August 22nd 2016- Will Donald Trumps Data-Analytics Company Allow Russia to Access Research on U.S

[malaise]

Citizens?
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/211152/trump-data-analytics-russian-access
<snip>
The Trump campaign has hired Ted Cruz’s former data-analysis firm, Cambridge Analytica—and in doing so, it has connected itself with a British property tycoon, Vincent Tchenguiz, and through him with the Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, a business associate of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who resigned last week. It would be hard to find a better example of why the ownership of the companies that collect data on the American electorate matters.

What Cambridge does is what marketers have done for some time now: segment potential customers (in this case, voters) by their buying habits, lifestyle, and psychology. It most famously worked on the “Leave.” campaign during Brexit voting in the United Kingdom.

Cambridge Analytica’s British parent company, SCL, has attracted criticism for some unusual strategies, such as trying to persuade opposition supporters not to vote in a Nigerian election, using the influence of “local religious figures.”

Mainly, though, SCL and CA both seem to have some pretty tired ideas. “The firm groups people according to where they fall on the so-called OCEAN scale, which psychologists use to measure how open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, or neurotic they are,” Wired reported in April. There’s nothing evil—or particularly smart—about this “psychological profiling,” which has been around for decades, and it’s questionable if it actually works to predict voting behavior.

CA obviously didn’t sprinkle the right kind of fairy dust for Cruz; a recent news item has it that the campaign felt it was CA to develop its product. Others say the firm doesn’t quite “get” American politics and has reliability issues: As Advertising Age quoted a consultant: “The product comes late or it’s not quite what you envisioned.”

But what’s worrisome is that CA, as The Wall Street Journal reports, is not just relying on public records:

Cambridge Analytica is surveying tens of thousands of Britons across the country on issues including partisanship, personality, and their concerns about EU membership. The company will then fuse those findings with other publicly available data on voters to produce advice for how “Leave. EU” should target their messaging more specifically through multiple channels.

Between “big data,” cyberwarfare, and new levels of detail in election polling, Americans ought to be thinking seriously about who owns the firms that collect this data.

[neohippie]

1. more on CA dig deeper

There's a lot of moving parts but this thread should be included

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/100210379333

as well as this



There's a lot of information about CA in this thread I posted in February 2017



https://www.democraticunderground.com/10028716802


And more from this threads from this past weekend


https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142016046

and of course these ties from Silicon Valley to Russian Mafia



There's a lot of interesting Russian ties to Silcon Valley, Facebook, Digital Skies, Zynga -facebook games, Air BNB, Spotify, Slack, and so much more

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=DA0D674CBF7C2F13611890CAB2434CCE&gwt=pay


https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/3286-facebook-are-you-interfacing-with-the-russian-mafia--kgb


Andrey Ternovskiy, one of Russia's wunderkind Internet entrepreneurs, is being courted by venture capitalists the world over. To get access to cash he needn't leave Moscow, but he doesn't want to do business with the billionaire oligarchs tied to the Russian Mafia and Putin's KGB-FSB machine in the Kremlin.

So, earlier this year the 18-year-old founder of Chatroullet, a webcam-based conversation website, came to the United States to meet with investors. Ternovskiy didn't tell anyone his itinerary. Nevertheless, when he arrived in New York, there was a chauffer-driven limo waiting for him, courtesy of Yuri Milner and Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's hottest investment company.

Ternovskiy reportedly has rebuffed DST's efforts, describing them as "harassing and hounding."

Ryan Tate at gawker.com appropriately describes the DST limo episode as "creepy." However, the experience goes beyond "creepy," illustrating the nexus between Russia's "business" community and it's intelligence structures. How did DST know Ternovskiy's flight schedule? There are a number of ways that DST could have gotten that information, nearly all of which would be illegal in any country where the "rule of law" is more than merely an empty slogan. But considering DST's high-level ties to Vladimir Putin's KGB-FSB police-state apparatus, obtaining Ternovskiy's airline itinerary must have been child's play.

The Russian teenager is demonstrating better business sense and greater ethical judgment than American corporations, such as social network behemoth Facebook and Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. Over the past year, DST has made several large investments in Facebook, and now holds a ten percent share in the company, which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide — and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

DST, which has also invested heavily in Zynga, the online social network game developer (FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars [above], etc.), and Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website, has a billion dollars to invest in Internet companies and, reportedly, is also looking at buying into Twitter.


https://www.wired.com/2011/10/mf_milner/


Ties to Kushner


https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/russia-funded-facebook-twitter-investments-kushner-investor





The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.

The discovery is likely to stir concerns over Russian influence in US politics and the role played by social media in last year’s presidential election. It may also raise new questions for the social media companies and for Kushner.


Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects”.

Vershbow said the findings were concerning in light of efforts by Moscow to disrupt US democracy and public debate. “There clearly was a wider plan, despite Putin’s protestations to the contrary,” he said.


The investments are detailed in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other partners, along with other previously unreported filings.

Facebook and Twitter were not made aware that funding for the investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and a financial arm of the state oil and gas firm Gazprom, according to Milner.

The files show that in 2011, VTB funded a $191m investment in Twitter. About the same time, Gazprom Investholding financed an opaque offshore company, which in turn funded a vehicle that held $1bn-worth of Facebook shares.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Milner



https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-poligarchs-oligarchs-and-stooges-of-the-paradise-papers


The Paradise Papers have uncovered some of the stooges and their connections to oligarchs. One example is Yuri Milner, a Wharton-educated Russian businessman who once worked for the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who rejected the mafia-state bargain and lost his fortune, spent ten years in prison, and now lives in exile. Milner started making money through Russian tech investments in the aughts, and by 2009 he was investing in American high-tech companies. He has since become a Silicon Valley fixture and a bit of a science-and-technology celebrity (he founded the Breakthrough Prizes, which offer the biggest cash payout of any science prize in the world). The Paradise Papers expose Milner as a stooge of Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch who has enjoyed most-favored status under Putin. Some of the money for Milner’s investments in Facebook came from Gazprom Investholding, which is the finance arm of the Russian state gas monopoly, Gazprom; at the time, Usmanov ran Gazprom Investholding.

[erronis]

2. What a great treasure chest of information. This will keep me busy all day

while other shit is coming down faster than I can read!

[malaise]

3. Excellent stuff there neohippie

[blake2012]

4. Powerful report back then. We were scammed as a country

By Cambridge Analytica, Russians, and Trump.

[poboy2]

5. r'd