The rightwing US computer scientist with links to Trump, the Leave.EU campaign and your data

[muriel_volestrangler]

About Robert Mercer, who donates many millions to right wing Americans like Trump, bankrolls the Breitbart website, and has a large stake in Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis company Trump and Bannon used in their election, and was apparently key, without being known in public, in the Brexit campaign too:

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.”
...
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.”

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

"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"

[LeftishBrit]

1. Wow. This MUST be illegal.

[TubbersUK]

2. K & R n/t

[Dustlawyer]

3. This is not some obscure law, they know they were supposed to report it.

Start putting these people in jail and watch this crap stop. It is a sign that our countries are controlled by a shadow government when there are two levels of society, one above the law and one below. We have that here in America and I guess they do over the pond as well.

[James48]

4. It's not illegal-

And won't be, because those in power want it to be legal.

[lostnfound]

5. Most important article ever. K&R. This is creating the Grand Canyon of politics.

Clear all distractions and READ.

[Ghost Dog]

6. Note that it is facebook that sells the data

to outfits like Cambridge Analytica in the first place. That bird has flown. Privacy rights have been eroded.

Election/referendum campaign income and spending need to be very tightly controlled by impartial authority. It does look like UK law was broken here.

... “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..."

[T_i_B]

8. To give you an idea of where we are with this....

...a few months ago I did a google search on my phone for information on biomass energy as I wanted to learn more about a new power station being built in Rotherham. Quite innocuous really. But then all of a sudden I am getting suggested posts on Farcebook linking to a website called "Green Watch" attacking biomass energy. A marked changed from the usual links to "personalised" Monty Python & System Of A Down T-Shirts I usually see on there.

It's quite scary how much information is quite innocuously put out there. Which has a lot of potential use.

[lostnfound]

7. We need to ask Tom Perez and every Elected D, what is your strategy to overcome this?

The psychopath campaign. The millions of zombie bots.
And what does the Trump admin intend to do with contracts to Cambridge Analytics or SCL going forward?
Psyops by the government against the American people is illegal, by the way.

[Matilda]

9. I'm currently reading a book called "Dark Money", by Jane Meyer

It's about how billionaires in the U.S., who seem to be able to write their own rules, are using their money to surreptitiously fund supposed citizens' groups to work against any attempts to make them accountable to the government. (Think Tea Party, for a start.)

It begins with, and focuses largely on the Koch brothers, but Robert Mercer also comes into it, among others. As does the DeVos family, of Amway fame - we saw their peculiarly blinkered views on show when Elizabeth Warren was interrogating Betsy DeVos, who is now, sadly, in charge of public education, which she is dedicated to destroying.

I'm less than halfway through, and at this point, it does seem that the left-wing, the progressives, the liberals, call them what you will in our different countries, are a bit naive when it comes to dealing with these ruthless people. Obama was certainly caught unprepared by their deviousness when he first introduced his Obamacare bill; I'm yet to find out whether the left has learned any lessons from that.

It's actually very unpleasant to read about these people, but if you want to know about their beliefs and how they use their money to twist government regulations to suit themselves, I do recommend it.