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit that advocates for privacy in the digital age, shares Kaufman’s concerns. She points to a study by the analytics company SAS, which worked in 2012 with an unnamed major health insurance company to predict a person’s health care costs using 1,500 data elements, including the investments and types of cars people owned.

The SAS study said higher health care costs could be predicted by looking at things like ethnicity, watching TV and mail order purchases.

“I find that enormously offensive as a list,” Dixon said. “This is not health data. This is inferred data.”

Data scientist Cathy O’Neil said drawing conclusions about health risks on such data could lead to a bias against some poor people. It would be easy to infer they are prone to costly illnesses based on their backgrounds and living conditions, said O’Neil, author of the book “Weapons of Math Destruction,” which looked at how algorithms can increase inequality. That could lead to poor people being charged more, making it harder for them to get the care they need, she said. Employers, she said, could even decide not to hire people with data points that could indicate high medical costs in the future.

O’Neil said the companies should also measure how the scores might discriminate against the poor, sick or minorities.

American policymakers could do more to protect people’s information, experts said. In the United States, companies can harvest personal data unless a specific law bans it, although California just passed legislation that could create restrictions, said William McGeveran, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. Europe, in contrast, passed a strict law called the General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in May.

“In Europe, data protection is a constitutional right,” McGeveran said.

Pasquale, the University of Maryland law professor, said health scores should be treated like credit scores. Federal law gives people the right to know their credit scores and how they’re calculated. If people are going to be rated by whether they listen to sad songs on Spotify or look up information about AIDS online, they should know, Pasquale said. “The risk of improper use is extremely high. And data scores are not properly vetted and validated and available for scrutiny.”

As I reported this story I wondered how the data vendors might be using my personal information to score my potential health costs. So, I filled out a request on the LexisNexis website for the company to send me some of the personal information it has on me. A week later a somewhat creepy, 182-page walk down memory lane arrived in the mail. Federal law only requires the company to provide a subset of the information it collected about me. So that’s all I got.

LexisNexis had captured details about my life going back 25 years, many that I’d forgotten. It had my phone numbers going back decades and my home addresses going back to my childhood in Golden, Colorado. Each location had a field to show whether the address was “high risk.” Mine were all blank. The company also collects records of any liens and criminal activity, which, thankfully, I didn’t have.

My report was boring, which isn’t a surprise. I’ve lived a middle-class life and grown up in good neighborhoods. But it made me wonder: What if I had lived in “high risk” neighborhoods? Could that ever be used by insurers to jack up my rates — or to avoid me altogether?

I wanted to see more. If LexisNexis had health risk scores on me, I wanted to see how they were calculated and, more importantly, whether they were accurate. But the company told me that if it had calculated my scores it would have done so on behalf of their client, my insurance company. So, I couldn’t have them.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.

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https://www.alternet.org/how-wrestle-your-data-data-brokers-silicon-valley-and-cambridge-analytica

... certain: My personal data, and likely yours, is in more hands than ever. Tech firms, data brokers and political consultants build profiles of what they know — or think they can reasonably guess — about your purchasing habits, personality, hobbies and even what political issues you care about.

You can find out what those companies know about you but be prepared to be stubborn. Very stubborn. To demonstrate how this works, we’ve chosen a couple of representative companies from three major categories: data brokers, big tech firms and political data consultants.

Few of them make it easy. Some will show you on their websites, others will make you ask for your digital profile via the U.S. mail. And then there’s Cambridge Analytica, the controversial Trump campaign vendor that has come under intense fire in light of a report in the British newspaper The Observer and in The New York Times that the company used improperly obtained data from Facebook to help build voter profiles.

To find out what the chaps at the British data firm have on you, you’re going to need both stamps and a “cheque.”

Once you see your data, you’ll have a much better understanding of how this shadowy corner of the new economy works. You’ll see what seemingly personal information they know about you … and you’ll probably have some hypotheses about where this data is coming from. You’ll also probably see some predictions about who you are that are hilariously wrong.

And if you do obtain your data from any of these companies, please let us know your thoughts at politicaldata@propublica.org. We won’t share or publish what you say (unless you tell us that’s it’s OK).

Cambridge Analytica and Other Political Consultants

Making statistically informed guesses about Americans’ political beliefs and pet issues is a common business these days, with dozens of firms selling data to candidates and issue groups about the purported leanings of individual American voters.

Few of these firms have to give your data. But Cambridge Analytica is required to do so by an obscure European rule.

Cambridge Analytica:

Around the time of the 2016 election, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician and founder of a website that helps people exercise their data protection rights called PersonalData.IO, approached me with an idea for a story. He flagged some of Cambridge Analytica’s claims about the power of its “psychographic” targeting capabilities and suggested that I demand my data from them.

So I sent off a request, following Dehaye’s coaching, and citing the UK Data Protection Act 1998, the British implementation of a little-known European Union data-protection law that grants individuals (even Americans) the rights to see the data Europeans companies compile about individuals.

How You Can Request Your Data From Cambridge Analytica:It worked. I got back a spreadsheet of data about me. But it took months, cost ten pounds — and I had to give them a photo ID and two utility bills. Presumably they didn’t want my personal data falling into the wrong hands.

1. Visit Cambridge Analytica’s website here and fill out this web form.
2. After you submit the form, the page will immediately request that you email to data.compliance@cambridgeanalytica.org a photo ID and two copies of your utility bills or bank statements, to prove your identity. This page will also include the company’s bank account details.
3. Find a way to send them 10 GBP. You can try wiring this from your bank, though it may cost you an additional $25 or so — or ask a friend in the UK to go to their bank and get a cashier’s check. Your American bank probably won’t let you write a GBP-denominated check. Two services I tried, Xoom and TransferWise, weren’t able to do it.
4. Eventually, Cambridge Analytica will email you a small Excel spreadsheet of information and a letter. You might have to wait a few weeks. Celeste LeCompte, ProPublica’s vice president of business development, requested her data on March 27 and still hasn’t received it.

Because the company is based in the United Kingdom, it had no choice but to fulfill my request. In recent weeks, the firm has come under intense fire after The New York Times and the British paper The Observer disclosed that it had used improperly obtained data from Facebook to build profiles of American voters. Facebook told me that data about me was likely transmitted to Cambridge Analytica because a person with whom I am “friends” on the social network had taken the now-infamous “This Is Your Digital Life” quiz. For what it’s worth, my data shows no sign of anything derived from Facebook.

What You Might Get Back From Cambridge Analytica:

Cambridge Analytica had generated 13 data points about my views: 10 political issues, ranked by importance; two guesses at my partisan leanings (one blank); and a guess at whether I would turn out in the 2016 general election.

They told me that the lower the rank, the higher the predicted importance of the issue to me.

Alongside that data labeled “models” were two other types of data that are run-of-the-mill and widely used by political consultants. One sheet of “core data” — that is, personal info, sliced and diced a few different ways, perhaps to be used more easily as parameters for a statistical model. It included my address, my electoral district, the census tract I live in and my date of birth.

The spreadsheet included a few rows of “election returns” — previous elections in New York State in which I had voted. (Intriguingly, Cambridge Analytica missed that I had voted in 2015’s snoozefest of a vote-for-five-of-these-five judicial election. It also didn’t know about elections in which I had voted in North Carolina, where I lived before I lived in New York.)

ALC Digital...

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ucsc

https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/06/data-science-center.html

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see uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-2286

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Chicago’s Gang Database Is Full of Errors — And Records We Have Prove It

by Mick Dumke

Pushing 80 and still gangbanginG?

PRO PUBL

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online surveys get psychometric data, cf trumping of Am stanford guy

What Gun Are You? Take this fun quiz to find out and get 50% off our top laser sight. 2/6/18 patriotcaLLER .COM?

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1/18 short

https://www.c-span.org/video/?436313-1/on-verge

Rebecca Costa talked about his book, On the Verge, about using technology and science to predict future events and outcomes with more precision.

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After Words with Patrick Tucker Patrick Tuckertalked about his book, The Naked Future: What Happens in a World that Anticipates Your Every Move, in which he argues that the future is very easy to predict, due to the availability of large amounts of data that make prediction models for individual behavior significantly more accurate. He spoke with Heidi Boghosian, co-host of the radio show “Law & Disorder” and executive director of the National Lawyers Guild.

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How Blockchain Technology Could Transform the Food Industry

By Sylvain Charlebois

There has been a lot of noise on cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin of late. While some suggest cryptocurrencies are a fraud, others believe them to be the next biggest economic revolution the world has seen since the internet. Bitcoin has brought to light blockchain technology, which offers great potential for food safety and verification in the agrifood sector. Yet it is far from being the panacea for a range of issues affecting the industry—at least for now.

Simply put, blockchain technology is a way of storing and sharing information across a network of users in an open virtual space. Blockchain technology allows for users to look at all transactions simultaneously and in real-time. In food, for example, a retailer would know with whom his supplier has had dealings. Additionally, since transactions are not stored in any single location, it is almost impossible to hack the information.

For consumers, blockchain technology can make a difference. By reading a simple QR code with a smartphone, data such as an animal's date of birth, use of antibiotics, vaccinations and location where the livestock was harvested can easily be conveyed to the consumer.

https://www.ecowatch.com/blockchain-technology-2519373206.html

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?433414-10/panel-discussion-big-data

Panel Discussion on Big Data Panelists talked about big data. Panelists included Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, and Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.

==

yikes esa

http://www.alternet.org/animal-rights/how-online-data-putting-endangered-species-around-globe-even-more-risk

==

75th anniv of valdiv sp raid Fr cops grabbed jews

kids who ask for free lunch asked about immigr status of parents

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-17-2017/

==

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

...

. The Targets: Mainstream Media, Social Networks — and Wikipedia

First, as my previous post noted, the sites with the most inbound hyperlinks (the largest circles on the graph) in this fake news propaganda network are Google, YouTube, the NYTimes.com, Wikipedia, and strangely, Amazon.com. The larger the circle, the more links are coming in from the 117 #MCM network sites.

...

Mainstream Media Are Mostly “Surrounded”

You can see on the “zoomed out” graph (image below) the #MPM — i.e., ID’d right-wing, fake news, conspiracy, anti-science, hoax, pseudoscience, and right-leaning misinformation sites — in red.

If you look at the graph closely, you’ll see they basically surround most of themainstream media, including the largest “liberal” media, on the network. This includes national newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and even “right-wing” media such as Breitbart.com, the Dailycaller.com, and the *National Review*.

...

The sites in the fake news and hyper-biased #MCM network have a very small “node” size — this means they are linking out heavily to mainstream media, social networks, and informational resources (most of which are in the “center” of the network), but not many sites in their peer group are sending links back.

The most influential sites line the periphery of the virtual propaganda network. You can see (image above) that many of the sites have a large flood of red hyperlinks flowing outward — some of these are in the thousands. For the purposes of this analysis, the red lines (each representing a different URL) “matter” most when they are headed towards the large nodes in the center of the network.

3. Content Sharing and Media Hosting

The #MCM network displays a high number of links to content creation and web asset-hosting services (Wordpress.com, Statcounter.com, WP.com, etc.). These likely are shared to help the website users produce content and measure the impact of their audiences. The zoomed-in views (see images below) also suggest that these fake news sites use social platforms to share as well as coordinate through hyperlinks:

...

4. Material and Digital Production Tools and eCommerce

In the next images (see below), there are an interesting number of links pointing to consumer goods/commerce sites and ✂️digital productiontools. These include CafePress (t-shirts), Feedburner (RSS news), and Addthis.com (social sharing scripts).

This could mean that the propaganda network may be use these resources internally to spread — as well as generate some income — off of politically-themed news events and political debates. These links might be pushed into other locations on the internet, especially social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Oddly, Amazon.com (see first graph, above) is also a top inbound link destinationin the #MCM network. [TP activist training; also parasitic sites to make $]

Further analysis is needed to uncover the type of content/resources all of these links point towards.

...

https://medium.com/@d1gi/election2016-propaganda-lytics-weaponized-shadow-trackers

... am interested in how behavioral targeting and retargeting is implemented by networks of propaganda and political fringe actors, because it is likely to be part of the lesser-yet-still-influential strategies used to shape the outcome of thin-margin elections. The Electronic Frontier Foundation refers to the less ethical practices of #adtech and behavioral tracking firms as :{semi-legal}: :{data-sharing agreements}:.

[EFF: “Online Behavioral Tracking” (21-Nov-2016) ]

During my “tracker” escapade of the shadow tracking network — composed of 114 fringe/anti-science/conspiracy/propaganda sites — I indirectly connected to *474 third parties.* The supernova-like image below is the resulting “ad-tracking network” footprint that was created in less than one hour. The graph shows how close hundreds of behavioral tracking companies, sketchy advertising networks, social network APIs, “addthis” sharing buttons, data mining outfits, and content delivery providers are in the lives of the people who frequent sites like:

...

The results here are very disturbing for the millions of people who frequent these propaganda sites. For one, they are easy targets for simple hacking techniques like hijacked connections when their outdated Android phones attempt to load third-party resources like the ones shown in the list above ⤴️, as well as the known unknowns shown in the list below ⤵️.

I’m just throwing it out there, but the glaring lack of secure resources loaded by these sites could mean that some of the fake news sites in this right-wing propaganda network (e.g., thepostermail.com below) may have been designed to compromise visitors’ machines. Hey, we’re talking about propaganda and privacy here, so I’m allowed to offer at least one conspiracy in this post.

I’m going to use the data I’ve collected for this project to make the argument that this “micro-propaganda machine” is not only a source of “fake news,” political noise, and strategic misinformation, it’s weaponized, behavioral-tracking shadow tech.

...

I. The Shadow Cabinet

Moving away from the initial discussion of sci-fi folklore, data privacy and national security, the tracking data I collected had some very interesting results. The first finding was significant, yet not very insightful. At the center of the right-wing propaganda machine’s behavioral tracking shadow was: Facebook. This is not surprising as Facebook’s “like” code is added to basically every website in the galaxy. Still, it’s good to know where the center of the storm is — especially in case it begins to drift your way.

...

 II. You’ve Got…Conspiracy Mail!

A more interesting finding in this follow-up “tracking” research relates to how propaganda might be propagated outside of Facebook/Twitter. The number of aggressive  email newsletter signup overlays (see images below) I encountered during my data collection was noteworthy.

This seems to support my initial hunch that even though everyone argues about the role of Facebook and algorithms in the election outcome, the impact of plain old email is likely being overlooked. I know — not as fashionable as algorithms, right? But, on the positive side, these emails have subjects like the “Re: Exposing the Illuminati Banking & Alien Media Cartel.” Below are some examples of what I’m talking about:

...

III. Cookies — Definitely Not a “Sometime Food” for Propagandists

In visiting these 114 right-wing propaganda websites, my computer encountered about 3,000 potential trackers, as well as an undetermined amount of less-conspicous trackers, such as Flash-based LSO “super-cookies” and font-checking browser “fingerprinting” tech.[

[Mozilla Lightbeam ID’d “cookies” (there were additional trackers beyond this column total, however)

IV. Paranoid Android

The main purpose in doing this follow-up data dive was to get a sense of the sorts of  behavior tracking and identification technology that’s being put on users’ computers and phones in this right-wing micro-propaganda network. I feel this might be the real conspiracy, because if users can’t remove these embedded tracking objects with niche tools like BetterPrivacy, Privacy Badger, and Decentraleyes, they are likely to be followed across the galaxy by this weaponized shadow indefinitely.

∞ ….. x … ⧓ ….⚫️

For users visiting these propaganda sites on mobile devices — especially those who are using phones running older versions of Android, as well as people using outdated browsers like Internet Explorer, this makes avoiding this kind of pervasive behavioral shadow-tracking even tougher.

Myprevious post identified :{IP blocking:(style="font-weight:700"):}: as a prominent concern in the right-wing micro-propaganda machine, so it’s worth pointing out that VPNs and proxies do little to prevent people from being tracked — especially given the number of obvious and less obvious tracking technologies I’ve found here. VPNs simply <shield> users’ originating IP address and add a thin layer of protection on open wifi networks. This does not stop them being individually targeted. Users of these propaganda sites might also opt to install add-ons like “Web of Trust,”™ privacy “bounty hunters” that sell people’s browsing histories to unsavory third parties.

...

Facebook Likes: Social Media’s Misinformation Gateway Drug?

The image shown above, as well as many of propaganda network homepages like “Jihad Watch” and “Dave Hodges Common Sense Show” clearly display how fringe/extremist political sites include the Facebook’s “” button front and center. You could even make the argument it’s an essential part of their brand:

...

In my view, like “Voldemort” in the Harry Potter series, people who are trulyworried about the Illuminati, Federal Reserve, George Soros, SR-71s, Precious Metals, and the New World Order would be scared to even say the word “Facebook” out loud in public, much less sign up for Facebook, complete every life detail on their profile, and then read content put out by Wix-template dark side fringe news sites and click on hundreds of “like” buttons.

Still, this shows that this content must be entering social media through pagelikes which will later be seen by certain connections (we will never know how many) on Facebook. Through “:{homophily}:” and attention-biased algorithms, fake news content might go on to spawn further confirmation bias (via group agreement) or “rage trolling” (via group disagreement).

Propaganda-lylics

What I’ve done in this research post is take a Star Wars-esque look at pervasive ad tracking by diving into the #Election2016micr0-propaganda machine’s behavioral tracking shadow. Using publicly available data and open source tools, I’ve touched on a number of potential major privacy/security concerns: thousands of advanced trackers, Facebook code everywhere, and even sketchy Russian ad tech (see the list and dataset I shared earlier).

There is no question these trackers are on millions of personal and work computers, mobile phones, and even the family iPads of anyone who has ever visited these propaganda sites on these devices. So, what about “fake news?”[img]

My previous research argued that what we are calling “fake news” is more akin to a micro-propaganda machine. This research data shows that what hides behind fake news sites is a highly coordinated behavioral tracking weaponized shadow network. The underlying tracking technology that fuels the privacy Death Star’s predictive influence modeling superlaser seems to play a part in:

A. Surveilliance of the key actors who produce propaganda — as well as all the people who respond to it

Watching the people who trigger the responses allows political strategists, data ops, and technology companies to see (and probably even initiate) social conflict in what Uber executives might refer to as “:{God View.}:” This type of omnipotent gaslighting can then be used to generate long-term data insights on millions of voters.

The more “shocking” the propaganda the micro-propaganda machine produces, the larger the social response; the more people who can be rage-trolled into fighting about things that mostly amount to coordinated distractions, the better. Why? Because all of this data can be captured and semantically mined, as well as merged with past, present and future datasets to increase the accuracy of predictive behavior modeling.

Why didn’t Clinton’s campaign work? Probably because they were being rage-trolled by “micro-propaganda machines” like the one I’ve explored in my last Medium few posts.

The data I’ve collected in this post suggests that it’s not as much about the fake news, viral hoaxes, and strategic misinformation the micro-propaganda machine creates and distributes around election times: This material helps, of course, but any group of actors will generate this type of content for you if you know how make them angry enough.

My exploration of the shadow network of trackers and behavioral data collection infrastructure behind the propaganda network provides evidence that it has more to do with the behavioral data the content the propaganda machine generates. This includes—as I’ve pointed out in this post—gathering rich, detailed, and deep insights on:

1. The millions of naive people who can be coerced into creating, distributing, and defending this network of “fake news” and psy-propaganda and;
2. The millions of people who end of fighting about on Facebook, Twitter, in person, in the news, op-eds, news comments, on TV, in media, popular music — and especially — with their own wallets.

All of this can be coordinated with enough data and technology. Together it’s what amounts to weaponized “shadow tech.”

B. Centralized measurement and long-term behavioral tracking to build predictive models.

When behavioral data, including historical data related to content engaged with on these sites, Facebook “likes,” Twitter RTs, email newsletter sign-ups, home and work history, time spent on social media, employment and income data, purchasing history, education, frequent shopping/customer loyalty cards, travel history, and religion are combined across millions of trackers, this technology can be easily be used to generate the kind of big data needed to rapidly advance the accuracy of :{*predictive voter models*:(style="font-weight:700"):}:.

It’s the Empire’s final stage in constructing the privacy Death Star’s™ superlaser. Maybe a better name for it is “propaganda-lytics.

...

part 3:

https://medium.com/@d1gi/data-is-the-real-post-truth-so-heres-the-truth-about-post-election2016-propaganda

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538 sort of saw trump win coming?

Data doesn’t win elections; candidates do. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump bet on that idea last week when he announced his plan to rely on his personality and rallies in the general election instead of collecting data on voters. Trump has a point: The effect of “big data” and improved analytics on elections is often overhyped. Even David Plouffe — the architect of President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, the most data-savvy in history — agreed that Obama’s “data processing machine” was not responsible for his wins.¹(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-scorning-of-data-may-not-hurt-him-but-itll-hurt-the-gop/#fn-1)

But Republicans are worried, and for good reason: Trump’s assumption that the sole value of data is to win more votes is too narrow.His decision to limit the role of data probably won’t be the deciding factor in the 2016 election, but data organization and access are an investment in the future of the party. A presidential campaign presents a rare opportunity to cultivate the next generation of talent and collect a ton of new data on voters, and Trump’s refusal to do so means that Republicans may need to wait until 2020 or beyond to even the playing field with Democrats.

Presidential elections, when turnout routinely exceeds midterm and off-cycle elections, produce an influx of data to public voter files and staffers who earn experience analyzing that data. Two examples of innovations in data-driven strategy — direct mail after 1964 and digital data analytics after 2004 — demonstrate that even losing presidential campaigns have paid huge dividends.

Trump’s candidacy is often compared to the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater, and generally not as a compliment. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson by nearly 23 percentage points, receiving only 27 million votes out of 70 million cast. Despite this historic loss, Goldwater’s campaign was a launching point for the national conservative movement largely because of the data it produced and the innovations it enabled.

Direct mail was a new tool for campaigns at the time. It was used to market a message directly to voters while raising money, much as online advertisements and emails do for today’s candidates. Messages are only as useful as the audience they reach, however, and the Republican Party was unorganized in most of the South and West. The “Draft Goldwater” committee, comprised of conservative activists who wanted to steer the Republican Party rightward, sought out “silent supporters” to become delegates and donors for Goldwater — creating reliable national lists of conservative Republicans in the process.

For these conservative activists, the Goldwater campaign was not a failure — it identified 27 million Americans willing to support a solidly conservative candidate, and generated data on where to find them. One activist, Richard Viguerie, went to the clerk of the House of Representatives and copied (by hand) the names of donors who gave Goldwater $50 or more, forming the basis for his mailing list. In his book, Viguerie claims that he used this data to send 70 million letters per year and 1 billion pieces of conservative direct mail between 1974 and 1980, when conservative Ronald Reagan was elected president. Goldwater’s ideological legacy was secured using strategies that relied upon the data generated by his failed campaign.

Political data has moved far beyond card catalogues and mailing lists. Making sense of today’s data requires experience with database software and statistical modeling. The software used by campaigns cannot be bought “off the shelf” or assembled quickly because it relies on data controlled and managed by the parties.²(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-scorning-of-data-may-not-hurt-him-but-itll-hurt-the-gop/#fn-2)

In 2005, after winning two consecutive presidential elections, the Republican Party’s data was more centralized and better organized than Democrats’. This success led to a sense of complacency among Republicans. Meanwhile, after two straight losses, Democrats were open to new campaigning techniques at the same time that online and digital tools were emerging.

Like conservatives post-Goldwater, the Democrats used their data effectively after a loss in a presidential election. In this case, failed 2004 Democratic candidate Howard Dean — whose campaign was known for its innovative use of the internet — became chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2005. He prioritized the creation of a national voter database with one company in charge (NGP VAN). This investment made it easier for future candidates to incorporate data analytics into their strategy, giving them incentive to hire employees who could innovate and build on each other’s work — even after elections ended. Since 2004, Democrats have founded 67 firms and organizations dedicated to digital campaigning and data analytics, while former Republican staffers founded 13.³(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-scorning-of-data-may-not-hurt-him-but-itll-hurt-the-gop/#fn-3) These firms apply their expertise down the ballot by providing services to Democratic gubernatorial, Senate and House candidates, all of whom work from the same dataset.

Democrats now hold a substantial expertise advantage in digital data-driven campaigning, and the GOP admitted as much in their 2012 election post-mortem. John McCain hired only 15 data staffers in 2008, compared with Obama’s 131. To his credit, Mitt Romney increased the number of data hires to 87 in 2012. (Obama had 342). In 2016, Republicans were positioned to build on this effort and narrow the analysis gap between the parties, pivoting off of two consecutive losses into an innovative data strategy — just like in 1964 and 2004.

But Republicans seem set to squander the opportunity. Trump currently employs as few as two staffers dedicated to data, according to reports. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request to confirm the number of staffers it has devoted to data.) The Republican Party has not consolidated data as Democrats did, instead relying on “a jumble of firms not always working in concert.” Independent firms such as i360, funded by the Koch brothers, have not integrated with the party database.

Meanwhile, Democratic consolidation and expertise building continues. Hillary Clinton set out to assemble a data team three times the size of Obama’s formidable 2012 operation. Several members of her digital and analytics leadership team worked for Civis Analytics, BlueLabs, and Blue State Digital⁴(http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-scorning-of-data-may-not-hurt-him-but-itll-hurt-the-gop/#fn-4) — all firms founded by former Obama or Dean employees. After this election, win or lose, Clinton’s data staff will be positioned to bring their expertise back to these companies or found new ones while Republicans continue to chase the data advantage they wasted after 2004.

Listen to our podcast special on the history of political data in U.S. elections.

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NOTE later worked together, rev dr rnc and i360: pa, ohio, n caro and fla but down ballot?

Most recently, party leaders have been in a tussle with the Koch network over a voter-data operation, i360, controlled by the Kochs that operates outside the party structure but is used by many Republican candidates who find it superior to the party’s data platform. The bad news for the party is that the data collected on those candidates’ behalf is not shared with the Republican National Committee; it stays within the Koch-linked operation. (Kenneth P. Vogel and Mike Allen have goods on the GOP data wars here.)

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13025/cmd-and-crew-allege-koch-backed-group-broke-law

Trees of Liberty, a dark money non-profit financed and operated by the Koch political network, broke the law in helping Joni Ernst win her primary election in 2014, according to a complaint filed today by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Trees of Liberty was set up by veteran Koch network political operatives a few months after Ernst appeared at a Koch donor retreat, and started running ads in Iowa within a week of its creation. Despite spending almost all of its budget to attack Ernst's primary opponent, Mark Jacobs, the group claimed on its tax filings with the IRS that it did not engage in political activity in 2014. Making false statements on a signed form to the IRS was a criminal violation. Additionally, Trees of Liberty violated its tax-exempt status by engaging primarily in political activity for the private benefit of now-Sen. Joni Ernst and the Koch network, the complaint alleges.

"Trees of Liberty appears to have violated the law the in three ways: the group misled the IRS by claiming it was not involved in political activity, engaged in more political activity than allowed and operated for the private interests of Sen. Ernst and the Koch political network," CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said. "Any one of these violations should be enough for the IRS to act on; taken together, they overwhelmingly support the need for investigation and vigorous enforcement."

Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, often referred to as "the Koch brothers’ secret bank," provided $400,000 of the $440,000 the group raised.The group then spent $412,000—an incredible 94% of its expenditures—on "advertising campaigns on television, radio and online," most of which benefited Ernst. Over $346,000 of Trees of Liberty’s budget was paid to i360, a data analyst and ad buying firm described as the "Koch data mine."

"The Koch network is effectively a political party, and Trees of Liberty is operating to advance the Koch party's interests, rather than anything resembling 'social welfare,'" said Brendan Fischer, Center for Media and Democracy's General Counsel. "The evidence shows that the Koch network secretly used Trees of Liberty to play a decisive role in a primary election, but the American people may never get a full accounting of how much the Kochs are spending on primaries this presidential election year, or what they get in return."

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http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/ted-cruz-campaign-hires-dirty.html

Cruz used dirty data-miners that harvested info on millions of Facebook users

Cambridge Analytica is an obscure data-mining company funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer (Cruz's main financial backer). Cambridge Analytica created "psychographic profiles" of millions of Facebook users by scraping their personal data without their knowledge or permission.

The Cruz campaign has paid Cambridge Analytica $750,000 so far, while Mercer-funded super-PACs have given Cambridge a further $2.5M over the past two years.

Cambridge Analytica refused to answer any questions from the press about its research methodologies, and hung up on a Guardian reporter when he phoned for a comment. According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Cambridge paid Mechanical Turk pieceworkers turn over data from their Facebook accounts, including data on their friends, aiming to collect the personal information of every American user of the service. Facebook also declined to comment on the story.

The academic used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights.

This was achieved by recruiting MTurk users by paying them about one dollar to take a personality questionnaire that gave access to their Facebook profiles. This raised the alarm among some participants, who flagged Kogan for violating MTurk’s terms of service. “They want you to log into Facebook and then download a bunch of your information,” complained one user at the time.

Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends

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series dark money and big data

http://www.propublica.org/series/buying-your-vote

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--

http://littlesis.org/partypolitics

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online tracking, ad targeting, online campaigns

checks and bal stealth coal

...

The bizarre but memorable video was bankrolled by America's Liberty, a super-PAC supporting Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). It was just a taste of what's coming in the 2016 race, when memes, GIFs, and other social-media catnip will blanket the internet. As the race heats up, every device you own, from your laptop to your Apple Watch, will become a delivery vehicle for all manner of political messaging. And you may never know which billionaire players or dark-money groups are targeting you—or how they're tracking you.

The amount of spending on digital advertising is expected to nearly double in this election cycle compared with 2012. Online spots cost a fraction of traditional TV or print ads, and political operatives are giddy over the new-and-improved ways to cheaply and creatively bombard voters with their messages. Larry Grisolano, who oversaw paid advertising efforts for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, predicts that the 2016 presidential nominees likely will devote nearly a quarter of their ad-buy budgets to digital media. Considering that each side could spend more than $2 billion to get into the White House, that's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for grabbing eyeballs.

...

Yet while political advertisers will know a lot about you, you may know very little about them. Due to paralyzed federal watchdogs and antiquated campaign finance rules that didn't anticipate the explosion of digital politicking, there is virtually no oversight of online ads. When it comes to old-fashioned print and TV political ads, the rules are simple: The candidate or organization paying for them must be disclosed. With online ads, there's a major loophole: A disclaimer is required only if someone pays to place an ad on a website. No disclosure is required for material that is posted on a campaign site nor for videos or images that can be distributed freely via social media. In other words, an attack ad can find its way onto YouTube or get retweeted or liked a million times without anyone knowing who made it.

...

Last fall, the FEC had an opportunity to update its rules when it took up a case involving a dark-money group called Checks and Balances for Economic Growth. During the 2012 election, this outfit created ads attacking Obama's coal policies but never reported any spending related to the creation of these clips, which were posted on YouTube. Instead of clarifying the rules, the FEC, which includes three Democratic commissioners and three Republican ones, may have ended up making the matter even murkier. The commission deadlocked on the question of whether to mount a full-scale probe to determine if the group violated election rules. The three Republican commissioners agreed with Checks and Balances that a YouTube video should not be regulated as paid political advertising—then used the case to stoke fears that the Democratic commissioners wanted to censor blogs, parody videos, perhaps even the Drudge Report.

Early this year, Republican FEC Commissioner Lee Goodman penned a *Wall Street Journal* op-ed accusing his liberal colleagues of seeking to clamp down on harmless grassroots political expression. "Free and low-cost Internet postings are not corrupting because no large expenditures of money are necessary," he argued. He also claimed there is no way to distinguish online political discourse from paid messaging. "The specter of government agents reviewing the thousands of daily online political posts is as impractical as it is ominous," he wrote....

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/digital-political-election-ads-dark-money

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see AT&T NSA

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http://grist.org/politics/judge-demands-tech-companies-hand-activist-data-over-to-chevron/

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Keystone XL Activists Labeled Possible Eco-Terrorists in Internal TransCanada Documents

By Steve Horn

Documents recently obtained :{by :(style="letter-spacing:0.03em"):}:*Bold Nebraska* show that TransCanada - owner of the hotly-contested Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline - has colluded with an FBI/DHS Fusion Center in Nebraska, labeling non-violent activists as possible candidates for "terrorism" charges and other serious criminal charges.

Further, the language in some of the documents is so vague that it could also ensnare journalists, researchers and academics, as well.

TransCanada also built a roster of names and photos of specific individuals involved in organizing against the pipeline, including 350.org's Rae Breaux, Rainforest Action Network's Scott Parkin and Tar Sands Blockade's Ron Seifert. Further, every activist ever arrested protesting the pipeline's southern half is listed by name with their respective photo shown, along with the date of arrest.

It's**PSYOPs-gate** and "fracktivists" as "an insurgency" all over again, but this time it's another central battleground that's in play: the northern half of KXL, a proposed border-crossing pipeline whose final fate lies in the hands of President Barack Obama.

The southern half of the pipeline was approved by the Obama Admin. via a March 2013 Executive Order. Together, the two pipeline halves would pump diluted bitumen ("dilbit") south from the Alberta tar sands toward Port Arthur, TX, where it will be refined and shipped to the global export market.

Activists across North America have put up a formidable fight against both halves of the pipeline, ranging from the summer 2011 *Tar Sands Action* to the ongoing *Tar Sands Blockade*. Apparently, TransCanada has followed the action closely, given the level of detail in the documents.

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http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/01/obama-food-resilience-climate-change-data-microsoft-amazon-monsanto

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raytheon RIOT scrapes soc networks http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15817&printsafe=1

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salon: Imagine cows fed and milked entirely by robots. Or tomatoes that send an e-mail when they need more water. Or a farm where all the decisions about where to plant seeds, spray fertilizer and steer tractors are made by software on servers on the other side of the sea.

This is what more and more of our agriculture may come to look like in the years ahead, as farming meets Big Data. There’s no shortage of farmers and industry gurus who think this kind of “smart” farming could bring many benefits. Pushing these tools onto fields, the idea goes, will boost our ability to control this fiendishly unpredictable activity and help farmers increase yields even while using fewer resources.

The big question is who exactly will end up owning all this data, and who gets to determine how it is used. On one side stand some of the largest corporations in agriculture, who are racing to gather and put their stamp on as much of this information as they can. Opposing them are farmers’ groups and small open-source technology start-ups, which want to ensure a farm’s data stays in the farmer’s control and serves the farmer’s interests.

Who wins will determine not just who profits from the information, but who, at the end of the day, directs life and business on the farm.

One recent round in this battle took place in October, when Monsanto spent close to $1 billion to buy the Climate Corporation, a data analytics firm. Last year the chemical and seed company also bought Precision Planting, another high-tech firm, and also launched a venture capital arm geared to fund tech start-ups.

In November, John Deere and DuPont Pioneer announced plans to partner to provide farmers information and prescriptions in near-real time. Deere has pioneered “precision farming” equipment in recent years, equipping tractors and combines to automatically transmit data collected from particular farms to company databases. DuPont, meanwhile, has rolled out a service that analyzes data into “actionable management strategies.”

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grover had db to track in terms of K Street

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this am life casino "hosts' have extensive records: my life depends on you coming; we have you X and you did not lose enough 7/13/13 other story http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/466/transcript

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Global Post [1] / By Angus West [2]

11 Shocking Things Snowden Has Taught Us (So Far)

July 9, 2013 |

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost [1].

[1]1) Can you hear me now?

The Guardian [3] reported on June 6 that, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the Obama administration enabled the National Security Agency to collect caller information from Verizon through a “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, established under President George W. Bush. The government ordered Verizon to hand over call information on a daily basis, including the time, location and duration of calls. The Bush administration began collecting such information in October 2001 from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, which USA Today reported in 2006.

The consequence:

While US officials sought to reassure the public that such surveillance was legal and part of an ongoing program vital to national security, many Americans called the domestic spying an unnecessary invasion of privacy and lamented that it was even legal in the first place. A national debate quickly erupted.

2) Yes we scan

Snowden also leaked a secret 41-slide PowerPoint presentation [4] apparently used to train US intelligence personnel. The slides detail the NSA’s involvement in a then-clandestine program called PRISM.

PRISM is the NSA effort to collect massive amounts of data from internet companies such as email content, search histories and file transfers tied to potential terrorism or espionage suspects. The PowerPoint presentation confirmed that the NSA is able to directly access the servers of “major US service providers,” describing collaboration with tech companies like YouTube, Skype, Google and Apple. Google, Apple, and others in the tech industry, however, denied awareness of the program.

PRISM began in 2007 with Microsoft and expanded to include Apple in 2012. To be subject toPRISM surveillance, there need only be “reasonable suspicion” that one of the suspects is outside the United States. Unlike the Verizon court-ordered collaboration, the government can access live information, photos, video chats and data from social networks directly through the companies’ servers without required consent or individual court orders. One slide puts the cost of the program at $20 million per year.

The consequence:

Domestically, PRISM was criticized for its ability to collect data on US citizens unintentionally. Also, the revelations coincided with a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama, adding tension to an already heated dialogue over cyber-espionage between the two countries. The summit in California was focused on US accusations of Chinese cyberattacks; but the US had little credibility in the wake of the Snowden leaks. China was adamant that it too was the victim of US attacks. EU countries were also brought into the mix, and European citizens now worry they have been spied upon through the PRISM program.

3) Boundless Informant

Boundless Informant is a tool that allows the NSA to compile and track the “metadata” it collects around the world. In the month of March alone, nearly 3 billion pieces of information were collected from US networks and 97 billion pieces worldwide,the Guardian [5] reported on June 8.

A “global heat map” sorts the intelligence sources by country, type, and volume, allowing quick analysis of which countries are most targeted, as well as when the information was gathered. The program is reviewed periodically, according to the documents, with operators able to make recommendations for future improvement.

The consequence:

Boundless Informant proved that despite assurances to Congress to the contrary, the NSA does keep track of the surveillance it performs on US citizens. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, defended the government’s use of the PRISM program and condemned “reckless disclosures” of its details by media. It was the first time Clapper named the program publicly. The intelligence director now faces criticism that he misled Congress when he earlier said the NSA did not have the tools to assess the extent of information gathered on US citizens. Clapper remains adamant that any information gathered on US citizens is “unwitting,” rather than the result of targeted surveillance.

4) The United States is hacking China

Snowden, speaking with The South China Morning Post [6], gave his first press interview with an outlet other than the Guardian after revealing himself as the source of the leaks on June 12. He said he would stay in Hong Kong until he is “asked to leave,” and said that he took up his previous role as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton with the intent of disseminating state secrets. (Snowden would later fly to Moscow and initiate asylum applications with more than 20 countries, many of them denied.) Snowden also told the South China Morning Post that the NSA has been hacking mainland Chinese and Hong Kong computers since 2009. He claimed the NSA hacked networks at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, home to the Hong Kong Internet Exchange and Hong Kong’s main terminal for all internet traffic.

The consequence:

Snowden’s statements hardened the standoff between China and the United States over hacking. Hong Kong Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok announced that the Hong Kong Internet Exchange has been monitored but appears unaffected, while Chinese University announced that it has not found evidence of hacking on its servers.

The domestic debate in the United States began to reach a fever pitch. A Gallup Poll conducted between June 10 and June 11 placed support among Americans for Snowden’s actions at 44 percent, while 42 percent said his actions were wrong. Still, the poll found that 57 percent of respondents did not support the NSA’s surveillance programs as outlined in the leaked documents, while 37 percent approved.

5) Britain targets G20 members

Another PowerPoint presentation leaked on June 16 outlines how the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s equivalent to the NSA, used real-time surveying of delegates’ phone communications at the G20 Summit in 2009. The intent of the surveillance was to gain diplomatic advantage at the meetings, which came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. British officials could obtain real-time readings of calls made by targeted persons and read their emails without notice.

There is specific mention in the slides of targeting “the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party,” according to the Guardian [7]. The slides suggest “senior level” members of government in Gordon Brown’s administration, Britain’s prime minister at the time, were aware of the intelligence gathering and that the information “was passed to British ministers.” The presentation also alludes to such covert techniques being neither unprecedented nor unique.

The consequence:

The revelations incited ire from Russia, Turkey and South Africa, all of which had diplomats directly targeted at various times during the summit. While there is consensus that many countries engage in similar acts of espionage, the publicity was nonetheless damaging to the UK government’s reputation. The news added to mounting concern in the international community about links between UK’s GCHQ and the NSA’s PRISM program.

6) NSA procedures

On June 20, the Guardian revealed two more documents obtained by Snowden (viewable here [8]and here [9]). Signed by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009, the documents shed light on procedures sanctioned by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. According to the documents, the NSA can keep (and make use of) information inadvertently gathered on US citizens for a period of up to five years — without a warrant — but only if the information is deemed to be relevant in preventing national security threats or to aid further investigations. The information can be sent to allied governments or foreign organizations, so long as the person’s identity is anonymous.

The consequence:

While the documents outline the circumstances the NSA must destroy data collected from US citizens, as well as the rigorous steps analysts are supposed to take to make sure a target is outside the United States, they also reveal several ways the NSA can continue to use data collected on US citizens. The revelations appear to contradict statements by Obama and others that the NSA cannot access data on US citizens without a warrant.

Patrick McFarland, inspector general for the US Office of Personnel Management, meanwhile, announced an ongoing probe into whether a proper background check was conducted before Snowden was given a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information-level clearance.

The investigation focused on the operations of US Investigations Services (USIS), a Virginia-based information and security company employed by the government to conduct background checks. US government officials came under fire during a Senate subcommittee hearing investigating why the NSA hired Snowden despite discrepancies on his resume. Booz Allen Hamilton noted potential issues but failed to act and USIS, which screened Snowden for his government security clearance before his work with Booz Allen Hamilton, was similarly unsuccessful in acting on any suspicous elements.

7) Friends who hack together stay together

The Guardian revealed slides [10] on June 21 created by the UK’s GCHQ with titles like “Mastering the Internet” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation.” The slides outline Tempora, an 18-month-old program the GCHQ uses to store metadata for up to 30 days and content data for up to three days, allowing the agency to sift through reams of information legally.

The documents show the extent to which the GCHQ has been able to tap 200 fiber-optic cables laid beneath the Atlantic Ocean, potentially accessing over “21 petabytes of communications data a day.”

The slides indicate that private companies are required to give GCHQ discreet access to tap the cables. The United Kingdom shared that information with the NSA beginning in 2011, giving the US spy agency unlimited access to GCHQ data. The slides show that “850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.”

The consequence:

Officials and private citizens raised concerns on both sides of the Atlantic that there is insufficient oversight and limited restrictions on the UK’s fiber-optic surveillance system. The close-knit relationship between the US and UK intelligence agencies, as well as the NSA’s unfiltered access to Britain’s world-leading cyber-surveillance stores, came under heightened scrutiny. Some diplomats worried that the revelations could negatively impact EU-US trade discussions, and that China-US cybersecurity talks, already on a tentative footing, could suffer as well.

8) NSA targets China’s largest research hub and major telecommunications provider

Speaking to The South China Morning Post [11], Snowden said on June 23 that the NSA has hacked into computer networks at Tsinghua University an unknown number of times. Snowden said on a single day in January 63 computers and servers were hacked. Snowden argued that the internal and external IP addresses he disclosed could only come from hacking or physical access to the computers.

The facility at Tsinghua University is one of six backbone networks that comprise the China Education and Research Network (CERNET), through which internet data for millions of Chinese can be accessed. The system was the first of its kind and is now the largest national research hub in the world. It is owned by the Ministry of Education and maintained by the university and other colleges.

The South China Morning Post [12] also published the allegation from Snowden that US agents hacked the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, a privately-owned company that provides the majority of fiber-optic cables in the Asia Pacific and has stations across the region. Most Pacnet cables bring internet connections to and from the United States, where some of the world’s largest cloud computing and internet search engines are based.

The consequence:

Following Snowden’s latest revelations, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs created a new office for handling “diplomatic activities involving cyber security.” Chinese diplomats said China has been the victim of US hacking many times before, and that the issue would be discussed as part of a US-China “strategic and security dialogue.” Despite concerns that the issue could derail any progress diffusing tension over cybersecurity issues, talks between the two countries were set to continue.

9) Fail-safe switch

Glenn Greenwald [13], the Guardian journalist who received Snowden’s first leak, told The Daily Beast that the rest of Snowden’s files have been disseminated around the world. If something unforeseen befalls Snowden, Greenwald reported, more information will inevitably be leaked.

Greenwald said that though the still-secret documents are encrypted, Snowden has made arrangements for the passwords to reach those with the files if he is unable to access them himself.

Greenwald also said Snowden gave him many more documents than those so far released and believes Snowden has even more on top of that. The documents are said to be stored on four laptops in Snowden’s possession. Greenwald said he does not wish to publish any details of the NSA’s surveillance systems that could foster or enable security breaches, nor does Snowden.

The consequence:

The fact that Snowden made multiple copies of the classified intelligence he carries created renewed angst among US officials. New questions were raised as to whether the US intelligence community can adequately stem the current leak and prevent future breaches from occurring.

10) NSA surveils Europe

German news magazine Der Spiegel [14] revealed on June 29 it had seen part of a 2010 document, obtained by Snowden, showing that the NSA spied on European citizens and EU officials.

The document reportedly specifies Europeans as a “location target,” with Germans singled out as a major focus of US eavesdropping. The document also mentions telecommunications hacking — first reported by EU officials five years ago — of the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council at the Justus Lipsius Building in Brussels. Calls from an NSA-occupied building at the NATO headquarters outside of Brussells, according to the document, were traced to the Lipsius Building.

The consequence:

Europeans erupted in anger over the new allegations. German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said: “If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War.”

Grievences with the US surveillance program were particularly evident in Germany where, after a frank conversation between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Obama during his visit to Berlin earlier in the month, cybersecurity was a hot topic.

11) Dozens of embassies hacked

On July 1, The Guardian [15] revealed a 2007 document that named 38 embassies and missions that were “targets” of US surveillance, including the EU embassy in Washington and its mission in New York.

It was unclear, according to The Guardian, whether those on the list were targets of the NSA only, or if agencies like the CIA and FBI were also watching them. The document described bugging fax machines with listening devices and listed the names of programs like “Wabash,” an operation directed at the French embassy in Washington.

The list of countries targeted was not limited to EU members or the traditional enemies of the United States, but instead includes the likes of India and Mexico, as well as Greece and Turkey. Gaining insider knowledge of diplomatic relations between the targeted states and the United States was the primary goal of the targeted surveillance, The Guardian reported.

The consequence:

The intelligence leak may have jeopardized the largest attempted free trade agreement in the world, with negotiations between the EU and United States set to begin on July 8 in Washington, DC on a new free trade pact. French President Francois Hollande made public his anger over the covert operations, saying that any future negotiations will be contingent on the United States ceasing all unauthorized surveillance of EU buildings and personnel. US officials have tried to smooth over the dispute, but the success of the trade agreement may still hang in the balance.

See more stories tagged with:

ed snowden [16]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/11-disturbing-things-snowden-has-taught-us-so-far

==

Judge demands tech companies hand activist data over to Chevron

By Susie Cagle

Hey kids, it’s a cool new update from your favorite horror show, The Surveillance State!

This week’s episode features multinational oil giant Chevron, 100-plus activists, and basic American civil liberties. Who do you think might win?!

Chevron is attempting to defend itself against a pesky $18 billion-plus judgment for its dirty dealing in the Ecuador rainforest. In the company’s appeal against the landmark judgment, a federal judge in New York has upheld a subpoena from Chevron seeking IP addresses and identity records of people allegedly tied to the investigation. From EarthRights International:

The sweeping subpoena was one of three issued to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, demanding IP usage records and identity information for the holders of more than 100 email accounts, including environmental activists, journalists and attorneys. Chevron’s subpoena sought personal information about every account holder and the IP addresses associated with every login to each account over a nine-year period.

This could allow Chevron to determine the countries, states, cities or even buildings where the account-holders were checking their email so as to “infer the movements of the users over the relevant period and might permit Chevron to makes inferences about some of the user’s professional and personal relationships.”

The court’s logic is that maybe the First Amendment doesn’t apply to these anonymous people, because maybe they aren’t U.S. citizens — because, you know, we don’t know who they are because they are anonymous.

Of course this isn’t the first time Chevron has lobbed subpoenas at its critics in this case, and it’s also certainly not the first time the feds have assisted in some serious eco-creepin. In this case, the judge’s logic is similar to the slippery explanation the National Security Agency and President Obama have used to defend the federal PRISM dragnet. But here’s the thing about a dragnet: It can catch up everything in its path, whether or not that thing is a U.S. citizen with constitutional rights.

This shouldn’t just give activists pause — it should give us all a little (more!) motivation to protect ourselves and our data. If you are interested in speaking out against multinational energy giants with lots of lawyers, I would suggest checking out this handy digital security guide from Micah Lee at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

==

Unless you’ve been holed up in a tree-sit somewhere, you’re likely intimately familiar with the NSA’s mammoth Prism internet dragnet ops. Well now, The Guardian‘s Earth Insight blogger, Nafeez Ahmed,presents this epic connect-the-dots game detailing how paranoid the feds are about how climate change and its attendant calamities could disrupt the national political equilibrium — paranoia that could easily drive them to use their sweet spy gadgets to keep a watchful eye on green groups.

The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA’s global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.

This is so not what we meant when we said these issues were urgent, people!

Ahmed points to piles of documents that suggest that federal agencies are growing ever-more nervous about the havoc climate change might wreak on national security, while at the same time also growing ever-more suspicious of citizens who are working to stop environmental destruction. We already kind of knew this: Activists from Tim DeChristopher to the Keystone XL blockaders have been locked up, smeared as terrorists, and even barred from participating in activism. But Ahmed makes a pretty convincing case that this may well be the tip of the iceberg.

FBI documents confirmed “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” designed to produce intelligence on behalf of “the corporate security community.” A [Partnership for Civil Justice Fund] spokesperson remarked that the documents show “federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People’s Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace.

Sound a little implausible? Well it’s not to 350.org, Greenpeace USA, and CREDO Action, all of which have joined theStopWatchingUs coalition in protesting the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of Facebook protest selfies and G-chats.

To add ecological insult to creepy surveillance injury, that massive churning NSA dragnet “spy center” south of Salt Lake City where the government plans to store all this information? The one that will require a colossal and constant stream of 65 megawatts of electricity? It will be mostly coal-powered, natch.

http://grist.org/politics/the-feds-get-seriously-creepy-about-climate-change/

hodad:

occupy phoenix

20

Brenda the Facebook Queen

Stalking Discontented Citizens Through the

Internet Data Mine, Christmas TLO alerts and

Tiananmen Square-Tested Facial Recognition

Technology

see also ppD:

What’s more, records obtained by DBA/CMD disclose that these off-duty officers were given a “face sheet” containing photographs of 24 “persons of interest to the ALEC conference.” This list of “persons of interest” consisted of members of Occupy Phoenix, members of Phoenix Cop Watch (an organization that monitors police actions, often at protestor events), anarchists (including two Phoenix area musicians), a prison reform activist (who had been a vocal opponent of prison privatization in Arizona), and a Quaker street medic-- Odhner. The fact that Odhner’s driver’s license photo and other identifying information were contained on this “face sheet” may go a long way toward explaining the medics’ false arrest and handcuffed stay in a squad car during the height of the November 30 ALEC protest (Appendix, p. 247).

Records indicate that PPD officers supplied with this “face sheet” were given strict orders to destroy their copies of the “face sheet” after each shift.

[Note: it appears that the driver’s license numbers, or possibly social security numbers, of activists may have also been provided on the ALEC “face sheet.” Below each photograph (23 out of the 24 photographs are driver’s license/state identification card photos) is a single line of information, approximately the length of a driver’s license or social security number. What information was contained in these lines is unknown, as the lines were redacted by PPDHDB in a copy of the “face sheet” provided to DBA/CMD per a public records request. This is significant to note, as Odhner was only advised that he was under arrest and detained in the squad car after the off-duty officer employed by ALEC/Kierland radioed in and...

red lettering and the photographs themselves are framed in red).

Five of these individuals were members of a group known in the Phoenix activist community as the “Arpaio Five,” a group of protestors who were arrested on charges of assaulting police and weapons use during a January, 2010 protest against what many perceive to be the racially-motivated immigration enforcement practices of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Despite the fact that the ALEC “face sheet” claimed these individuals had assaulted police officers, none of the Arpaio Five were convicted of assault; three of the five had either been found not guilty, or had charges against them dismissed. The remaining two had accepted plea agreements on charges of disorderly conduct.

The sixth individual in this top row of persons proclaimed to have “committed assault on police officers” was Dane Rossman. Rossman had been arrested on multiple counts of assault and use of dangerous weapons (having allegedly thrown rocks) during a November, 2010 counter protest of a National Socialist Movement (NSM, an American neo-Nazi group) “Reclaim the Southwest” march in Phoenix. The purpose of this neo-Nazi march was to protest federal injunctions issued against portions of SB 1070 at that time.

Interestingly, the initial charges against Rossman were “scratched” by prosecutors shortly following his arrest. This “scratching” of felony charges is an Arizona legal phenomenon wherein a prosecutor can “scratch,” or temporarily dismiss, a felony charge/charges-- while reserving the right to resurrect the charge/charges at any time within seven years from the date of “scratching.”

According to court records, a grand jury returned an indictment against Rossman on September 28, 2011, at which point, Maricopa County Superior Court issued a warrant for his arrest. Court records show that this warrant was not executed until November 21-- a week prior to the launch of the 2011 ALEC SNPS.

Rossman accepted a plea agreement for the lesser charge of felony disorderly conduct in July, 2012.

[Note: Rossman was arrested in February, 2013 by the U.S. Marshals Service pursuant to a Canadian indictment. According to court documents, Rossman is alleged to have “smashed” the window of a Toronto business during a June, 2010 G-20 protest. As such, Canadian authorities charged Rossman with “mischief,” “mischief endangering life,” and “disguise with intent to commit an indictable offense” (Rossman was allegedly wearing a bandana when he allegedly smashed the window). In April, 2013 a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona ordered Rossman be extradited to Canada.]

Multiple activists involved in the planning of the ALEC SNPS protest interviewed by DBA/CMD stated that neither Rossman, nor any member of the “Arpaio Five,” took part in the planning, or execution, of the November 30, 2011 ALEC protest at the Westin Kierland. It is also worth noting that none of the 16 other activists listed on the ALEC “face sheet” had warrants, or were accused of having committed any violent crime, at the time of the ALEC conference protest.

 ===

see sunlight and various civic transparency dataviz tools eg

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/05/anomaly-tracker.html

===

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cf Jaron's new book

==

Karl Rove, Koch brothers lead charge to control Republican data

By: Kenneth P. Vogel and Maggie Haberman

April 22, 2013 05:04 AM EDT 

The GOP didn’t have an answer for Big Democratic Data in 2012, costing them in close races from Congress to the White House.

Now, they’ve got lots of answers — possibly too many — and a feisty rivalry is brewing between tea party upstarts, nonpartisan data geeks, operatives linked to the Koch brothers and insiders like Karl Rove.

Instead of fighting Democrats, the right’s would-be data wizards are going after each other with claims of cronyism and incompetence, as well as cutthroat bidding wars and threats of legal action.

(PHOTOS: Republican money men)

This isn’t just about who can hire the most young IT programmers, create the slickest app to optimize door-knocking routes or stave off a repeat of the Election Day collapse of Mitt Romney’s ORCA system.

Rather, in a very real way, it’s about who controls the party through its most precious asset — its voter data — and the multimillion-dollar contracts that could follow.

Rovehas begun soliciting donors for a $15 million-plus data project. There are competing systems being offered by a pair of twin brothers. And a programmer who helped start the dominant Democratic voter data system is pitching a copycat setup for Republicans.

The Republican National Committee is encouraging the intramural competition and,at the same time, pushing a data management system of its own.

(Also on POLITICO: DSCC outraises NRSC by $2 million)

“I would hope that the pressure and the desire to win is so great that people will really try to get the best product that is truly going to solve the problem and not just make their decisions based on who has the best connections,” said conservative data entrepreneur Ned Ryun.

Rove earlier this month spoke with major donors in New York about a voter data project that he has estimated could cost between $15 million and $20 million. He has been working with San Francisco-based private-equity investor Dick Boyce, who is fronting a political data concept called Liberty Works, sources tell POLITICO.

The public relationship between Rove and Boyce has been complicated, according to several sources familiar with the project. Rove has openly embraced Boyce’s work, touting it at an invitation-only conference that drew some of the GOP’s biggest names to a swanky Georgia resort in March. But Boyce has established distance from Rove, indicating to prospective donors that he’s not simply a front for the latest project from the Rove-conceived Crossroads groups, which sponsored one of Rove’s New York meetings this month.

(Also on POLITICO: Obama political arm strikes fear in GOP)

Likewise, Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio, called Liberty Works a “stand-alone” effort.

Meanwhile, POLITICO has learned that a voter database outfit called Themis, established by the political network associated with David and Charles Koch, has been working with an established private political data company calledi360. The partnership seems to give Koch World, which until recently had mostly focused on conservative issue advocacy, new reach into Republican Party politics.

On its website, i360 boasts of maintaining a constantly updated database of over 187 million active voters and over 211 million consumers that “provides hundreds of data points on every American adult that is currently or potentially politically active.”

It’s unclear when the Themis relationship began, but since 2010,  i360 has worked for Republican candidates and committees ranging from Reps. Diane Black and Tom Cottonto unsuccessful 2012 candidates Allen West, Josh Mandel and Tim Pawlenty, the Maine Republican Party, and a pro-Rick Perry super PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Themis — which cost at least $18 million to build in 2010 and 2011, according to recent tax filings — was used in 2012 by Koch-backed nonprofit groups such as Americans for Prosperity to contact millions of voters through phone calls and door-knocks in the run-up to Election Day.

Some critics grumbled about Themis’s performance, and POLITICO has learned that operatives have held post-election meetings on how to utilize it more effectively.

A representative from Koch Industries declined to comment on the record, but a person familiar with the situation said “Koch remains committed to Themis and their technology.”

Multiple sources said that Boyce’s effort has collided with Themis, adding to the rivalry between two of the deepest-pocketed factions in conservative politics — Crossroads and the Koch political operation.

Lighter-weight groups also have made some in-roads into the wide-open conservative data landscape.

Last year, Ned Ryun and his twin brother Drew, in a partnership between their American Majority Action nonprofit and a company called Political Gravity, rolled out a voter data interface called Gravity that helped customers ranging from victorious Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz to the tea party group FreedomWorks.

But the brothers have since split. Drew left American Majority, and they launched competing firms after Election Day.

The Ryuns are “type double As” who have been “competing all our lives,” said Drew Ryun, whose new company, Surge Data Tech, is among a handful of voter data firms pitching state Republican parties.

“Free market competition leads to innovation,” he said. “The conundrum will be when innovation is outside the purview of GOP consultants and therefore their bank accounts.”

Ned Ryun’s firm Voter Gravity is courting campaigns directly, and this month fired off a cease-and-desist letter to a new GOP consulting firm called MGA Holdings founded by a pair of former operatives for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican Governors Association demanding that the new firm stop using the name Gravity-N for its data tool.

MGA Holdings — which says it intends to drop the use of the name Gravity-N — hopes to bring together data streams across a wide array of platforms, including potentially using applications from other companies. Co-founder Alex Skatell, who was digital director for the NRSC and the RGA, says the more, the merrier.

“It’s encouraging that there are others out there willing to put the time, energy and investment into working towards solutions,” he said.

The RNC in its post-election autopsy announced it would seek to facilitate the competition by allowing approved software platforms, candidates and groups to directly access a revamped version of its once-vaunted voter file through the Data Trust database created in 2011 with support from Crossroads.

But it’s also quietly pushed state parties to sign onto a voter data management system — GOP Data Center — created around the same time, which some conservative data entrepreneurs outside the party structure see as stifling competition.

Republicans know what they don’t want: another ORCA — the voter-mobilization system built by Romney’s campaign, which was crippled by balky interfaces that volunteers couldn’t navigate and cataclysmic Election Day crashes.

What they do want is a matter of debate.

Establishment types worry that a truly open data environment could empower tea party candidates and groups to use the GOP’s data to defeat incumbents in Republican primaries, while groups and firms that cater to the base worry that the RNC will shut them out.

The nightmare scenario for many on the right has Data Trust, the Kochs and possibly operatives like Rove and the Ryun brothers building their own competing voter files, creating a money vacuum that could produce conflicting or overlapping data and further splinter the conservative movement.

Democrats built their voter data advantage partly because their data is more centralized. A few well-connected firms like Catalist and NGP VAN have earned de facto endorsements from the Democratic establishment and used those blessings to build near monopolies on the left. As a result, Democratic candidates and liberal interest groups have benefited from enhancing and sharing the same data through the same interfaces.

“That came as a result of a competitive marketplace where there were five or six players, and, over time, over half the states decided that they thought VAN was the superior product, and then the [Democratic National Committee] stepped in and expanded the NGP VAN contract to 50 states,” said Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN.

Trevelyan rejected criticism that his company has stifled competition or been slow to innovate, saying, “we continue to provide more innovation than anyone on the Republican side.”

Bruce Willsie, the president of a nonpartisan data firm called Labels & Lists, said there’s no clear answer about what’s better.

“On the plus side, the competition may be healthy and result in better technology and data,” said Willsie, whose company in 2012 was paid $68,000 by conservative and liberal candidates and committees ranging from unions to FreedomWorks, according to FEC reports. “On the minus side, the lack of coordination may introduce inefficiencies.”

NGP VAN’s dominance could make Democrats susceptible to losing their data edge, suggested Jim Gilliam of the nonpartisan firm NationBuilder. It was started by liberals but has recently made inroads with GOP groups, drawing fire from NGP VAN and liberal activists suggesting Democrats should be wary about doing business with firms that play both sides.

“I believe the choose-a-side card is in its last days,” Gilliam said. “The competition is definitely going to help, not hinder the Republicans. It will encourage a bit more of an open ecosystem as they will need to share data.”

Steve Adler, a Rhode Island programmer who helped start one of the companies that became NGP VAN, has switched sides and developed a parallel system for Republicans called rVotes.

Adler’s company has had meetings or calls to present its system to some of the most influential Republican data consultants — from the Romney campaign’s digital gurus Zac Moffatt and Michael Beach (who got a demonstration in the spring of 2011) to the RNC (first back in 2009 and again in March, when he pitched to chief of staff Mike Shields and top adviser Jeff Larson) to Rove (who talked with an rVotes supporter after the election).

Despite the meetings, Adler says there’s a reluctance among GOP bigwigs to award data contracts to anyone who’s not part of the insider Beltway consultant class. “They just don’t know what they’re doing,” Adler charged, adding “They’re not qualified.”

As for his efforts to get traction for rVotes among Washington’s GOP elite, he said, “It’s like trying to sell beauty products to ugly people, but they’re blind, so they don’t know that they’re ugly.”

His company failed to land any big federal or state GOP contracts last year, with federal records showing rVotes earned only $18,000 in 2012 mostly from longshot or tea party congressional candidates such as Will Cardon of Arizona, Barry Hinckley of Rhode Island and Jamie Radtke of Virginia.

Moreover, Adler says there’s little incentive for consultants to let anyone else try their hand, since “even though they’ve failed, they succeeded, because they still made money off of ORCA and Data Trust.”

To wit, the companies that handled the bulk of the data business for Romney’s campaign and the RNC — Targeted Victory, FLS Connect and Target Point Consulting — since the beginning of 2011 have received $190 million from Romney, the RNC and other federal Republican candidates, committees and groups,FEC records show.

The huge windfalls drew harsh criticism from Republicans, who — noting the firm’s close ties to the folks picking vendors (Targeted Victory was created by Moffatt and Beach, while Target Point was founded by Alex Gage, whose wife Katie Gage was Romney’s deputy campaign manager, and FLS Connect was founded partly by Larson and counted Romney political director Rich Beeson among its partners) — called it everything from “racketeering” to the “incestuous bleeding of the Republican Party.”

RNC chairman Reince Priebus defended Larson, who served as RNC chief of staff during the 2012 election, pointing out that he stepped down from FLS Connect. But the decision to open the data file to outside firms was seen in some quarters as a response to the argument that the party didn’t welcome outsiders.

The idea, as expressed in the autopsy, was that the RNC should be “supporting competition in the marketplace to ensure that the best ideas rise to the top.” But even that announcement was greeted skeptically, with grass-roots critics pointing out that the RNC only recently created GOP Data Center, which it pays FLS Connect to maintain and encourages state parties to adopt.

“Volunteers have been very frustrated” with GOP Data Center, said Steven Kuivenhoven, a Michigan GOP official during the 2012 cycle who encouraged activists to use alternative voter outreach interfaces last year. He has emerged as an rVotes evangelist, supporting a proposal Adler submitted this month to the state party, and he expressed concern about state parties relying primarily on GOP Data Center, which Michigan’s GOP this year agreed to use.

GOP Data Center and Data Trust are “a patchwork of apps built on an old database structure,” he said. “This is very inadequate as compared to what the Democrats use.”

Interoperability, said Moffatt, was “one of the challenges that we ran into in 2012. The systems on the Republican side weren’t built to talk to each other. If you’re building new technology and you’re doing it properly, then the systems should talk to each other.”

RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said GOP Data Center will work with other applications — not against them — partly by allowing them to interface with Data Trust. “There has been an appetite for one central open data platform for others in our party to access data and build innovative tools and applications that will help make our party better,” she said.

Adler, the rVotes creator, says the GOP’s biggest challenge may stem less from technological deficiencies than from a fundamental approach to politics.

“The technology supports a philosophy that isn’t there,” he said. “Most Republicans don’t want to knock on doors. They don’t want to motivate people at the grass-roots level. It’s just not what they want to do.”

Steve Friess contributed to this report.

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This post has been updated following the disclosure of Internal Revenue Service documents this week that suggest the agency’s Criminal Tax Division does not require a warrant to read emails. It was originally published Dec. 4, 2012.

The U.S. government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the local sheriff to the FBI to the Internal Revenue Service, to snoop on the digital trails you create every day. Authorities can often obtain your emails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a simple subpoena. Usually you won’t even be notified.

Two senators introduced legislation last month to update privacy protection for emails, but the bill remains in committee. Meantime, here’s how law enforcement can track you without a warrant now:

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The Republicans have admitted it: They need to get serious about collecting and analyzing voter data.

Well, you can't get much more serious than talking to Teradata, the "data warehousing" company that helps Wal-Mart, Apple and eBay store massive amounts of information about the behavior of their customers.walmart

Teradata is just one of the major data outfits with which leading Republican strategists are talking in their declared effort to match Barack Obama's big data campaign tactics, according to one person with knowledge of the strategy discussions.

The Republican National Committee would neither confirm nor deny talking with Teradata, but was emphatic that no deal is in place. Teradata also declined to comment. There's unlikely to be any final deals until the RNC appoints a chief technology officer, which it has pledged to do by May 1.

But if Republican strategists are still shopping for formal partners, their goal is clear: a new, more open database that will make it easier for Republican candidates to share what they're learning about voters — and for the party to share voter information with technology developers in order to build apps for use in coming campaigns.

"At lots of levels, for lots of reasons, there's a lot of people that we're talking to," Mike Shields, the RNC's new chief of staff, told ProPublica.

Both Republicans and Democrats already have databases of basic information about every voter in the United States. But Obama's campaign made big strides in connecting data from different sources, like campaign donation records, consumer data and volunteer lists, in order to produce more detailed profiles of individual voters.

The Democratic National Committee has also streamlined the way information flows between local volunteers and the national party, so that data about voters collected by many different campaigns — such as a Minnesota voter's stance on gay marriage or whom a Virginia voter supported in a state senate race — all ends up in the same database in D.C.

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It’s “National Prosperity Action Day.” Tea Partiers, Republican volunteers and conservative activists are being summoned by Americans for Prosperity—the group founded and financed by several large corporations, and led by the billionaire Koch brothers—to begin mobilizing to defeat President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

They’re gathering in newly set up offices in critical swing states. Some of the locations have a tinge of irony for a supposedly grassroots, ordinary citizens-led organization: In Saddlebrook, Arizona, they’ll be meeting in a country club; in Clearwater, Florida, the local AFP field director rented space from an outsourcing company called TAC Worldwide. But the work the AFP machine is doing is no laughing matter for liberals. The Koch network has a sophisticated targeting system, as well as an army of experienced Republican campaign hands to guide the effort. The volunteers even receive Samsung Galaxy tablets to quickly log information and move on to the next potential Romney voter.

It’s the beginning of an extremely well-planned get-out-the-vote effort that duplicates what an entire national party would attempt. And it’s been four years in the making.

In 2009, the Koch network created amodel called the Wisconsin Prosperity Projectto move the state to the far right. After witnessing the Democrats’ stunning 2008 ground game, the operatives in Wisconsin were determined to out-organize liberals. They hired Tea Party organizers, invested heavily in front groups (like the MacIver Center), ran constant advertising and coordinated with employers to hold propaganda meetings with workers. Tea Party bus tours in the state, fully financed by AFP, were “designed” to help elect Republicans.

And in 2010, Wisconsin turned harder to the right than almost any other state in the nation during the midterm elections. At least from the Koch perspective, the investments worked. (The Koch theory of change was also reinforced by the savvy Scott Walker recall campaign, in which Koch operatives bused**seventy-five canvassers**to the state to out-perform the unions.)

Koch’s unique, outside-the-GOP voter mobilizing system is called Themis, named after the Greek god of divine order. It carries a similar name to the Themis project by the US Chamber of Commerce’s partners exposed for planning to hack and sabatoge liberals and some union groups, but it is not related.

Rather, Themis is a master database built with information purchased by the Koch brothers, as well as survey information gathered through its network of paid organizers. During the Republican primaries, as Mother Jones reported, AFP paid Florida residents to survey Republican activists as they voted for the various candidates. Tim Phillips, the Koch political deputy, explained Themis this way to USA Today’s Fredreka Schouten: “Our geo-targeting looks at everything from voting data to Census data to consumer-purchasing information.” Phillips also said, “We know their magazine subscriptions. In some cases, we know the websites they prefer to surf.”

Koch is now financing more than 200 organizers and paid political staff in thirty-one states. Its likely much of the money Koch now donates to the NRA and groups like the Faith and Freedom Coalition (run by Tim Phillip’s longtime business partner, Ralph Reed), will also be spent on organizers on the ground. Using the Wisconsin model, Koch hopes to partner with local conservative groups to build a rapid mobilization system that can compete on Election Day, in every critical state.

Too much attention is given to the television ads. The Koch network, which is actively training Tea Partiers, via a**partnership**with True the Vote, to harass and intimidate voters, may tip the scales in this election. And you won’t see their work on television, or through FEC disclosures (they refuse to register their grassroots electioneering as independent expenditures). Like Wisconsin, liberals might see the ground shifting beneath them, and wonder what happened. fang

For more on the influence of money in politics, check out The Nation's special issue on*"The One-Percent Court."*

Related Topics: Conservatives and the American Right | Election 2012 | Tea Party