Pauling, L
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">===</font><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">medium .com</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://medium.com/textifire/a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambridge-analytica-97633129cb06" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://medium.com/textifire/a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambridge-analytica-97633129cb06</a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx </font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica</b></div><div>Bridging the Atlantic to bring radical nativists of Trump & Brexit together via military tech & ad money, one donation or dataset at a time.</div><div>
</div><div>May 19,<b> 2017</b> · 46 min read</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Bannon-owned Cambridge Analytica LLC, a US subsidiary of UK defense contractor SCL Group, has been increasingly faulted for its dual role in both Donald Trump and Brexit’s victories. Its elevated & expensive role in the Trump digital marketing team’s self-proclaimed voter suppression rollout was the culmination of several years of preparation by military and anti-government interests on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as nationless finance & technology kingmakers seeking to enhance their own profit power.</div><div>
</div><div><b>As a direct result of the reporting led by the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica is already under active investigation for violating United Kingdom data protection laws, as related to their involvement with Leave.</b>EU. It’s unclear if anything will come of this, as Leave’s ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ seem quite confident they were able to skate through some loopholes and use some creative accounting to their advantage.</div><div>
</div><div>Separate issues have been under the microscope of UK authorities. For example, one is the improper collection & use of voters’ personal data via the internet for political marketing/advertising purposes, and another is the question of foreign (read: non-UK) money being used to fund the Leave campaigns. Cambridge Analytica is at the center of the data inquiry, and US-based stock trader Robert Mercer has been identified as the primary source of the foreign money, but in both cases political media production & dissemination is the underlying issue.</div><div>
</div><div>Our previous article looked at the undertold history of the nonprofit organization Citizens United regarding highly influential American political media & advertising from 1988 to 2011, and we’ll continue just prior to where we left off. SCL was in a down period at the beginning of our tale, and its Cambridge Analytica did not yet exist.</div><div>
</div><div> Donald Trump would soon begin early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012 presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal aspirations on hold.</div><div>Still, the fire rises.</div><div>
</div><div>Dukakis to Donald: 30 Years of Citizens United - TEXTIFIRE - Medium</div><div>1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of…</div><div>medium.com</div><div>PROFIT BOTS</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon & Bossie began releasing their political issue advocacy film collaborations in 2010, months after Bossie’s Citizens United v FEC case received its big Supreme Court victory, but they were among many looking to exploit the new election [de]regulations. One such up-and-coming major player was half-billionaire Robert Mercer.</div><div><b>Mercer had won awards in his first career, working for IBM’s Watson AI project in the field of natural language processing,</b> where he wrote code teaching computers how to understand humans. The avid yachtsman changed tacks slightly in 1993, as he went on to make his sudden fortune with the wildly profitable private hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, also known as RenTec, of which he is now co-CEO. Its stock-in-trade, if you will, is using quantitative analysis and high frequency trading (HFT) to win big on the global financial markets.</div><div>
</div><div>Quantitative analysis is a blanket term that covers a range of techniques, but the basic idea is to execute financial transactions based on predictions made by calculating large groups of historical alphanumeric sets; i.e., using existing patterns to predict future outcomes. When you’re anticipating future numbers, you might naturally expect to first inspect past numbers.</div><div>
</div><div>However, the standard human brain can only do so much these days, so the vast majority of work involved in this field is performed by computers. Even experts in the field — unsurprisingly called ‘quants’, though RenTec is known for exclusively employing mathematicians, physicists, and cryptographers — are still only able to quickly & accurately calculate a small grouping of historical variables. As a result, giant datasets — consisting of any number of different variables tracked over time — are fed into computers which calculate them using complex math equations, following repeatable series of preprogrammed steps that are known as algorithms.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Not only do quants employ algorithms to spit out robotically identified market trends, but they frequently direct the algorithms to buy and sell stocks all on their own.</b> This outsourcing of labor is known as algorithmic trading, and since the computers involved are usually employing algorithms on both sides of these transactions, the trades can happen incredibly quickly (nanoseconds) and in high volumes (around half of all US equity trades). Now we’re describing the quant subgenre of high frequency trading.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">HFT is very controversial within the financial industry, with supporters saying it helps keep the markets liquid & transparent and detractors saying it increases volatility, but it’s probably safe to say most outside observers think it’s very dangerous. It’s been responsible for “flash crashes”;</span> allowed for massive accumulations of private wealth for no reason other than automated exploitation of loopholes, timezones, and bandwidth;<b> played a sizable (or at least very profitable) role in the 2008 global financial meltdown; and put the planet’s resources under the control of larval artificial intelligence.</b></div><div>
</div><div>For these reasons, it should be no surprise HFT came under the scrutiny of regulators, but only after a decade of algorithmic trading that was enabled by the 2000 changeover to stock decimalization (pricing shares by pennies instead of quarter-dollars). The EU had been fairly vigilant in that regard, but the US government hadn’t pricked up its ears until after the July 2009 arrest of Sergey Aleynikov, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, for allegedly stealing ‘proprietary’ algorithms from his employer Goldman Sachs.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Aleynikov was accused of sticking his digital avatar hand into the “black box” — the batches of algorithms that are kept secret by HFT firms — of Goldman Sachs, but his still-active case has been in & out of courts for these past 8 years, partially because some of the laws he broke had not yet been fully written. That genre of legislative inefficiency sparked the interest of<b> Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon,</b> which in turn caught the eyes of quants and black box houses like RenTec.</span></div><div>
</div><div>4 minutes of HFT</div><div>
</div><div><b>DeFazio spearheaded the idea of a financial transactions tax — to impose a micropercent tax on trades that would only affect the high-volume HFT in any tangible way</b>— and teamed up with a couple colleagues to bring bills to the floor of Congress. He got nowhere in 2009, two years after the “Quant Quake”, nor in 2010, even after the May 6th “Flash Crash” again alerted the public to the dangers of HFT. Despite the failure to ignite substantial interest, his dedication to reform did not go unnoticed.</div><div>
</div><div>TEST DRIVING CITIZENS UNITED</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>DeFazio’s 2010 reelection campaign was nearly derailed by the appearance of highly-funded ads which attacked him and supported his ‘Tea Party’ Republican opponent, Art Robinson</b>. Created by a <b>PAC calling itself Concerned Taxpayers of America (CTA)</b>, it had been an ongoing mystery at the time as to who put up the big money for that organization. Only a few weeks before the election, as per the then-newly lax criteria set forth by the Citizens United decision earlier that year, was it revealed that one of the only two funders was Mr Robert Mercer, who contributed $643,750.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Investigation by the Washington Post prior to the reveal turned up even more curiosities, including a denial of the existence of CTA by a PR rep standing in the doorway of its registered address and directly to DeFazio’s face. Also, we should not be surprised to learn <b>CTA’s treasurer was Jason Miller, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign communications director starting 30 June 2016.</b> Miller was briefly named White House communications director in December 2016, before recusing himself a few days later after a fellow campaign worker accused the otherwise married Miller of fathering her unborn child.</div><div>
</div><div>Mercer’s attacks on DeFazio are easily attributable to HFT tax proposals, but his support of political then-novice Art Robinson is also notable. Robinson is a crackpot pseudoscientist whose <b>mentor was Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling</b>, before they acrimoniously parted ways in a divorce which ultimately ended in Robinson’s $25.5m lawsuit against the Pauling Institute (which he<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> settled for $575k).</span></div><div>
</div><div>Robinson then became a supporter of homeopathic disease cures via exposure to raw radioactive elements, as well as a well-known climate change denier, an obsessive hoarder of 14,000+ human urine samples, and a forest-dwelling widower who homeschooled his 6 children using his own Bible-based, available-for-sale “Robinson Curriculum” (all of which basically makes him the Anti-Captain Fantastic).<b> He lost to DeFazio in 2010 and lost again & again & again in 3 subsequent elections, but managed to become the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party from 2013–15, and has recently been considered for the role of Trump’s chief Science Adviser.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Robert Mercer and his politically powerful daughter Rebekah are said to have become fans of Robinson’s after reading his newsletter “Access to Energy”, which argues such things as Chernobyl radiation and carbon pollution are ultimately beneficial to planetary life.</span> However, Mercer has privately “downplay[ed] the dangers posed by nuclear war” when excitedly expressing his belief that Hiroshima & Nagasaki radiation made the greater population of Japan healthier, and Robinson has published a book & multi-DVD set on Nuclear War Survival Skills, so they have that hobby in common.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After bringing someone like Robinson close to victory in 2010, the Mercers’ fresh taste for political power brought them the privileges and lifestyles of the rich & famous. They soon found themselves at a<b> 2011 conference of the Club For Growth,</b> a pro-business activist group for the conservative elite, which spent $6m of its own in support of 2010 GOP/Tea Party contenders. The Club is perhaps best known for being sued and fined by the FEC in 2005 for violating fair election laws. Its Executive Director <b>David Keating then formed SpeechNow</b>, a group which sued the FEC and did even more damage to campaign finance regulations via their Ninth Circuit Court victory in the immediate wake of Citizens United v FEC, but right now we’re focused on the Club as the place where Mercer first met Andrew Breitbart.</span></div><div>
</div><div>BREITBART OUT, BANNON & MERCER IN</div></div>