Trinidad Do So

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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/cambridge-analytica-database-identified-black-voters-as-ripe-for-deterrence-british-broadcaster-says/">https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/cambridge-analytica-database-identified-black-voters-as-ripe-for-deterrence-british-broadcaster-says/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Cambridge Analytica database identified Black U.S. voters as ripe for ‘deterrence,</b>’ British broadcaster says</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sep. 28, 2020 at 3:26 pm Updated <b>Sep. 28, 2020</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Craig Timberg and Isaac Stanley-Becker</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Washington Post</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A database built by Cambridge Analytica, the Republican-aligned firm that unraveled over allegations of improper use of Facebook data, disproportionately identified Black voters as ripe for “Deterrence” in profiles prepared for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to a report Monday from Britain’s Channel 4 News.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president’s reelection campaign called the segment “fake news,” and an aide who handled data in 2016 said the material went unused by the campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Still, the evidence the British broadcaster says it has uncovered is likely to intensify concerns about voter suppression and the opportunities afforded by Facebook to narrowly segment and target portions of the electorate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The material revives debates over the extent to which the voter profiles touted by Cambridge Analytica were actually used to sway the vote in 2016. The firm was founded in part by The Trump campaign’s onetime chief executive, Steve Bannon, and collapsed in 2018 after news reports detailed its improper use of Facebook data in analyzing voters and other allegations of impropriety.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The new cache of materials could add detail to allegations about Cambridge Analytica’s role in the campaign, particularly in efforts to harness Facebook’s powerful ad technologies to dissuade Black voters from supporting Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Four years later, turnout among similar communities may help decide the Nov. 3 contest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The tactics described in the Channel 4 report are legal, and the sorting of voters into categories for the purposes of political messaging has been a routine – and all but unregulated – part of campaign tactics for years.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">A database of nearly 200 million American voters, obtained by Channel 4, sorted likely Democratic voters into several categories, such as “Core Clinton” or “<b>Disengaged Clinton.” The database put 3.5 million African Americans into a third category called “Deterrence,” in an apparent bid to single them out for messages designed to dissuade them from voting, the report said.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">The file spanned 16 states, according to the news channel. <b>In crucial battlegrounds, Black voters made up a disproportionate share of those marked for “Deterrence” – 17% in Wisconsin despite making up just 5.4% of voters, and 33% in Michigan while accounting for 15% of the voting population.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The margin in these states, which Trump won in 2016, was exceptionally narrow. Trump bested Clinton in Michigan by 11,000 votes. Meanwhile, Black turnout fell in Michigan and Wisconsin by more than 12 points, estimates suggest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The database, in Channel 4’s telling, was “used by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign” – an allegation the campaign denied.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“This machine was built in part by a team from the now-notorious company Cambridge Analytica, working hand in glove with a team from the Republican National Committee,”</b> the segment further claimed. Channel 4 did not say how it had obtained the database.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s reelection campaign, dismissed the report as “fake news,” adding in a statement that Trump’s record gave him a “relationship of trust with African American voters.</b>” The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, “has not seen the documents” described by the British broadcaster, said Paris Dennard, the party’s senior communications adviser for Black media affairs. He added, “that is not our data.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matt Braynard, who served as the Trump campaign’s data director in 2016, said his team did not use the categorizations featured in the report, relying instead on material from the party and from the<b> firm L2 Political. </b>He also said, <b>“Deterrence doesn’t mean suppression and it doesn’t mean deterrence from voting. It just means deterrence from voting for Hillary Clinton.”</b> James Barnes, a former Facebook employee embedded with Trump’s team, said he had “no exposure to a ‘deterrence’ segment in 2016.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Trump’s 2016 campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million</span>, according to Federal Election Commission data tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wisconsin state Sen. Lena Taylor, a Democrat from Milwaukee featured in the Channel 4 News report, called the revelations “shocking” in an interview with The Washington Post. “It just makes me feel disgusted what the president of the United States did to disenfranchise the citizens of our most important thing, which is our democracy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Cambridge Analytica’s former director of business development, Brittany Kaiser, called the new findings consistent with her understanding of how Cambridge Analytica and Republicans targeted Black voters in 2016. She provided an internal company document describing a similar sorting of Democrat voters into categories, including “Deterrent,” from that year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">The document also showed<b> $55,000 spent in Georgia targeting African American voters with advertising, including the Clinton “Superpredator” video.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“This comes as no surprise,” said Kaiser, who did not work on the Trump campaign but received detailed briefings about it while still working for Cambridge Analytica. “I’ve been screaming my head off about this for years.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">More than half of the voters the database marked for “Deterrence” messages were Black, Asian or Latinos, with particularly high percentages in predominantly African American neighborhoods in urban areas in key areas such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, according to Channel 4 News. It quoted voters in predominantly Black areas of Milwaukee and elsewhere expressing frustration that they had been targeted in this way.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Channel 4 report also showed evidence that the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">database sorted American voters into categories based on psychological analyses</span> provided by Cambridge Analytica, using terms such as “Individualist,” “Thinker” and “Adventurer” as shorthand indicating what kind of political messaging might be most effective in reaching them.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the New School in New York who has waged a multi-year battle to learn what information Cambridge Analytica had assembled on him</b>, said he found the evidence of Republican voter suppression presented by the Channel 4 report “unambiguous.”</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Great Hack Netflix (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omc-5zj70M0">3 min on do so</a>)</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BBC 4 20 min <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ</a>
</font></p><h1 class="title style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks</font></h1><div id="info-text" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer"><div id="date" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span id="dot" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer">Mar 19, 2018</span></font></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>corruption</b> it's also a devil term; djt needed to defend from it, so he i'm not a puppet 'd joe hunter biden --> ukraine (also bizarro mirror on server)</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 2rem; font-size: small; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.86667rem; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“Do So. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage.</span></b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 2rem; font-size: small; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.86667rem; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“And the reason why this was such a good strategy is because we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. And so all the Indians went out and voted, and the difference on the 18-35-year-old turnout is like 40%, and that</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> swung the election by about 6% – which is all we needed!”</span></b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 2rem; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.86667rem; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Again, Nix was selling his company’s expertise in promoting cynicism and apathy to suppress turnout among the opposition. But this campaign was even more manipulative: enlisting young Afro-Caribbeans in what pretended to be an authentic youth movement, secretly designed to manipulate them into surrendering their votes. <b>This is what ‘compliance’ means in psychological warfare: achieving the desired behavioural effect from a ‘hostile audience’.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 2rem; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.86667rem; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked for comment on the Do-So campaign, Nix responded in an email earlier today, writing, “The objective of this campaign was to highlight and protest against political <b>corruption. There is nothing unlawful or illegal about assisting with this activity</b>. SCL / CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 2rem; font-size: small; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.86667rem; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Nix’s closing comments in his summer 2016 pitch were tantalising: “</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">We’ve got an in-house intelligence team, so we can do full intelligence protection… Opposition don’t hack your emails and everything else. And we're pretty good at getting intelligence too… You know what? We do a lot of counter operations. </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">You can spend $10 million on an election.</span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">”</span></b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 2rem; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.86667rem; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beneath the veneer, this seems to have been some of the work Alexander Nix was most proud of. This is how he pitched his company around the world, just as he was finally starting to work for Trump. This is the man who the Mercers and Steve Bannon enlisted to help them reshape the American political mind.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dn 120</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>longtime Facebook executive has admitted the company’s platform helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and it may happen again this year.</b> In an internal memo, Facebook Vice President <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Andrew Bosworth wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes.” </span>Bosworth, who was a backer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, went on to write that the company should not change its policies in an effort to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. In his memo, Bosworth referenced the role of the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica but downplayed its significance. However, a new Oscar-shortlisted documentary called “The Great Hack” argues Cambridge Analytica has played a significant role not just in the U.S. election but in elections across the globe. The company harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent and used the data to sway voters during the 2016 campaign. We speak with the directors of “The Great Hack,” Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser and propaganda researcher Emma Briant.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Transcript</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: A longtime Facebook executive has admitted the company’s platform helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and predicted it may happen again this year. In an internal memo, Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes,” he said. Bosworth, who was a backer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, went on to write that the company should not change its policies in an effort to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. Bosworth credited Trump for running, quote, “the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his memo, Bosworth referenced the role of the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica but downplayed its significance. However, a new Netflix documentary called The Great Hack argues Cambridge Analytica has played a critical role in the U.S. election, as well as elections across the globe.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cambridge Analytica was founded by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon was the company’s vice president and claims to have named the company.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Cambridge Analytica harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent and used the data to sway voters during the 2016 campaign.</b> The story of Cambridge Analytica is featured in the new documentary The Great Hack, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DAVID CARROLL: All of your interactions, your credit card swipes, web searches, locations, likes, they’re all collected, in real time, into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CAROLE CADWALLADR: The real game changer was Cambridge Analytica. They worked for the Trump campaign and for the Brexit campaign. They started using information warfare.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DAVID CARROLL: Cambridge Analytica claimed to have 5,000 data points on every American voter.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Well, earlier this week, I spoke to the directors of The Great Hack, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as propaganda researcher Emma Briant and a former employee at Cambridge Analytica, Brittany Kaiser, who has begun posting online a trove of documents detailing the company’s operations, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. Kaiser has also written about her experience at the company in the book Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again. Kaiser is one of two former Cambridge Analytica employees featured in The Great Hack. The other is Christopher Wylie.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CHRISTOPHER WYLIE: It’s incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica a purely sort of data science company or an algorithm company. You know, it is a full-service propaganda machine.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: I asked Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser to talk about how she became involved with Cambridge Analytica.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: I think it’s very important to note this, because there are people all around the world that are working for tech companies, that I’m sure joined that company in order to do something good. They want the world to be more connected. They want to use technology in order to communicate with everybody, to get people more engaged in important issues. And they don’t realize that while you’re moving fast and breaking things, some things get so broken that you cannot actually contemplate or predict what those repercussions are going to look like.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chris Wylie and I both really idealistically joined Cambridge Analytica because we were excited about the potential of using data for exciting and good impact projects. Chris joined in 2013 on the data side in order to start developing different types of psychographic models. So he worked with Dr. Aleksandr Kogan and the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in order to start doing experiments with Facebook data, to be able to gather that data, which we now know was taken under the wrong auspices of academic research, and was then used in order to identify people’s psychographic groupings.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that, psychographic groupings, and especially for people who are not on Facebook, who don’t understand its enormous power and the intimate knowledge it has of people. Think of someone you’re talking to who’s never experienced Facebook. Explain what is there.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So,<b> the amount of data that is collected about you on Facebook and on any of your devices is much more than you’re really made aware of</b>. You probably haven’t ever read the terms and conditions of any of these apps on your phone. But if you actually took the time to do it and you could understand it, because most of them are written for you not to understand — it’s written in legalese — you would realize that you are giving away a lot more than you would have ever agreed to if there was transparency. This is your every move, everywhere you’re going, who you’re talking to, who your contacts are, what information you’re actually giving in other apps on your phone, your location data, all of your lifestyle, where you’re going, what you’re doing, what you’re reading, how long you spend looking at different images and websites.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This amount of behavioral data gives such a good picture of you that your behavior can be predicted, as Karim was talking about earlier, to a very high degree of accuracy. And this allows companies like <b>Cambridge Analytica to understand how you see the world and what will motivate you to go and take an action — or, unfortunately, what will demotivate you. So, that amount of data, available on Facebook ever since you joined, allows a very easy platform for you to be targeted and manipulated.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And when I say “psychographic targeting,” I’m sure you probably are a little bit more familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, so the Myers-Briggs that asks you a set of questions in order to understand your personality and how you see the world. The system that Cambridge Analytica used is actually a lot more scientific. It’s called the OCEAN five-factor model. And OCEAN stands for O for openness, C for conscientiousness, whether you prefer plans and order or you’re a little bit more fly by the seat of your pants. Extraversion, whether you gather your energy from being out surrounded by people, or you’re introverted and you prefer to gather your energy from being alone. <b>If you are agreeable, you care about your family, your community, society, your country, more than you care about yourself. </b>And if you are<b> disagreeable, then you are a little bit more egotistical. You need messages that are about benefits to you. And then the worst is neurotic. You know, it’s not bad to be neurotic. It means that you are a little bit more emotional. It means, unfortunately, as well, that you are motivated by fear-based messaging, so people can use tactics in order to scare you to doing what they want to do.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And this is what was targeted when they were gathering that data out of Facebook to figure out which group you belonged into. <b>They found about 32 different groups of people, different personality types. And there were groups of psychologists that were looking into how they could understand that data and convert that into messaging that was just for you.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I need to remind everybody that the<b> Trump campaign put together over a million different advertisements that were put out, a million different advertisements with tens of thousands of different campaigns. Some of these messages were for just you, were for 50 people, a hundred people.</b> Obviously, certain groups are thousands, tens of thousands or millions. But some of them were targeted very much directly at the individual, to know exactly what you’re going to click on and exactly what you care about.[also do algorithmic A/B testing to tailor ads on the fly??!]</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So they were doing this before Cambridge Analytica. But describe — I want to actually go to a Bannon clip, Steve Bannon, who takes credit for naming Cambridge Analytica, right? Because you had SCL before, Defence.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And then it becomes Cambridge Analytica, for Cambridge University, right? Where Kogan got this information that he culled from Facebook.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: This is the White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in an interview at a Financial Times conference in March 2018. Bannon said that reports that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to build profiles on American voters and influence the 2016 presidential election were politically motivated. Months later, evidence emerged linking Bannon to Cambridge Analytica, the scandal, which resulted in a $5 billion fine for Facebook. Bannon is the founder and former board member of the political consulting firm — he was vice president of Cambridge Analytica.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN BANNON: All Cambridge Analytica is the data scientists and the applied applications here in the United States. It has nothing to do with the international stuff. The Guardian actually tells you that, and The Observer tell you that, when you get down to the 10th paragraph, OK? When you get down to the 10th paragraph. And what Nix does overseas is what Nix does overseas. Right? It was a data — it was a data company.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And by the way, Cruz’s campaign and the Trump campaign say, “Hey, they were a pretty good data company.” But this whole thing on psychographics was optionality in the deal. If it ever worked, it worked. But it hasn’t worked, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. So, it was never even applied.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Steve Bannon in 2018, key to President Trump’s victory and to his years so far in office, before he was forced to — before he was forced out. What was your relationship with Steve Bannon? You worked at Cambridge Analytica for over three years. You had the keys to the castle, is that right, in Washington?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes, for a while I actually split the keys to what is Steve’s house, with Alexander Nix, because we used his house as our office. His house is also used as a Breitbart office in the basement. It’s called the “Breitbart Embassy” on Capitol Hill. And that’s where I would go for meetings.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Who funded that?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: I believe it was owned by the <b>Mercer</b> family, that building. And we would come into the basement and use that boardroom for our meetings. And we would use that for planning who we were going to go pitch to, what campaigns we were going to work for, what advocacy groups, what conservative 501(c)(3)s and (c)(4)s he wanted us to go see.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And I didn’t spend a lot of time with Steve, but the time I did was incredibly insightful. Almost every time I saw him, he’d be showing me some new Hillary Clinton hit video that he had come out with, or announcing that he was about to throw a book launch party for Ann Coulter for ¡Adios, America!, which was something that he invited both me and Alexander to, and we promptly decided to leave the house before she arrived.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But Steve was very influential in the development of Cambridge Analytica</b> and who we were going to go see, who we were going to support with our technology. And he made a lot of the introductions, which in the beginning seemed a little less nefarious than they did later on, when he got very confident and started introducing us to white right-wing political parties across Europe and in other countries and tried to get meetings with the main political parties, or leftist or green parties instead, to make sure that those far-right-wing parties that do not have the world’s best interests at heart could not get access to these technologies. heart could not get access to these technologies.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: You said in The Great Hack, in the film, that you have evidence of illegality of the Trump and Brexit campaigns, that they were conducted illegally. I was wondering if you can go into that. I mean, it was controversial even, and Carole Calwalladr, the great reporter at The Observer and The Guardian, was blasted and was personally targeted, very well demonstrated in The Great Hack, for saying that Cambridge Analytica was involved in Brexit. They kept saying they had nothing to do with it, until she shows a video of you, who worked for Cambridge Analytica, at one of the founding events of leave it, or Brexit.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yeah, <b>Leave.EU,</b> that panel that I was on, which has now become quite an infamous video, was their launch event to launch the campaign. A<b>nd Cambridge Analytica was in deep negotiations, through introduction of Steve Bannon, with both of the Brexit campaigns. </b>I was told, actually, originally we pitched remain, and the remain side said that they did not need to spend money on expensive political consultants, because they were going to win anyway. And that’s actually what I also truly believed, and so did they.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, Steve made the introductions to make sure that we would still get a commercial contract out of this political campaign, and both to Vote Leave and Leave.EU. Cambridge Analytica took Leave.EU, and AIQ, which was Cambridge Analytica’s essentially digital partner, before Cambridge Analytica could run our own digital campaigns, they were running the Vote Leave side, both funded by the Mercers, both with the same access to this giant database on American voters.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: The Mercers funded Brexit?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: There was Cambridge Analytica work, as well as AIQ work, in both of the leave campaigns. So, a lot of that money, in order to collect that data and in order to build the infrastructure of both of those companies, came from Mercer-funded campaigns, yes.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And again, explain what AIQ is.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: AIQ was a company that actually ran all of Cambridge Analytica’s digital campaigns, until January 2016, when Molly Schweickert, our head of digital, was hired in order to build ad tech internally within the company. AIQ was based in Canada and was a partner that had access to Cambridge Analytica data the entire time that they were running the Vote Leave campaign, which was the designated and main campaign in Brexit.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, when did you see the connection between Brexit and the Trump campaign?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Actually, a lot of it started to come when I saw some of Carole’s reporting, because there were a lot of conspiracy theories over what was going on, and I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that we definitely did work in the Brexit campaign, “we” as in when I was at Cambridge Analytica, because I was one of the people working on the campaign. And we obviously played a large role in not just the Trump campaign itself, but Trump super PACs and a lot of other conservative advocacy groups, 501(c)(3)s, (4)s, that were the infrastructure that allowed for the building of the movement that pushed Donald Trump into the White House.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: I mean, <b>it looks like Cambridge Analytica was heading to a billion-dollar corporation.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>BRITTANY KAISER: That’s what Alexander used to tell us all the time.</b> That was the carrot that he waved in front of our eyes in order to have us keep going. “We’re building a billion-dollar company. Aren’t you excited?” And I think that that’s what so many people get caught up in, people that are currently working at Facebook, people that are working at Google, people that are working at companies where they are motivated to build exciting technology, that obviously can also be very dangerous, but they think they’re going to financially benefit and be able to take care of themselves and their families because of it.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So what was illegal?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: The massive problems that came from the data collection, specifically, are where my original accusations come from, because data was collected under the auspices of being for academic research and was used for political and commercial purposes. There are also different data sets that are not supposed to be matched and used without explicit transparency and consent in the United Kingdom, because they actually have good national data protection laws and international data protection laws through the European Union to protect voters. Unfortunately, in the United States, we only have seen the state of California coming out and doing it.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Now, on the other side, we have voter suppression laws that prevent our vote from being suppressed. We have laws against discrimination in advertising, racism, sexism, incitement of violence. All of those things are illegal, yet somehow a platform like Facebook has decided that if politicians want to use any of those tactics, that they will not be held to the same community standards as you or me, or the basic laws and social contracts that we have in this country.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser. When we come back, we speak to the directors of <b>The Great Hack,</b> the documentary that’s just been shortlisted for an Academy Award.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: “Let Me Steal Your Secrets,” soundtrack from the documentary The Great Hack. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our look at Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and their roles in the 2016 U.S. election and other elections. Earlier this week, I spoke to the directors of The Great Hack, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as propaganda researcher Emma Briant and a former Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Brittany Kaiser. I asked Karim Amer to talk about what Cambridge Analytica effort to suppress the vote in Trinidad and Tobago did.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: It was important for us to show in the film the expansiveness of Cambridge’s work. This went beyond the borders of the United States and even beyond the borders of the EU and the U.K. Because what we find is that Cambridge used the — in pursuing this global influence industry that they were very much a part of, they used different countries as Petri dishes to learn and get the know-how about different tactics. And from improving those tactics, they could then sell them for a higher cost — higher margin in Western democracies, where the election budgets are, you know — we have to remember, I think it’s important to predicate that the election business has become a multibillion-dollar global business, right? So, we have to remember that while we are upset with companies like Cambridge, we allowed for the commoditization of our democratic process, right? So, people are exploiting this now because it’s become a business. And we, as purveyors of this, can’t really be as upset as we want to be, when we’ve justified that. So I want to preface it with that.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, that being said, what’s happened as a result is a company like Cambridge can practice tactics in a place like Trinidad, that’s very unregulated in terms of what they can and can’t do, learn from that know-how and then, you know, use it — parlay it into activities in the United States. What they did in <b>Trinidad</b>, and why it was important for us to show it in the film, is they led something called the “Do So” campaign, where they admit to making it cool and popular among youth to get out and not vote. And they knew —</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, you had the Indian population and the black population.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: And the black population. And there is a lot of historic tension between those two, and a lot of generational differences, as well, between those two. And the <b>“Do So” campaign targeted —</b> was was done in a way to, you know, by looking at the data and looking at the predictive analysis of which group would vote or not vote, get enough people to dissuade them from voting, so that they could flip the election.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Targeted at?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: Targeted at the youth. And so, this is really — when you watch —</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: “Do So” actually meant “don’t vote.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: “Do So,” don’t vote.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: Don’t vote.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: Yes, exactly. And when —</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: With their fists crossed.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: With their fists.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">And that it became cool not to vote.</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">KARIM AMER: Exactly. And you look at the level of calculation behind this, and it’s quite frightening. Now, as Emma was saying, a lot of these tactics were born out of our own fears in the United States and the U.K. post-9/11, when we allowed for this massive weaponization of influence campaigns to begin. You know, if you remember President Bush talking about, you know, the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, all of these kinds of industries were born out of this.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And now I believe what we’re seeing is the hens have come home to roost, right? All of these tactics that we developed in the name of, quote-unquote, “fighting the war on terror,” in the name of doing these things, have now been commercialized and used to come back to the biggest election market in the world, the United States. And how do we blame people for doing that, when we’ve allowed for our democracy to be for sale?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that’s what Brittany’s files today, that she’s releasing and has released over the last couple days, really give us insight to. The Hindsight Files that Brittany has released show us how there is an auction happening for influence campaigns in every democracy around the world. There is no vote that is unprotected in the current way that we — in the current space that we’re living.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the thing that’s allowing this to happen is these information platforms like Facebook. And that is what’s so upsetting, because we can actually do something about that. We are the only country in the world that can hold Facebook accountable, yet we still have not done so. And we still keep going to their leadership hoping they do the right thing, but they have not. And why is that? Because no industry has ever shown in American history that it can regulate itself. There is a reason why antitrust laws exist in this country. There’s a tradition of holding companies accountable, and we need to re-embrace that tradition, especially as we enter into 2020, where the stakes could not be higher.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Brittany Kaiser, can you talk about the “Crooked Hillary” campaign and how it developed?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely.<b> So, this started as a super PAC that was built for Ted Cruz, Keep the Promise I, which was run by Kellyanne Conway and funded by the Mercers. That was then converted to becoming a super PAC for Donald Trump.</b> They tried to register with the Federal Election Commission the name, Defeat Crooked Hillary, and the FEC, luckily, did not allow them to do that. So it was called Make America Number 1.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This super PAC was headed by David Bossie, someone that you might remember from Citizens United</b>, who basically brought dark money into our politics and allowed endless amounts of money to be funneled into these types of vehicles so that we don’t know where all of the money is coming from for these types of manipulative communications. And he was in charge of this campaign.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, on that two-day-long debrief that I talked about — and if you want to know more, you can read about it in my book — they told us —</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Wait, and explain where you were and who was in the room.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: So, I was in New York in our boardroom for Cambridge Analytica’s office on Fifth Avenue. And all of our offices from around the world had called in to videocast. And everybody from the super PAC and the Trump campaign took us through all of their tactics and strategies and implementation and what they had done.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">Now, when we got to this Defeat Crooked Hillary super PAC, they explained to us what they had done, which was to run experiments on psychographic groups to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. Unfortunately, what they found out was the only very successful tactic was sending fear-based, scaremongering messaging to people that were identified as being neurotic. And it was so successful in their first experiments that they spent the rest of the money from the super PAC over the rest of the campaign only on negative messaging and fearmongering.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And<b> crooked, the O-O in “crooked” was handcuffs.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>BRITTANY KAISER: Yes. That was designed by Cambridge Analytica’s team.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: And one thing that I think it’s important to remember here, because there’s been a lot of debate among some people about: Did this actually work? To what degree did it work? How do we know whether it worked or not? What Brittany is describing is a <b>debrief meeting where Cambridge, as a company, is saying, “This is what we learned from our political experience. This is what actually worked.” OK? And they’re sharing it because they’re saying, “Now this is how we want to codify this and commoditize this to go into commercial business.</b>” Right?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So this is the company admitting to their own know-how. There is no debate about whether it works or not. This is not them advertising it to the world. This is them saying, “This is what we’ve learned. Based off that, this is how we’re going to run our business. This is how we’re going to invest in the expansion of this to sell this outside of politics.” The game was, take the political experience, parlay it into the commercial sector. That was the strategy. So, there is no debate whether it worked or not. It was highly effective.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the thing that’s terrifying is that while Cambridge has been disbanded, the same actors are out there. And there’s nothing has been — nothing has changed to allow us to start putting in place legislation to say there is something called information crimes. In this era of information warfare, in this era of information economies, what is an information crime? What does it look like? Who determines it? And yet, without that, we are still living in this unfiltered, unregulated space, where places like Facebook are continuing to choose profit over the protection of the republic. And I think that’s what’s so outrageous.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: And I think it’s pretty telling that only two people</font><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"> have come forward from Cambridge Analytica. Why is that? Both of the people that have come forward, Brittany and Chris, and also with Carole’s writing, have been targeted personally. And it’s been a very, very difficult story to tell. Even with us, when we released the film in January, every single time we have entered into the country, we have been stopped for four to six hours of questioning at the border. That —</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"> Stopped by — on the border of the U.S., in JFK Airport, where you’re taken into the back, asked for all of your social media handles, questioned for four to six hours, every single time we enter the country. So —</span></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: Since we released the film, so since Sundance, since January, every time we’ve come back into the U.S.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And on what grounds are they saying they’re stopping you?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: No explanation. No —</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And what is your theory?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: My theory is that it’s got something to do with this film. Maybe we’re doing something right. We were at first — we’ve been stopped in Egypt, but we’ve never been stopped in the U.S. in this way. We’re American citizens. Right?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: You talk about people coming forward and not coming forward. I wanted to turn to former Cambridge Analytica COO, the chief operating officer, Julian Wheatland, speaking on the podcast Recode Decode.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JULIAN WHEATLAND: The company made some significant mistakes when it came to its use of data. They were ethical mistakes. And I think that part of the reason that that happened was that we spent a lot of time concentrating on not making regulatory mistakes. And so, for the most part, we didn’t, as far as I can tell, make any regulatory mistakes, but we got almost distracted by ticking those boxes of fulfilling the regulatory requirements. And it felt like, well, once that was done, then we’d done what we needed to do. And we forgot to pause and think about ethically what was — what was going on.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could decode that, Brittany? Cambridge Analytica COO Julian Wheatland, who, interestingly, in The Great Hack, while he was — really condemned Chris Wylie, did not appreciate Chris Wylie stepping forward and putting Cambridge Analytica in the crosshairs in the British Parliament, he was more equivocal about you. He — talk about Wheatland and his role and what he’s saying about actually abiding by the regulations, which they actually clearly didn’t.</font></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">BRITTANY KAISER: Once upon a time, I used to have a lot of respect for Julian Wheatland. I even thought we were friends. I thought we were building a billion-dollar company together that was going to allow me to do great things in the world. But, unfortunately, that’s a story that I told myself and a story he wanted me to believe that isn’t true at all.</span></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While he likes to say that they spent a lot of time abiding by regulations, I would beg to differ. Cambridge Analytica did not even have a data protection officer until 2018, right before they shut down. I begged for one for many years. I begged for more time with our lawyers and was told I was creating too many invoices. And for a long time, because I had multiple law degrees, I was asked to write contracts. And so were other —</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t you write the Trump campaign contract?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: The original one, yes, I did. And there were many other people that were trained in human rights law in the company that were asked to draft contracts, even though contract law was not anybody’s specialty within the company. But they were trying to cut corners and save money, just like a lot of technology companies decide to do. They do not invest in making the ethical or legal decisions that will protect the people that are affected by these technologies.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Next story from this daily show</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Weaponization of Data: Cambridge Analytica, Information Warfare & the 2016 Election of Trump</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><div class="r"><div class="TbwUpd"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/cambridge-analyticas-work-in-the-caribbean-was-pretty-shady.html"><cite class="iUh30 bc">slate.com › technology › 2018/03 › cambridge-analyticas-work-in-the...</cite></a></font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><h3 class="LC20lb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cambridge Analytica's work in the Caribbean was pretty shady.</font></h3><div class="B6fmyf"><div class="TbwUpd"><cite class="iUh30 bc" /></div><div class="yWc32e"><span /></div></div></div><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAMQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiFleGW08rnAhWloFsKHavPCO8QFSgAMAt6BAgDEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="s"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="st"><span class="f">Mar 29, 2018 - </span>The company actually <em>did do</em> some of the kinds of things it's now in trouble for bragging about. ... When Alexander Nix, the CEO of <em>Cambridge Analytica</em>, was ... Its purported activities in the Caribbean over the past decade or <em>so</em> might be ... The work SCL and Aggregate IQ <em>did</em> with the government in <em>Trinidad</em> ...</span></font></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g"><div data-hveid="CAEQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiFleGW08rnAhWloFsKHavPCO8QFSgAMAx6BAgBEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="r"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div class="TbwUpd"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/they-were-planning-on-stealing-election-explosive-new-tapes-reveal-cambridg/"><cite class="iUh30 bc">www.opendemocracy.net › dark-money-investigations › they-were-pl...</cite></a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div>
<h3 class="LC20lb">'They were planning on stealing the election': Explosive new ...</h3><div class="B6fmyf"><div class="TbwUpd"><cite class="iUh30 bc" /></div><div class="yWc32e"><span /></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="s"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="st"><span class="f">Jan 28, 2019 - </span>Brittany Kaiser, the second <em>Cambridge Analytica</em> whistleblower to go public, had just ... He reveals how in <em>Trinidad</em> and Tobago, Strategic Communications ... “<em>Do So</em>. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of ...</span></font></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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