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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhistleblower: The Cambridge Analytica Files I created Steve Bannons psychological warfare tool
I created Steve Bannons psychological warfare tool: meet the data war whistleblower
For more than a year weve 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 Trumps chief strategist. Cambridge Analyticas parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. Its 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? Its like Nixon on steroids.
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It was Bannons interest in culture as war that ignited Wylies intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercers 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 Amazons Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogans 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 peoples profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.
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There are other dramatic documents in Wylies stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russias 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.
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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 Facebooks 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 Analyticas processes says its 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 platforms data flows, he says. And Wylies 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
dalton99a
(81,471 posts)octoberlib
(14,971 posts)It didnt make any sense to me, says Wylie. I didnt understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?
Muellers 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 Americas 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
(47,209 posts)code smart and socio-politically a total moron. Thats not a good thing for companies to have such naive workers who employ their skills w fucking blinders on. Hes so young too, probably just way out of his depth.
MelissaB
(16,420 posts)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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
(21,946 posts)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
(16,420 posts)bettyellen
(47,209 posts)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 theyd like to exploit cheap labor and build a lot of factories there, and so werent 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
(3,608 posts)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
(16,420 posts)I just wonder if they will give him that chance. I don't know if they need him or not.