Whistleblower: The Cambridge Analytica Files I created Steve Bannons psychological warfare tool

[MelissaB]

The Cambridge Analytica Files
‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate

by Carole Cadwalladr

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By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

... snip

It was Bannon’s interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie’s intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercer’s millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total – unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.

... snip

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

... snip

Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows, he says. And Wylie’s revelations only move it on again.

Read the entire article. Really, do it.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump?CMP=share_btn_tw

[poboy2]

1. r'd

[dalton99a]

2. A must read.

[octoberlib]

3. We know why, don't we? They wanted Trump to win because sanctions

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”


Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with “consumers”. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a “rumour campaign” spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election – in which the company worked – by spreading the idea that the “election would be rigged”

[bettyellen]

9. Wylies ignorance is a good example of why diversity is desperately needed in AI and IT... he is

code smart and socio-politically a total moron. That’s not a good thing for companies to have such naive workers who employ their skills w fucking blinders on. He’s so young too, probably just way out of his depth.

[MelissaB]

4. Great analysis by Molly McKew

Lots to unpack in this Cambridge Analytica download. (And great to see @nytimes leveraging the amazing research @carolecadwalla has done on this story eons before anyone else) In sum, everyone should probably be pissed off. Why? /1

Link to tweet

First, some details. 1- Veterans of Obama data operations were highly sought after by all sorts of goons who wanted to capture/weaponize that knowledge. (Many hired by Russia-connected oligarchs/banks/political parties etc). Mercenary mindset of this world spread TTPs fast /2

2- a lot of people understood what this was being used for. No one said anything. Creating an arsenal of information weapons. Swell. /3

Link to tweet

3- Alexander Nix not only sought to acquire illegally obtained information from Assange, he should to collect his own compromat by hiring ex-spies and entrapping targets (or so he boasted). /4

Link to tweet

4- Nix acquired other illegal data from a guy who -- for real -- now calls himself Dr. Spectre. If you haven't read about Kogan before, look him up.

Link to tweet

5- how did CA/SCL perfect it's methods? They got their government clients to give them data -- as part of their campaigns to win elections in this places. (Read about how CA/SCL helped destabilize Kenya in the elex, if you haven't already) /6

6- The Mercers -- who wanted to "rewire American politics" via culture wars -- invested to develop these tools of coercive persuasion and mindfuckery. Invested a lot. Certainly, they seemed convinced of their efficacy. Remember Bannon and Conway come from Mercerworld /7

Link to tweet

So why be mad? A bunch of people who should have known better aided a bunch of wealthy ideologues and guys who knew that what they were doing was building "weapons" to change perceptions. These weapons were beta-tested on you, America. /8

They have also been used in a lot of other places where there is a lot less attention to what has happened. The underlying theme is rich people who don't think very much about the citizens they believe they have the right to control /9

I'm tired of people laughing this off, or blaming "uninformed, uneducated, naive Americans" for being persuadable. These are tools -- weapons -- of persuasion and control. It isn't fair to blame the targets, who had no idea this was happening. /10

P.s. You were a target too.

[shraby]

5. Mueller just recently asked for the Analytica documents. This guy must be getting scared and

has turned whistleblower to ease the heat a bit?

I suspected a long time ago that brexit was engineered in the same way trump won here. It stunk to high heaven.

[MelissaB]

6. I'd love to see facebook (at least Zuck) go down in flames.

[bettyellen]

10. Its an international thing. A very politically aware safari guide in Tanzania told me that

many had been made aware that the Russians and Chinese were spreading anti-American garbage for years. We caused the AIDS crises, etc. They understand that they’d like to exploit cheap labor and build a lot of factories there, and so weren’t falling for it. But China has been making big inroads.

The American approach was to aid African nations to be more self sustainable and not rush to industrialize to a point where it harms their wildlife and tourism in a big way. Apparently we helped develop better infrastructure for more eco- tourism.

[Kirk Lover]

7. Alt.us.pres sec. on twitter has posted this:

Brad, I’m tired. I’m sure you’re tired. So there are two choices here: I can expose the dataset of every Russian bot you use to amplify your message... Or you resign as Trump’s campaign manager, and announce your cooperation with Special Counsel Mueller.


And then this person sent an example of what they are going to expose....I'm sorry I can't post it or do the links.
I wish that was a little easier around here.

Link to tweet

[MelissaB]

8. If he's given the chance, he'd be crazy not to flip.

I just wonder if they will give him that chance. I don't know if they need him or not.

[octoberlib]

13. He even posted a screenshot

:large

[poboy2]

11. MSNBC running a feature on this now.

[MelissaB]

12. Dang it! I missed it.