‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

a reply to: CoramDeo

www.economist.com...

Here you go.

I had a lot of trouble believing it too, trust me. I've been a fan of his for decades and found this out. I know it could also look like he was trying to do the right thing, but its my belief he ultimately helped the intel agencies to create things like facebook where we simply spill all of our info online.

Keep in mind he also was friends with Cheney growing up and was a libertarian leaning republican. He eventually flipped on Cheney, but my guess is as much as he wanted the internets privacy respected, he also wanted to promote american exceptionalism, or something similar.

a reply to: Harpua
Do you actually believe that Facebook didn't know about it?

Ya'll might want to study FB's T&C agreements 😉

originally posted by: crayzeed
a reply to: Harpua
Do you actually believe that Facebook didn't know about it?

Not sure it matters what I believe.

I wouldn't be surprised either way.

I wonder if there is a lawsuit brewing for them due to this.

originally posted by: xuenchen
Ya'll might want to study FB's T&C agreements 😉

Thats what I'm wondering... why were they denying that they shared the data for so long and even now are making excuses and covering their butt?

I'm wondering if there are potential legal ramifications for them.

a reply to: Harpua

Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP ("Scott+Scott"), a national shareholder and consumer rights litigation firm, is investigating whether Facebook, Inc. ("Facebook" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:FB) or certain of its officers and directors violated federal securities or other laws. If you are a Facebook stockholder, you are encouraged to contact a Scott+Scott attorney at (844) 818-6982 for more information. The investigation centers around Facebook's management of user data. On March 17, 2018, The New York Times reported that voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica ("Cambridge") "harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network's history." The next day, March 18, 2018, the Massachusetts Attorney General said her office was launching an investigation into Facebook. On March 19, 2018, European Union officials also said they would investigate.

From Barchart.com.

Yea, they're going to have legal issues.

originally posted by: Harpua

originally posted by: xuenchen
Ya'll might want to study FB's T&C agreements

Thats what I'm wondering... why were they denying that they shared the data for so long and even now are making excuses and covering their butt?

I'm wondering if there are potential legal ramifications for them.

It was too late when they realized they got set-up 😁

a reply to: lordcomac
a reply to: Harpua

You guys are missing the points in Grambler's thread: the Democrat's have been lock-step collaborating with the social media giants, which makes the externally mined data look like a drop in the bucket compared tot he internal holdings of se Facebook. So you ban external data mining companies from doing it, but how do you ban se Facebook, the goliath, when it could be argued their entire nature is data mining. A serious clusterF in oversight against it doing it politically.

Not that I'm against it (I'm not), but to even define how it does and how it doesnt work, how to police it, where 'it' even begins and ends, and so on, would be an obscene undertaking to actually specify let alone implement.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

I've felt for a long time that facebook was an intel operation to harvest data, but I didn't consider it would be used to manipulate people like this.

Time to go back to old school tech

:grabs a book:

I know several people who have cut facebook out of their lives- and many more that just never got into it in the first place.

Not a one of them were the kinds of people who would have voted clinton- and we're in a decidedly blue (or wasn't it red before?) state.

Personally, from what I've seen, people who never got into social media are generally pretty intelligent people- they simply know better.

I've yet to find an obvious liberal who avoids social media.

Just my observations.

from the Original Link

(The article is essentially an inisder, Christopher Wylie, spilling the beans about what C/A does)

... big snip ...
The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defence and elections operations.

Its defence arm was a contractor to the UK’s Ministry of Defence and the US’s Department of Defense, among others.
Its expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.

SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves.

Their know-how works is tried, tested and proven
They've been doing it for years, at any price
Check this out :

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.

“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?”

There's more !

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss.

And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor.

And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

Makes it all sound as though Robert Mercer paid C/A to "do a job" on America !
The article is really good, thanks OP

More articles, if anyone fancies a dive down the rabbit hole ...
The analytica Files

a reply to: Harpua

I can't help thinking that this Wylie character is not completely forthcoming with everything.
I don't believe for a minute that he couldn't resolve a reason for the Russian company/s? being interested in the data, nor do I believe that Facebook would have no clue as to what all the data mining was about, especially since it was spread so exponentially from a relatively low number of people...facebook would have been very interested in that.

And, to say the Cambridge Analytica group were unaware of any illegalities, is more like cover for himself.
You could say that Cambridge Analytica were just plain Blasé about it all when you consider all the actors involved.

a reply to: Cassi3l

And these recent exposures and MSM hype may be part of the "psy-ops" as well 😨

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

I said make it a felony- that goes for facebook too.
DO NOT ALLOW data mining. People are stupid to put their data out there in the first place- nobody warns children these days that everything they do is being watched, recorded, and can bite them in the ass 30 years from now.

Systematically gathering information on people (which is what facebook does) should be a felony, akin to how there are laws against stalking people.

A more recent update :Cambridge analytica execs boast dirty tricks

Caught on camera by a reporter :

When the reporter asked if Cambridge Analytica could offer investigations into the damaging secrets of rivals, Nix said it worked with former spies from Britain and Israel to look for political dirt. He also volunteered that his team were ready to go further than an investigation.

“Oh, we do a lot more than that,” he said over dinner at an exclusive hotel in London. “Deep digging is interesting, but you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded.

“You know these sort of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption.”

Purveyors of influence
not so much about "The Deep State"
more about "The Deepest pockets"

And since i'm perusing ..

Revealed : 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica

... snip ...
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements

..snip..

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.

... snip ...

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong.

Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.

ye gods, there's like 50 million manchurians in the US right now !

originally posted by: Harpua

originally posted by: lordcomac

originally posted by: Harpua
I believe we need a legal code of ethics for data harvesting. What say you, ATS?

We only need one- outright ban data harvesting. Make it a felony.
Problem solved.

I'm down.

Try to convince the control matrix/deep state/oligarchs/intel cabal

Won't happen

Until they realize that someone devised a virus that was embedded in a highly complex way within the meta deta gathered from that person or group.

Like a puzzle that, once completed, activates the virus.

Really wouldnt suprise me as a response to the totally insane control freak, power mongers who disguise their lust for dominance with "i know better than you, ill keep you safe" mentality.

Yea. "Safe." Safe, and enslaved.

originally posted by: lordcomac
I know several people who have cut facebook out of their lives- and many more that just never got into it in the first place.

Not a one of them were the kinds of people who would have voted clinton- and we're in a decidedly blue (or wasn't it red before?) state.

Personally, from what I've seen, people who never got into social media are generally pretty intelligent people- they simply know better.

I've yet to find an obvious liberal who avoids social media.

Just my observations.

Well, my experience differs greatly from yours. When I was still on Fakebook, I was one of several Libertarians among my friends who ran the gamut from Republican to Democrat, Green Party to Constitutionalist to Anarcho-Capitalist. Everyone ran the complete basic Liberal/Conservative slant gamut from one extreme through the moderates to the other extreme, too.

Aside from myself, the only mutual friend among all of us that left Fakebook in the...5 years now?...since I dumped it in disgust was a Dem, so...

However, this comparison BS simply detracts from a significantly more serious matter than "my FB echo chamber is giving me a false usership impression!" is.

a reply to: Cassi3l

Can't be just this administration. Facebook stocks are plummeting now as the membership pool is getting smaller-still not enough . The control grid should be panicking.