Russian Disinformation. Russian Disinformation. Russian Disinformation. How many time have you heard that over the past four years?

But what about British disinformation?

Much of the current Russia paranoia began with the claims that Donald Trump was recruited by Russian intelligence years ago as a sleeper agent, and then given a leg-up into the presidency of the United States with the help of the GRU. The claims of ‘collusion’ were repeated over and over, and yet at the end of the day none of them could be substantiated. And where did it all start? In the now notorious dossier assembled by former British spook Christopher Steele.

Steele, it has now been revealed, got his information from a guy called Igor Danchenko. He in his turn got a lot of it from a former classmate, Olga Galkina, described as an alcoholic ‘disgruntled PR executive living in Cyprus’, and as such obviously a well-informed source with intimate knowledge of the Kremlin’s innermost secrets.

In short, the Steele dossier was a load of hokum, commissioned by a British Black PR operative and then fabricated by some random Russian émigrés with no access to anything of value. And yet, millions believed it.

And then, we have the story of Brexit. Ever since the 2016 referendum which resulted in Britain leaving the European Union, we have been repeatedly told that the victory of the Leave campaign was made possible by ‘Russian interference’. Most significantly, it was claimed that the Russian government illicitly funded the Leave campaign by funneling money through the campaign’s most significant financial backer, businessman Arron Banks.

Leading the charge against Russia and Banks was journalist Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer (as the Sunday version of The Guardian is known). Faced with complaints that she lacked evidence for her accusations against Banks, Cadwalladr doubled down on her assertions. ‘We know that the Russian government offered money to Arron Banks’, she said. ‘I am not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government’, she added, ‘I say he lied about his contact with the Russian government. Because he did.’

But it turns out that it was Cadwalladr who had a tricky relationship with the truth. Angered by her assertions, Arron Banks sued her for libel. Three weeks ago, she publicly backed down from one of her accusations. ‘On 22 Oct 2020,’ she said, ‘I tweeted that Arron had been found to have broken the law. I accept he has not. I regret making this false statement, which I have deleted. I undertake not to repeat it. I apologise to Arron for the upset and distress caused.’

Despite this, Ms Cadwalladr plugged on for a little while with her defence against Banks’s suit. But today, she finally threw in the towel. Withdrawing her defence of ‘truth’, Cadwalladr admitted that she had no evidence to back her allegations against Banks and offered to pay all his costs.

The Banks story was not the only fiction Cadwalladr peddled. The journalist earned international plaudits and a prestigious Orwell prize for her report on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica supposedly used big data dredged up out of Facebook to help both the Leave campaign and Donald Trump win victories in 2016. This too had a Russian connection. In a 2018 article for The Observer Cadwalladr described how, ‘Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties a Russian university. … Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with … also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin.’

Others jumped on the Russia-Cambridge connection. ‘The Facebook data farmed by Cambridge Analytica was accessed from Russia’, claimed British MP Damien Collins, head of the House of Commons Select Committee for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. In this capacity, he then published a report outlining allegations of Russian propaganda and meddling in British affairs, including unsubstantiated insinuations that Russian money had influenced the Brexit campaign via Mr Banks.

And yet, all this was false too. The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spent over two years investigating Cambridge Analytica, including its alleged role in the Brexit referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and its supposed ties to Russian government influence operations. Having completed its investigation, the ICO reported that apart from a single Russian IP address in data connected to Cambridge Analytica, it had found no evidence of Russian involvement with the company. Moreover, it concluded that claims of the company’s enormous influence were ‘hype’, unjustified by the facts.

In other words, just like the Steele dossier, the whole story about Russia influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum was made-up nonsense.

And yet, it has had an enormous influence. The allegations that Russia ‘interfered’ in Brexit have been repeated again and again – in parliamentary reports, newspaper articles, scholarly journals, books, social media, and so on. Despite their falsehood, they have enjoyed a spread and influence that Russian ‘meddlers’ could only dream of.

Will the peddlers of British disinformation repent? Will they now pen scores of articles admitting that they were wrong? Will they give evidence to parliament denouncing the scourge of false stories about Russia emanating from the British media and MPs?

Of course not. Ms Cadwalladr’s humiliation will get a few lines buried somewhere deep in some newspapers’ inner pages, and will then be forgotten. Meanwhile, the original claims will remain uncorrected in the many documents that repeat them, and the myth of Russian interference in Brexit will trundle on as a basis for denouncing the threat emanating from the East. The damage has been done. Ms Cadwalladr has been discredited, but someone else will soon be found to pick up the torch.

irrussianality.wordpress.com

Alexander RUBINSTEIN

Two years after the stunning June 2016 passage of the Brexit referendum, affirming the British public’s desire to withdraw from the European Union, and the equally unexpected November 2016 election of Donald Trump to the White House, a scandal erupted that seemed to explain these rogue right-wing victories as the handiwork of an especially devilish data-mining scheme.

In 2018, a hipster techie named Christopher Wylie emerged as a supposed whistleblower from the UK data firm SCL-Cambridge Analytica. Wylie claimed inside knowledge of how his former employer illicitly harvested the personal data of British and American voters through Facebook to conduct micro-targeting operations in favor of Brexit and Trump. Further, and most memorably, he asserted that “known Russian agents” were involved in the right-wing plot.

“Here is what I know,” Wylie tweeted , “when I was at Cambridge Analytica, the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St Petersburg, tested US voter opinion on Putin’s leadership, and hired hackers from Russia – all while [former Trump Chief of Staff Steve] Bannon was in charge.”

As soon as Wylie went public, his accusations against Cambridge Analytica became a central pillar of the Russiagate narrative, bridging Trump-Putin across the Atlantic to Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism.

Wylie, a self-proclaimed progressive Eurosceptic , has since published a book, “ Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America,” and inspired an Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary about the supposed scandal called “The Great Hack.” In 2018, Wylie’s supposed revelations earned him a spot on Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. A film based on the rebel techie’s interview with The Guardian is on the way.

Wylie has boastfully described himself as “the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool,’” who enjoys a wild ride “from fashion to fascism to fashion.” (After starting out as a fashion school student, he said he was hired by H&M in 2018.)

The hipster whistleblower was cultivated over the course of 2017 and 2018 by The Guardian’s Russia-obsessed correspondent Carole Cadwalladr. Operating as Wylie’s de facto publicist and churning out a stream of reports based on his spectacular claims, Cadwalladr has won admiring media profiles , an array of journalism awards, and a finalist nomination in the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

In July 2018, Cadwalladr issued a bold prophesy that stirred liberal audiences across the Atlantic: “From [former FBI director Robert] Mueller’s most recent indictments [of Trump officials], it is clear that the data trail must be coming soon: the chain of evidence that is required to understand how the Russian government’s influence operation targeted American voters.”

She pointed to a forthcoming report by the British Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and its commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, on the role of SCL-Cambridge Analytica in Brexit and 2016 US elections: “ And here is the clue and where it is believed Denham comes in – what data it was based on.”

Her self-styled whistleblower source, Wylie, has also praised Denham: “ I want to point out this Russia/Facebook/[Cambridge Analytica] investigation is being led by women like Elizabeth Denham, the UK Information Commissioner, and Carole Cadwalladr at the Guardian. When the tech bros looked away, these women paid attention and put in the hours to investigate.”

But the data trail promised by Cadwalladr never arrived. Instead, Denham and the British ICO produced a report that contradicted virtually ever major prediction and assertion that Wylie and Cadwalladr made about SCL-Cambridge Analytica and its role in UK politics. Published this October, the ICO report reinforces a British parliamentary investigation into Brexit that found no evidence of Russian meddling.

With the release of the ICO report, the Cambridge Analytica-Russiagate bombshell that erupted two years ago has been exposed as another dud. Now, there are serious questions about the credibility of the figures who inspired the debunked narrative.

Another Russiagate plot point reaches a revealing denouement

The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spent over two years investigating Cambridge Analytica (CA) and associated entities, including its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL); the Canada-based Aggregate IQ (AIQ); and the research facility Global Science Research (GSR).

Strategic advisory firms like Cambridge Analytica work with political campaigns, governments, and corporate clients, offering them a variety of services from public relations to black operations. The ICO report, for example, found that Cambridge Analytica purchased large amounts of commercially available data on US citizens. The data was then used to build profiles on American voters so that they could be targeted with election advertising tailored to them.

After examining Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, and allegations of ties to Russian government influence operations, the ICO found a chaotic, largely ineffectual operation with no connection to the Kremlin. The closure of the investigation marked yet another anti-climactic denouement of a key Russiagate plot point.

Elizabeth Denham methodically discredited the baseless allegations of collusion between the data firm, the Russian government, and the Trump campaign. Further, her report poured cold water on the influence of Cambridge Analytica in Brexit, demonstrating the company’s negligible impact on the vote.

The ICO even concluded that Cambridge Analytica’s widely touted psychographic micro-targeting of voters was mostly hype. Its tactics were neither new nor particularly effective.

“The scale of the investigation I conducted was unprecedented for a data protection authority,” declared the ICO commissioner in her 18-page report. “It highlighted the whole ecosystem of personal data in political campaigns.”

“During my investigation a large amount of material and equipment was reviewed including; 42 laptops and computers, 700 TB of data, 31 servers, over 300,000 documents, and a wide range of material in paper form and from cloud storage devices,” Denham said.

The Guardian reported “40 full-time investigators working on the case, 20 specialist contractors, and they have an interview list that numbers 264 people.”

“The ICO has conducted a reverse engineering exercise to try to identify and confirm as far as possible, how SCL/CA processed the personal data they held… my findings were also informed and corroborated based on accounts obtained from witness interviews and the contents of statements taken during the investigation,” Denham said.

The methodically detailed investigation’s findings were a damning commentary on the Western media that opportunistically painted SCL-Cambridge Analytica as a batcave command center for Putin and the Bannonite far-right.

Reaching for the Russia ruse

In March 2018, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pointed to Cambridge Analytica’s alleged work with Russia in order to deflect from her loss to Trump in 2016. “You’ve got Cambridge Analytica… and you’ve got the Russians. And the real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely?” she posed to the UK’s Channel 4 News in an interview for the network’s documentary on the data scandal.

“If they were getting advice from let’s say Cambridge Analytica or someone else, about, ‘ok, here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin…’ that indeed would be very disturbing,” Clinton declared.

Cadwalladr seized on the statement as confirmation of her own reporting.

So, this is pretty extraordinary. Hillary links Kenya, Trump & Brexit. Says all “projects” of Cambridge Analytica https://t.co/Xbv2cNS9SI

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) September 19, 2017

That same month, Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressional point man on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, had invited Wylie to testify as a part of “ ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.” In the Senate, Richard Blumenthal called to have Cambridge Analytica investigated over its “ties to Russia” and “services for Russians.”

The uproar that ensued from Wylie’s testimony resulted in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg being dragged before Congress to apologize like a whimpering puppy for his role in enabling the British data firm to meddle in elections.

Corporate media leapt on the salacious story, devoting copious air time to the topic. One journalist noted dozens of tweets about Cambridge Analytica written in 2018 by CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju, the network’s media critic Brian Stelter, and its primetime host Jake Tapper.

Don’t know if anyone at CNN is covering debunking of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower panic. This is what it looked like back in 2018.

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) October 9, 2020

When Wylie testified behind closed doors to members of the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee and an Oversight and Government Reform panel in April 2018, he stunned the lawmakers with claims that Cambridge Analytica had tested messaging with American voters about Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies in Eastern Europe.

Wylie claimed that people who worked on the US and UK campaigns had connections to two Russian intelligence outfits, as well as to Russians and Russian companies which were in turn linked to the Kremlin itself. According to the self-styled whistleblower, Cambridge Analytica hired “known Russian agents.” He painted a sprawling, conspiratorial portrait of a hostile foreign information warfare operation that seemed almost custom made for a US media and Democratic Party eager to impeach Trump and wage a new cold war against Putin.

“There was a lot of relationships and a lot of communications with different fairly senior Russian officials,” Wylie told NPR. He has claimed that a Russian gas company with alleged ties to the Kremlin named Lukoil inquired about political, non-commercial online targeting in the United States to the company.

“Wylie also revealed Cambridge Analytica’s links to Russia. Wylie had the documents and tapes to back him up,” NPR reported.

Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) has said it discussed working with “Lukoil Turkey [to] better engage with its loyalty-card customers at gas stations,” but that nothing came from the meeting. Tellingly, Lukoil received not one mention in the short section on Russia in the ICO’s report.

While the ICO report mentioned “possible Russia-located activity” – referring to Russian IP addresses found in some data – the information was ultimately referred to the National Crime Agency, which has not taken any action. “These matters fall outside the remit of the ICO,” the report says.

In July 2018, Wylie claimed this information was also in the FBI’s hands, and that he had “been helping their investigation.” However, the reported DOJ-FBI investigation that ran parallel to the ICO has offered nothing to corroborate his remarkable assertion.

The ICO’s Russiagate section concluded as follows: “We did not find any additional evidence of Russian involvement in our analysis of material contained in the SCL / CA servers we obtained.”

In other words, virtually everything Wylie told US Congress and the media about Cambridge Analytica’s role as a secret Russian weapon – the entire basis of his fame – has been discredited by the ICO report he helped to spur.

Blustery claims of influence exposed as hot air

UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s report also surgically dismantled many of the most sensational claims about Cambridge Analytica advanced by Christopher Wylie’s promoters in the media, like Cadwalladr.

In one of the report’s most revealing sections, its authors found:

The methods that SCL were using were, in the main, well recognised processes using commonly available technology. It was these third-party libraries which formed the majority of SCL’s data science activities which were observed by the ICO… We understand this procedure is well established within the wider data science community, and in our view does not show any proprietary technology, or processes, within SCL’s work.

However, it is important to stress that the output was only a prediction… the real-world accuracy of these predictions – when used on new individuals whose data had not been used in the generating of the models – was likely much lower.

As in so many previously misreported Russiagate stories, the subjects of the controversy may have been a victim of their own self-promotional bluster. In a press release following Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, Cambridge Analytica claimed it was “instrumental in identifying supporters, persuading undecided voters, and driving turnout,” and bragged that it had “informed key decisions on campaigning communications, and resource allocation.”

“We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in President-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win,” CEO Alexander Nix boasted at the time.

The ICO report, on the other hand, noted “evidence that [SCL’s] own staff were concerned about some of the public statements the leadership of the company were making about their impact and influence.”

“SCL’s own marketing material claimed they had ‘Over 5,000 data points per individual on 230 million adult Americans.’ However, based on what we found it appears that this may have been an exaggeration,” the report stated.

The investigation not only exposed SCL-Cambridge Analytica’s claims of driving tectonic shifts in global politics as hot air; it also found the company’s data protection was almost comically sloppy, “with little thought for effective security measures.”

Widespread data manipulation tactics painted as uniquely evil Republican mind-weapons

Yet as recently as September of this year, media outlets like Channel 4 have continued to milk the scandal, using Cambridge Analytica data to fuel its investigative exposés on the 2016 election. Like reporting over the previous years, the coverage was premised on the dubious notion that Cambridge Analytica’s impact was meaningful.

When the scandal broke, few journalists penned anything counter to the prevailing narratives on Cambridge Analytica. Among the very few skeptics at the time was Yasha Levine, author of “ Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.” In March 2018, Levine panned media coverage of the firm’s activities.

“This story is being covered and framed in a misleading way,” Levine wrote. “So far, much of the mainstream coverage, driven by the Times and Guardian reports, looks at Cambridge Analytica in isolation—almost entirely outside of any historical or political context.”

“Everyone” working in contemporary data-driven politics employs the tactics employed by Cambridge Analytica, Levine explained to The Grayzone.

“The Koch brothers have their own firm that sucks in data from Facebook and a million other sources to micro-target voters,” he said. “The Democratic Party has its own software that does exactly the same thing. Facebook has a whole team that works with campaigns to utilize data and profile voters. It’s a huge business with billions slushing around. Everyone promises huge results, way overselling their capability. If you knew even a little bit about the way political campaigns use data, it was clear that the whole thing was a sham the moment this scandal hit.”

While Wylie has claimed that SCL conducted “counter-extremism” information operations in the Middle East on behalf of the British government, and suggested that Bannon sought to deploy these tools to foment extremism in the US, the reality is that the technology was hardly limited to the 2016 election, or to one party.

This May, for example, Fox News reported that technology that received initial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was deploying AI-driven information warfare tools originally meant to fight ISIS propaganda in order to target pro-Trump voters.

An award-winning narrative collapses

According to Elizabeth Denham’s ICO report, SCL-Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising was “likely the final purpose of the data gathering.” However, it “has not been possible to determine from the digital evidence reviewed” whether the firm’s online tactics influenced any political campaign.

In March 2018, Christopher Wylie testified to the UK parliament that Cambridge Analytica had shared surreptitiously obtained Facebook data with AggregateIQ (AIQ), a firm that was contracted by several pro-Brexit campaigns including Vote Leave. Wylie claimed AIQ was the Canadian front for SCL. However, the ICO report referred to AIQ merely as “a company associated with SCL/CA.”

The ICO report concluded that SCL had only a negligible impact on Brexit: “From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK – beyond some initial enquiries made by SCL/CA in relation to [the UK Independence Party] data in the early stages of the referendum process,” Denham wrote. “This strand of work does not appear to have then been taken forward by SCL/CA.”

The ICO report went on to state that the data harvested by SCL from Facebook could not have been used by anyone in the course of Brexit campaigns:

It was suggested that some of the data was utilised for political campaigning associated with the Brexit Referendum. However, our view on review of the evidence is that the data from GSR could not have been used in the Brexit Referendum as the data shared with SCL/Cambridge Analytica by Dr. Kogan related to US registered voters.

In one revealing finding laid out in the report, GSR “shared subsets of the data harvested by the App” with Eunoia Technologies Inc, among other companies.

Unmentioned in the report was that Eunoia Technologies was founded by none other than Christopher Wylie after he left Cambridge Analytica in 2014.

To be sure, there were real connections between the Donald Trump operation and Cambridge Analytica. Trump’s then-campaign manager, Steve Bannon, was a vice president at Cambridge Analytica before he joined the Trump campaign. Top Trump moneyman Robert Mercer had funded the firm, along with Bannon’s assorted media projects and the Trump campaign. Anti-Trump forces exploited these ties to try to frame Cambridge Analytica as a non-existent bridge between Trump Inc. and “the Russians.”

There is also no doubt that there was illicit data that was likely misused in the course of political campaigns by Cambridge Analytica. But Western media once again crossed the line from mundane fact into Russiagate fiction by alleging that the Kremlin exploited data non-consensually harvested by Cambridge Analytica to micro-target US and UK citizens with political messaging meant to sway the presidential election and the Brexit referendum.

These conspiracy theories were amplified and seemingly legitimized by Wylie, who was touted as an experienced company insider who came forward out of a commitment to democratic values. But was he truly who he said he was, or was he another opportunist seeking to exploit the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate for fame and fortune?

A Wylie web of deceptions and suspect associates

Throughout the Cambridge Analytica pseudo-scandal, a series of conflicting narratives raised questions that were conveniently overlooked by US and UK media. Was AIQ, the Canadian firm, truly part and parcel of SCL? Was Christopher Wylie a co-founder, a contractor, or a mere intern? Questions about the provenance of the data Wylie blew the whistle on have not been posed.

While Wylie focused on the most seemingly explosive connections, such as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s meetings with Cambridge Analytica prior to Trump’s announcement that he was running for president, he omitted crucial pieces of evidence that undermined the conspiracy theories the media feasted on.

For example, Wylie neglected to mention that his own company, Eunoia, met with Lewandowski at about the same time in an attempt to retain the soon-to-be campaign as a client, offering them services similar to Cambridge Analytica’s.

Reporting from Buzzfeed indicated that Eunoia pitched the Trump campaign – a Cambridge Analytica client – on micro-targeting services. Wylie told the website that he deleted the illicit data in 2015. According to BuzzFeed, Wylie “bragged to associates about meetings he had with potential corporate clients, including Walmart, Monsanto, the American Petroleum Institute, Burberry, DKNY, Ford, and Virgin.”

That was before Wylie “blew the whistle.”

According to the former campaign director for Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, who today serves as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief advisor, “Wylie tried to sell me the same crap he accuses Cambridge Analytica of doing.”

While Wylie claimed that after leaving Cambridge Analytica he was subjected to lawsuits from the company in order to make it impossible for him to ever “work in any kind of political thing again or data thing again,” and to keep quiet about the data, Buzzfeed’s reporting and Cummings’ account of his apparent attempts to poach Vote Leave and the Trump campaign from his former employer corroborates accusations against him in a report commissioned by Cambridge Analytica.

Wylie claims he was appalled at the direction of the company following Bannon’s takeover, however, he has been credited with personally developing the illicit data harvesting tactic, and likely exploited it while at Cambridge Analytica before leaving the company to start his own firm – which also had access to the data. He then allegedly attempted to court the very same right-wing clients with essentially the same services. It was only after the failure of his private company that Wylie began sounding the alarm.

It is not clear exactly when Wylie experienced a change of heart. Cadwalladr says she first approached him on LinkedIn in 2017. Years earlier, in 2013, Wylie was discussing plans to found Eunoia Technologies and build it into “the NSA’s wet dream.”

Buzzfeed noted that Wylie approached SCL colleagues about joining his Palantir-like data firm. Promotional materials later produced by Eunoia pitched the targeting of voters for political clients, just as SCL did.

Wylie has also claimed to be a founder of Cambridge Analytica. “I got recruited to join a research team at SCL Group, which, at the time, was a British military contractor based in London. Most of its clients were various ministries of defense in NATO countries,” he boasted to NPR.

However, the report Cambridge Analytica commissioned in the aftermath of Wylie’s emergence as a supposed whistleblower claimed he was little more than an intern on a student visa who only worked two days per week.

That record stands in stark contrast to the claim by The Guardian’s Cadwalladr that Wylie was the man who “came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica.”

Coupled with the damning conclusions of the UK ICO report, the conflicting accounts of Wylie’s background seem to shatter his credibility, along with that of the Western press that accepted his spectacular claims at face value.

So was his most enthusiastic promoter, Cadwalladr, acting purely as a journalist, or as a partisan advancing an ulterior Cold War agenda?

At around the same time Cadwalladr was spinning out the now-discredited Cambridge Analytica story, she was  listed by a covert, UK Foreign Commonwealth Office-funded, anti-Russian propaganda operation, the Integrity Initiative, as part of a UK-based cluster of journalists that operated under its watch. In fact, Cadwalladr participated in a November 2018 Integrity Initiative conference with other members of the cluster called “Tackling Tools of Malign Influence.”

Cadwalladr also appears to have enjoyed some form of relationship with the dubious former British spy and author of the discredited Steele Dossier, Christopher Steele. Beyond repeatedly hyping Steele and his dossier, the Guardian writer appears to have meet with the British spook. In fact, Steele spoke about “imminent and urgent threats to democracy” at a screening of “The Great Hack,” the documentary about Cadwalladr and Wylie. His comments, however, were off the record.

Christopher Steele, ex-head of MI6 Russia desk & author of so-called ‘Steele dossier’, has made very few public pronouncements. If he talks – as he does below – we really should listen. Lack of action against election interference = ‘scary’ https://t.co/JN1mjuwklk

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) January 5, 2020

On Twitter, the Guardian writer has spun out unfounded conspiracies, declaring that “ Trump = Brexit = Russia. ” She has also decried being “mocked as a crackpot conspiracy theorist for pursuing Cambridge Analytica. Let’s hope I’m as [sic] wrong about Brexit’s centrality in Trump-Russia axis.”

America. Yours wasn’t the only election gamed. Same players. Same companies. Same data. Same Facebook. Same Russians. https://t.co/LGNcdHrAo2

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) July 9, 2018

Wylie, for his part, enjoyed a speaking gig alongside Cadwalladr and Bill Browder, the vulture capitalist fugitive from Russian justice whose distortion-laden tale of persecution by the Kremlin inspired the US government’s Magnitsky Act and helped fuel the anti-Russian politics that now dominate Washington.

Russia is attacking our democracy. Facebook did nothing to stop them. Brexit is the product of crime. And I suck at dress codes. pic.twitter.com/jHmeQPCHkU

— Christopher Wylie (@chrisinsilico) November 28, 2018

Since the UK’s ICO report demolished the claims that were central to Wylie’s hipster-whistleblower persona, and which provided the basis for Cadwalladr’s award-winning reporting, one has gone off the radar while the other has gone into apparent damage control mode.

Wylie and Cadwalladr ignore, dismiss a report they had eagerly anticipated

On Twitter, Christopher Wylie has chosen to ignore the damning ICO report that he once predicted would validate his explosive allegations.

Carole Cadwalladr, for her part, has pumped out a series of Tweets attacking outlets that claimed the ICO report undermined her award-winning reporting. In apparent hopes of shielding her reputation from scrutiny, she linked to a commentary by The Guardian Observer’s editorial board which bizarrely insisted “this newspaper’s exposé of the exploitation of private data has been vindicated [by the ICO report].”

The column highlighted certain aspects of the report that seemed to corroborate the paper’s reporting. However, it dismissed the meat of the investigation, declaring that “it stretches credulity to present [the ICO investigation] as a full investigation into potential Russian influence on Brexit.” Like Cadwalladr, it attacked other publications for misreporting the story.

“The ICO report confirmed massive mishandling of private data and its exploitation for political campaigning. The Observer is proud of its role in the exposure of these abuses,” the article proclaimed.

The editorial is correct about one thing, at least: the ICO investigation has resulted in a number of penalties. Cambridge Analytica was fined before it shuttered; Facebook was fined for allowing applications to harvest data from friends of users; Vote Leave and other campaigns and companies were also hit with fines for data crimes relating to the Brexit campaign – including pro-Remain entities.

But the high-tech huckstering hipster Wylie and his media muse Cadwalladr have faced no consequences for the hyperbolic bluster and now-debunked hype about foreign infiltration they spun out to win fame, film deals, and flashy journalistic awards. No matter the evidence, the Russiagate show must go on.

thegrayzone.com

The recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica fiasco deepened public concern about the political power and allegiances of Big Tech corporations. Soon after the story went viral, 3,100 Google employees submitted a petition to Google CEO Sundar Pichai protesting Google’s involvement in a Pentagon program called “Project Maven”.

Last week, the Tech Worker’s Coalition launched a petition protesting tech industry participation in development for war, urging Google to break its contract with the Department of Defense (DoD).  Will Pichai respond?

Google has a lot to answer for.  In March 2016, then US Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, tapped then Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt to chair the DoD’s new Innovation Advisory Board.  The Board would give the Pentagon access to “the brightest technical minds focused on innovation” –  culled from Silicon Valley.

More recently, details about Project Maven emerged.  The project uses machine learning and deep learning to develop an AI-based computer vision solution for military drone targeting.  This innovative system turns reams of visual data – obtained from surveillance drones – into “actionable intelligence at insight speed.”

Because there are many more hours of surveillance footage than a team of humans can view, most of the footage cannot be evaluated by Pentagon workers.  Using AI, Project Maven steps in to make sure no footage goes unwatched.  The AI performs analytics of drone footage to categorize, sift and identify the items the DoD is looking for – cars, people, objects and so on – and flag the sought-after items for a human to review.  The project has been successful, and the Pentagon is now looking to make a “Project Maven factory”.

Reports of Google’s participation in Project Maven comes amidst news they are bidding alongside Amazon, IBM and Microsoft for a $10 billion “one big cloud” servicing contract with the Pentagon.  Eric Schmidt, who is no longer CEO of Google or Alphabet, but who remains a technical advisor and board member at Google’s parent company Alphabet, claims to recuse himself of all information about Google AI projects for the Pentagon, because he also chairs the DoD’s Innovation Advisory Board.

Schmidt’s central role in this story underscores controversy about Google’s close relationship to the US military.  In 2013, Julian Assange penned an essay highlighting Google’s sympathy for the US military empire in his essay, The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’– a criticism of Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s co-authored book, The New Digital Age.

In 2015, Schmidt hosted Henry Kissinger for a fireside chat at Google.  He introduced Kissinger as a “foremost expert on the future of the physical world, how the world really works” and stated Kissinger’s “contributions to America and the world are without question.”

For many, Henry Kissinger’s “contributions” are drenched in the blood of the Global South. Declassified documents show that during the Vietnam/Indochina War, Kissinger, then a national security advisor, transmitted Nixon’s orders to General Alexander Haig: use “anything that flies on anything that moves” in Cambodia. According to a study by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan (Director of Genocide Studies at Yale University), the United States dropped more tons of bombs on Cambodia than all of the Allies during World War II combined.  Cambodia, they conclude, may be the most bombed country in history.  By all reason, Kissinger should be tried for genocide.

Carpet bombing Cambodia is just one of many crimes carried out by Dr. Kissinger.  During his time in government, he bolstered “moderate” white settler-colonial forces in Southern Africa to subvert the black liberation struggle for independence and self-determination.  The US deemed Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress and other, less-recognized black liberation groups as “terrorist” and “communist” threats to US interests.  The apartheid regime subjugated the black majority not only inside South Africa, but in brutal wars across the border in countries like Angola and Mozambique.  More than 500,000 Africans died in Angola alone.

US corporations profited from business in the region, and provided white supremacists the arms, vehicles, energy resources, financial support and computer technology used to systematically oppress black people.  IBM was a primary culprit, supplying the apartheid state with the bulk of computers used to denationalize the black African population and administer the state, banks, police, intelligence and military forces.

On April 6, 2018, Kissinger welcomed one of today’s new tech leaders, Eric Schmidt, to keynote the annual Kissinger Conference at Yale University.  This year’s theme was Understanding Cyberwarfare and Artificial Intelligence. After praising the ROTC and Ash Carter (both in attendance), Schmidt told the audience it is a “tremendous honor to be on the same stage as Dr. Kissinger, and we all admire him for all the reasons we all know.”  In his speech, he spoke of how the US must develop AI to defend against today’s familiar adversaries: the “nasty” North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese.  A couple of Yale students were kicked out for protesting.

In decades past, human rights advocates famously challenged the development of technology for racial capitalism.  Activists, including students and workers, pressured IBM, General Motors and other corporations to stop aiding and abetting apartheid and war.

Today, a new wave of technology is being tapped by military and police forces.  IBM has partnered with the City of Johannesburg for early efforts at “smart” policing, while Africa and the Middle East are targets of the US drone empire. Activists advocating democracy and equality inside Africa and the Middle East are staunchly opposed to these developments.

The bi-partisan effort to police Trump-designated “shithole” countries with advanced weaponry has Big Tech on its side.  Google’s involvement with Project Maven constitutes active collaboration in this endeavor.

An activist campaign about Silicon Valley’s collaboration with the US military could be unfolding. However, it’s going to take grassroots pressure across the world to make technology work for humanity.

counterpunch.org

It is no longer vogue to interfere with vote counting. Instead, psychographic warfare experts have decided that it is much more advantageous to influence the voters before they cast their votes. This form of information warfare was initiated in 2006 after the development of the Megaphone Desktop Tool, a software program designed to respond to what was considered anti-Israeli content on the web. Using RSS (Rich Site Summary) news feeds, Megaphone and an umbrella propaganda organization called Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS) were able to martial support for Israeli policies by automatically casting votes in on-line polls, respond to comments deemed negative toward Israel in chat rooms and on-line forums, and directing email to various news organizations, including the BBC, Independent Television News (ITN), and Reuters. According to “The Register” in the United Kingdom, what Megaphone provided was “a high-tech exercise in ballot-stuffing.” Megaphone received the nickname of “lobbyware.”

In 2007, Megaphone was re-programmed for other uses and a revised version was marketed by Collactive, a firm that was at the center of providing spamming software to unscrupulous on-line marketers. The seed money for Collactive was provided by Sequoia Capital, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm active in financing high-technology ventures in Israel. It is no coincidence that Sequoia Capital’s headquarters is located a mere 7.5 miles from Facebook’s headquarters in East Palo Alto. The nexus of spamming software developers and deep data mining firms like Facebook and Google, the latter just 10 miles from Sequoia, would soon pose a significant threat to the conducting of democratic elections in over 100 countries and regions and provinces around the world.

It is now known that Facebook was permitting Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based company, to mine the ubiquitous provider repository of personal data, to develop software to geo-demographically target, and thus influence, the decisions of voters around the world. Far from tampering with voting machines or vote tabulation machines, what Cambridge Analytica did, along with its US-based subsidiary – Cambridge Analytica LLC – was to tamper with the minds of voters. This was accomplished using sophisticated psychographic programs. After several dubious elections in the United States, including the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, both rife with election fraud in Florida and Ohio, respectively, the new method for “throwing” elections resided at the voter decision level. By psychographically profiling voters based on their web activity and behavior, interests, attitudes, values, Cambridge Analytica — armed with weaponized election outcome-based software — was able to conduct mass psychological warfare campaigns to steer voters away from certain political candidates, their political parties, and popular referendum choices. Microtargeting 230 million American voters using as many as 5000 different data vectors harvested from the massive databases of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media applications was the determining factor in Trump’s election victory. In almost every case where elections were influenced by these manipulation operations, parties and candidates favorable to Israel and Israeli interests were the victors. GIYUS and Megaphone had been transformed from an influence-peddling operation to a full-blown election behavioral change outcome determiner. Instead of on-line polls succumbing to the purveyors of such malfeasance, it was actual polls that became the target for “Made in Israel” psychological manipulation.

Donald Trump’s upset election victory in 2016 was helped along by Long Island, New York hedge fund tycoon and computer scientist Robert Mercer. Mercer, a right-wing product of the military-intelligence complex, owing to his early work on artificial intelligence for the US Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Mercer was able to transform artificial intelligence used for weapons systems to predict winners and losers in the stock market. The programs developed by Mercer made him a multi-billionaire.

Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies was a major investor in Cambridge Analytica. Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer were also major financiers of the pro-Trump alt-right news site Breitbart News. Cambridge Analytica, working hand-in-glove with Breitbart and the Trump presidential campaign’s digital operations unit, engaged in a psychographic and psychological warfare campaign unseen in US history and preceded virtually-unreported election interference operations in in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Latin America.

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group of London, formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) – a firm with links to the British Ministry of Defense, Britain’s MI-6, and the US Departments of Defense and State – was founded in 1993 by a former executive with the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. The advertising giant was founded in 1970 by brothers Maurice and Charles Saatchi, who hailed from a very wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq. The Saatchi brothers, both Orthodox Jews, as are Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump, are strong supporters of Israel. The connections between SCL and Cambridge Analytica to prior web-based propaganda operations developed by Israeli intelligence, therefore, should be of no surprise.

A Cambridge Analytica psychologist, Michal Kosinski, was involved in research by a private firm that concluded that Internet users who “liked” Nike shoes and KitKat chocolate bars were also anti-Israeli. Some of Kosinski’s funding came from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a notorious research laundering operation for the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.

Nor should it be surprising that Cambridge Analytica employed the services of two rabid pro-Israeli officials in the Trump campaign and early administration, indicted former Trump National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, and former Trump chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Jared Kushner, whose ex-convict father Charles Kushner has close ties with Israeli intelligence, personally oversaw the use of Cambridge Analytica by the Trump campaign. In fact, the classic intelligence “tradecraft” employed by Cambridge Analytica, under the direction of its former CEO, Alexander Nix – starting vicious rumors about political candidates’ sexual orientation and other sexual habits, as well as trying to compromise candidates with attractive female Ukrainian prostitutes – are favored tactics of Israel’s Mossad.

Charles Kushner employed such entrapment tactics in helping to set up, in an Israeli intelligence-led homosexual “honeytrap,” the former Democratic Governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey. Charles Kushner was also criminally charged with trying to use prostitutes to entrap his accountant and brother-in-law, government witnesses in the federal corruption case brought against him. Cambridge Analytics had at least 10 employees embedded in the Trump campaign’s digital operations, which was led by Brad Parscale, recently named as the head of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

There are also connections between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir, the firm established with CIA venture capital funds and headed by Trump’s close friend and economic adviser Peter Thiel. Headquartered only a few miles from Facebook and Google in Palo Alto, Palantir uses deeply-mined personal and geo-spatial data to assist the Pentagon and US intelligence community in conducting micro- and macro-targeted psychological warfare and “information operations.” Palantir is only 10 miles from another firm that started with CIA seed money, Oracle, Inc., the grandfather of relational databases.

In an exposé on Cambridge Analytica aired by Britain’s Channel 4, Nix revealed the firm used “some Israeli companies,” which he noted were “very effective in intelligence gathering.” The developer of the application used by Cambridge Analytica to collect and mine personal data on 50 million American Facebook users, alone, for political and other purposes is Aleksandr Kogan, a colleague of Kosinski. Born in what was the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kogan and his family were among hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents of the Soviet Union who emigrated to the United States during the final years of the USSR. In a move worthy of a James Bond villain, Kogan briefly legally changed his name to Dr. Alexander Spectre. It is noteworthy to point out that a malicious program that breaks down the security of “secure” computer applications is also known as “Spectre.”

Many Moldovan Jews serve as kingpins in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls the “Eurasian Mafia.” Russian President Vladimir Putin was absolutely correct when he recently told NBC News in an interview that Russians may not have been involved in US election meddling, but that they could be “Ukrainians, Tatars, or Jews with Russian citizenship… Maybe they hold dual citizenship, or green cards. Or maybe Americans paid them for this job.”

Based on the origins of Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group, Renaissance Technologies, Saatchi & Saatchi, Sequoia Capital, Facebook, Google, Palantir, Collactive, and Megaphone/GIYUS, there is no “maybe” about the involvement of Ukrainians and Soviet Jews in psychographic election manipulation. One could add to President Putin’s list, Moldovans, Israelis, and British and American nationals, not to mention Latvians, Estonians, Romanians, Turks, and Macedonians.

SCL Group conducted classified research for Britain’s Ministry of Defense and NATO on “Target Audience Analysis” (TAA), a subset of what Western intelligence agencies call “Population Intelligence.” Rather than having ties to Russian intelligence or the Russian government, Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL Group’s links beat a direct path to Whitehall, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, the US Defense Intelligence Agency while under the command of General Flynn, UK Conservative Party headquarters, NATO headquarters in Brussels, and most particularly, the Mossad and Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

The former Australian Privacy Commissioner, Malcolm Crompton, summed up the way companies like Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group interfere with elections on a massive scale. He told the “Brisbane Times” that political parties, themselves, were to be primarily blamed. Crompton said that parties use “very sophisticated machines in the electorate” that collect information from contact with voters. He added that such “information sources could then be combined with Facebook data to build a profile of voters.”

The extent of Cambridge/SCL Group’s election interference around the world is staggering. In addition to the United States, conglomerate has been active in elections in Kenya, India, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Moldova, St. Lucia, Argentina, Czech Republic, Ghana, Latvia, Italy, Nigeria, St. Kitts-Nevis, Mexico, Jamaica, Poland, Scotland, Lithuania, German, France, Hungary, Romania, Thailand, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Northern Ireland, Kedah, Bihar, Colombia, Dominica, St. Vincent and Grenadines, Iceland, Nepal, Iran, Malaysia, and the Brexit "Leave" campaign in the United Kingdom.

In 2015, Cambridge Analytica’s Israeli hackers operating from its London office hacked the emails of then-Nigerian presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari to dig up embarrassing personal information about the candidate, a Muslim. This was to benefit incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian who supported close ties to Israel. That same year, Israeli hackers hacked the email and medical records of St. Kitts-Nevis opposition leader Timothy Harris of the People’s Labor Party. The Israeli government was known to oppose Harris for his policy of strengthening ties with Venezuela, a bitter opponent of Israel. Harris, against the odds imposed by the Israeli hackers and Cambridge, won the election.

Cambridge Analytica struck again in 2017, when it helped President Uhuru Kenyatta’s re-election campaign in Kenya to spread on-line malicious rumors and gossip about his opponent, using Facebook and its application, Whatsapp. Kenyatta has maintained strong intelligence and military relations with Israel. In practically every election in which it interfered, Cambridge Analytica and SCL did so on behalf of leaders and parties favoring close ties with Israel. This was no coincidence.

With all the attention on election integrity, now comes along a firm offering block-chaining technology to audit and authenticate vote counts. Agora, a Swiss-based firm blockchain technology company issued the following press release on March 8, 2018: “Sierra Leone’s 2018 presidential elections, which took place on March 7th, represents the first time in history that blockchain technology has been used in a national government election. West District’s results were registered on Agora’s unforgeable blockchain ledger, and the tally made publicly available days before the usual manual count.” Block-chain technology is at the core of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It is also no coincidence that behind the introduction of cryptocurrency in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a close diplomatic ally of Israel, are Israeli technology firms. The manipulation and penetration of global elections to benefit Israel will not end in the foreseeable future nor will politicians, afraid of the Israeli Lobby, point fingers at the true culprits behind election malfeasance in over 100 countries.

Photo: vice.com

In the days and weeks following the 2016 presidential elections, reports surfaced about how a small British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, might have played a pivotal role in Donald Trump’s surprise victory. The company claimed to have formulated algorithms to influence American voters using individually targeted political advertisements. It reportedly generated personality profiles of millions of individual citizens by collecting up to 5000 data points on each person. Then Cambridge Analytica used these “psychographic” tools to send voters carefully crafted online messages about candidates or hot-button political issues.

Although political consultants have long used “microtargeting” techniques for zeroing in on particular ethnic, religious, age, or income groups, Cambridge Analytica’s approach is unusual: The company relies upon individuals’ personal data that is harvested from social media apps like Facebook. In the US, such activities are entirely legal. Some described Cambridge Analytica’s tools as “mind-reading software” and a “weaponized AI [artificial intelligence] propaganda machine.” However, corporate media outlets such as CNN and the Wall Street Journal often portrayed the company in glowing terms.

Cambridge Analytica is once again in the headlines–but under somewhat different circumstances. Late last week, whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public, explaining how he played an instrumental role in collecting millions of Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica. This revelation is significant because until investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr published her exposé in The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica’s then-CEO Alexander Nix had adamantly denied using Facebook data. And although Facebook officials knew that Cambridge Analytica had previously gathered data on millions of users, they did not prohibit the company from advertising until last Friday, as the scandal erupted. To make matters worse, the UK’s Channel 4 released undercover footage early this week in which Cambridge Analytica executives boast about using dirty tricks–bribes, entrapment, and “beautiful girls” to mention a few.

The case of Cambridge Analytica brings into focus a brave new world of electoral politics in an algorithmic age–an era in which social media companies like Facebook and Twitter make money by selling ads, but also by selling users’ data outright to third parties. Relatively few countries have laws that prevent such practices–and it turns out that the US does not have a comprehensive federal statute protecting individuals’ data privacy. This story is significant not only because it demonstrates what can happen when an unorthodox company takes advantage of a lax regulatory environment, but also because it reveals how Internet companies like Facebook  have played fast and loose with the personal data of literally billions of users.

From Public Relations to Psychological Warfare

In order to make sense of Cambridge Analytica it is helpful to understand its parent company, SCL Group, which was originally created as the PR firm Strategic Communications Laboratory. It was founded in the early 1990s by Nigel Oakes, a flamboyant UK businessman. By the late 1990s, the company was engaged almost exclusively in political projects. For example, SCL was hired to help burnish the image of Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid–but Oakes and SCL employees had to shut down their operations center when SCL’s cover was blown by the Wall Street Journal .

In July 2005, SCL underwent a dramatic transformation. It very publicly rebranded itself as a  psychological warfare company by taking part in the UK’s largest military trade show. SCL’s exhibit included a mock operations center featuring dramatic crisis scenarios–a smallpox outbreak in London, a bloody insurgency in a fictitious South Asian country–which were then resolved with the help of the company’s psyops techniques. Oakes told a reporter: “We used to be in the business of mindbending for political purposes, but now we are in the business of saving lives.” The company’s efforts paid off. Over the next ten years, SCL won contracts with the US Defense Department’s Combatant Commands, NATO, and Sandia National Labs.

Over the past few years SCL–now known as SCL Group–has transformed itself yet again. It no longer defines itself as a psyops specialist, nor as a political consultancy–now, it calls itself a data analytics company specializing in “behavioral change” programs.

Along the way it created Cambridge Analytica, a subsidiary firm which differs from SCL Group in that it focuses primarily on political campaigns. Its largest investors include billionaire Robert Mercer, co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who is best known for his advocacy of far-right political causes and his financial support of Breitbart News. Steve Bannon briefly sat on Cambridge Analytica’s board of directors.

Cambridge Analytica first received significant media attention in November 2015, shortly after the firm was hired by Republican presidential nominee Ted Cruz’s campaign. Although Cruz ultimately failed, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, claimed that Cruz’s popularity grew largely due to the company’s skillful use of aggregated voter data and personality profiling methods. In August 2016, the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica as part of a desperate effort to challenge Hillary Clinton’s formidable campaign machine. Just a few months later, reports revealed that Cambridge Analytica had also played a role in the UK’s successful pro-Brexit “Leave.EU” campaign.

Hacking the Citizenry

Cambridge Analytica relies upon “psychographic” techniques that measure the Big Five personality traits borrowed from social psychology: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

In the US, Cambridge Analytica developed psychological profiles of millions of Americans by hiring a company called Global Science Research (GSR) to plant free personality quizzes. Users were lured by the prospect of obtaining free personality scores, while Cambridge Analytica collected data–and access to users’ Facebook profiles. Last week, The Guardian reported that Cambridge Analytica collected data from more than 300,000 Facebook users in this way. By agreeing to the terms and conditions of the app, those users also agreed to grant GSR (and by extension, Cambridge Analytica) access to the profiles of their Facebook “friends”–totalling approximately 50 million people.

Psychographics uses algorithms to scour voters’ Facebook “likes,” retweets and other social media data which are aggregated with commercially available information: land registries, automotive data, shopping preferences, club memberships, magazine subscriptions, and religious affiliation. When combined with public records, electoral rolls, and additional information purchased from data brokers such as Acxiom and Experian, Cambridge Analytica has raw material for shaping personality profiles. Digital footprints can be transformed into real people. This is the essence of psychographics: Using software algorithms to scour individual voters’ Facebook “likes,” retweets and other bits of data gleaned from social media and then combine them with commercially available personal information. Data mining is relatively easy in the US, since it has relatively weak privacy laws compared to South Korea, Singapore, and many EU countries.

In a 2016 presentation, Nix described how such information might be used to influence voter opinions on gun ownership and gun rights. Individual people can be addressed differently according to their personality profiles: “For a highly neurotic and conscientious audinece, the threat of a burglary–and the insurance policy of a gun. . .Conversely, for a closed and agreeable audience: people who care about tradition, and habits, and family.”

Despite the ominous sounding nature of psychographics, it is not at all clear that Cambridge Analytica played a decisive role in the 2016 US presidential election. Some charge that the company and its former CEO Alexander Nix, exaggerated Cambridge Analytica’s effect on the election’s outcome. In February 2017, investigative journalist Kendall Taggart wrote an exposé claiming that more than a dozen former employees of Cambridge Analytica, Trump campaign staffers, and executives at Republican consulting firms denied that psychographics was used at all by the Trump campaign. Taggart concluded: “Rather than a sinister breakthrough in political technology, the Cambridge Analytica story appears to be part of the traditional contest among consultants on a winning political campaign to get their share of the credit–and win future clients.” Not a single critic was willing to be identified in the report, apparently fearing retaliation from Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who is also an investor in the firm.

Not-So-Innocents Abroad

By no means has Cambridge Analytica limited its work to the US. In fact, it has conducted “influence operations” in several countries around the world.

For example, Cambridge Analytica played a major role in last year’s presidential elections in Kenya, which pitted incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta of the right-wing Jubilee Party against Raila Odinga of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement. The Jubilee Party hired Cambridge Analytica in May 2017. Although the company claims to have limited its activities to data collection, earlier this week Mark Turnbull, a managing director for Cambridge Analytica, told undercover reporters a different story. He admitted that the firm secretly managed Kenyatta’s entire campaign: “We have rebranded the party twice, written the manifesto, done research, analysis, messaging. I think we wrote all the speeches and we staged the whole thing–so just about every element of this candidate,” said Turnbull.

Given the most recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s planting of fake news stories, it seems likely that the company created persuasive personalized ads based on Kenyans’ social media data. Fake Whatsapp and Twitter posts exploded days before the Kenyan elections. It is worth remembering that SCL Group has employed disinformation campaigns for military clients for 25 years, and it seems that Cambridge Analytica has continued this pattern of deception.

The August elections were fraught with accusations of vote tampering, the inclusion of dead people as registered voters, and the murder of Chris Msando, the election commission’s technology manager, days before the election. When the dust settled, up to 67 people died in post-election violence–and Kenyatta ultimately emerged victorious. Weeks later, the Kenyan Supreme Court annulled the elections, but when new elections were scheduled for October, Odinga declared that he would boycott.

Given Kenya’s recent history of electoral fraud, it is unlikely that Cambridge had much impact on the results. Anthropologist Paul Goldsmith, who has lived in Kenya for 40 years, notes that elections still tend to follow the principle of “who counts the votes,” not “who influences the voters.”

But the significance of Cambridge Analytica’s efforts extends beyond their contribution to electoral outcomes. Kenya is no technological backwater. The world’s first mobile money service was launched there in 2007, allowing users to transfer cash and make payments by phone. Homegrown tech firms are creating a “Silicon Savannah” near Nairobi. Two-thirds of Kenya’s 48 million people have Internet access. Ten million use Whatsapp; six million use Facebook; two million use Twitter. As Kenyans spend more time in the virtual world, their personal data will become even more widely available since Kenya has no data protection laws.

Goldsmith summarizes the situation nicely:

Cambridge Analytica doesn’t need to deliver votes so much as to create the perception that they can produce results. . .Kenya provides an ideal entry point into [Africa]. . .Embedding themselves with ruling elites presents a pivot for exploiting emergent commercial opportunities. . .with an eye on the region’s resources and its growing numbers of persuadable youth.

Recent reports reveal that Cambridge Analytica has ongoing operations in Mexico and Brazil (which have general elections scheduled this July and October, respectively). India (which has general elections in about a year) has also been courted by the company, and it is easy to understand why: the country has 400 million smartphone users with more than 250 million on either Facebook or Whatsapp. India’s elections are also a potential gold mine. More than half a billion people vote in parliamentary elections, and the expenditures are astonishing: Political parties spent $5 billion in 2014, compared to $6.5 billion in last year’s US elections. India also has a massive mandatory ID program based on biometric and demographic data, the largest of its kind in the world.

Cambridge Analytica’s global strategy appears focused on expanding its market share in promising markets. Although many people might describe Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, and India as developing countries, each in fact has a rapidly growing high-tech infrastructure, relatively high levels of Internet penetration, and large numbers of social media users. They all have weak or nonexistent Internet privacy laws. Though nominally democratic, each country is politically volatile and has experienced episodic outbursts of extreme political, sectarian, or criminal violence. Finally, these countries have relatively young populations, reflecting perhaps a long-term strategy to normalize a form of political communication that will reap long-term benefits in politically sensitive regions.

The capacity for saturating global voters with charged political messages is growing across much of the world, since the cost of buying Facebook ads, Twitterbots and trolls, bots for Whatsapp and other apps is cheap–and since more people than ever are spending time on social media. Such systems can be managed efficiently by remote control. Unlike the CIA’s psyops efforts in the mid-20th century, which required extensive on-the-ground efforts–dropping leaflets from airplanes, bribing local journalists, broadcasting propaganda on megaphones mounted on cars–the new techniques can be deployed from a distance, with minimal cost. Cambridge Analytica relies upon small ground teams to do business with political parties, and partnerships with local business intelligence firms to scope out the competition or provide marketing advice, but most of the work is done from London and New York.

Weaponizing Big Data?

From its beginnings, Cambridge Analytica has declared itself to be a “data-driven” group of analytics experts practicing an improved form of political microtargeting, but there are indications that the firm has broader ambitions.

In March 2017, reports emerged that top executives from SCL Group met with Pentagon officials, including Hriar Cabayan, head of a branch which conducts DoD research and cultural analysis. A decade ago, Cabayan played an instrumental role in launching the precursor to the Human Terrain System, a US Army counterinsurgency effort which embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with US combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A few months later, in August 2017, the Associated Press reported that retired US Army General Michael Flynn, who briefly served as National Security Director in the Trump administration, had signed a work agreement with Cambridge Analytica in late 2016, though it is unclear whether he actually did any work for the firm. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian operatives in late 2017, when he was working with Trump’s transition team. Given his spot in the media limelight, it is easy to forget that he once headed US intelligence operations in Afghanistan, advocating for a big data approach to counterinsurgency that would, among other things, include data collected by Human Terrain Teams.

The connections between Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group and the Pentagon’s champions of data-driven counterinsurgency and cyberwarfare may be entirely coincidental, but they do raise several questions: As Cambridge Analytica embarks on its global ventures, is it undertaking projects that are in fact more sinister than its benign-sounding mission of “behavioral change”? And are the company’s recent projects in Kenya, India, Mexico, and Brazil simply examples of global market expansion, or are these countries serving as laboratories to test new methods of propaganda dissemination and political polarization for eventual deployment here at home?

Here the lines between military and civilian applications become blurred, not only because ARPANET–the Internet’s immediate precursor–was developed by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, but also because the technology can be used for surveillance on a scale that authoritarian regimes of the 20th century could only have dreamed about. As Yasha Levine convincingly argues in his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, the Internet was originally conceived as a counterinsurgency surveillance program.

Neutralizing Facebook’s Surveillance Machine 

It appears that many people are finally taking note of the digital elephant in the room: Facebook’s role in enabling Cambridge Analytica and other propagandists, publicists, and mind-benders to carry out their work–legally and discreetly. As recently noted by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in the online journal Motherboard, Cambridge Analytica’s data harvesting practices weren’t security breaches, they were “par for the course. . .It was a feature, not a bug. Facebook still collects—and then sells—massive amounts of data on its users.” In other words, every Facebook post or tweet, every g-mail message sent or received, renders citizens vulnerable to forms of digital data collection that can be bought and sold to the highest bidder. The information can be used for all kinds of purposes in an unregulated market: monitoring users’ emotional states, manipulating their attitiudes, or disseminating tailor-made propaganda designed to polarize people.

It is telling that Facebook stubbornly refuses to call Cambridge Analytica’s actions a “data breach.” As Zeynep Tufekci, author of the book Twitter And Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest puts it, the company’s defensive posture reveals much about the social costs of social media. She recently wrote:

“If your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used and misused. Hacked, breached, leaked, pilfered, conned, targeted, engaged, profiled, sold. There is no informed consent because it’s not possible to reasonably inform or consent.”

Cambridge Analytica is significant to the extent that it illuminates new technological controlling processes under construction. In a supercharged media environment in which Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) have become the primary means by which literally billions of people consume news, mass producing propaganda has never been easier. With so many people posting so much information about the intimate details of their lives on the Web, coordinated attempts at mass persuasion will almost certainly become more widespread in the future.

In the meantime, there are concrete measures that we can take to rein in Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and other technology giants. Some of the most lucid suggestions have been articulated by Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and early Facebook investor. He recommends a multi-pronged approach: demanding that the social media companies’ CEOs testify before congressional and parliamentary committees in open sessions; imposing strict regulations on how Internet platforms are used and commercialized; requiring social media companies to report who is sponsoring political and issues-based advertisements; mandating transparency about algorithms (“users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results,” says McNamee); requiring social media apps to offer an “opt out” to users; banning digital “bots” that impersonate humans; and creating rules that allow consumers (not corporations) to own their own data.

In a world of diminishing privacy, our vulnerabilities are easily magnified. Experimental psychologists specializing in what they euphemistically call “behavior design” have largely ignored ethics and morality in order to help Silicon Valley companies create digital devices, apps, and other technologies that are literally irresistible to their users. As the fallout from Cambridge Analytica’s activities descends upon the American political landscape, we should take advantage of the opportunity to impose meaningful controls on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other firms that have run roughshod over democratic norms–and notions of individual privacy–in the relentless pursuit of profit.

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Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade.  The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state.

It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of social media profiling, sharing and targeting of information, to another level.  Not only could companies such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for political purpose.

As a social phenomenon, Facebook could not help but become a juggernaut inimical to the private sphere it has so comprehensively colonised.  “Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”

Now, the unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon.  Outrage and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption.  An instructive lesson here would be to run the counter-factual: had Hillary Clinton won, would this seething discontent be quite so enthusiastic?

Be that as it may, the spoliations of Cambridge Analytica are embedded in a broader undertaking: the evisceration of privacy, and the generation of user profiles gathered through modern humanity’s most remarkable surveillance machine.  The clincher here is the link with Facebook, though the company insists that it “received data from a contractor, which we deleted after Facebook told us the contractor had breached their terms of service.”

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have attempted to isolate and distance that particular contractor, a certain Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher whose personality quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife” farmed the personal data of some 50 million users who were then micro-targeted for reasons of political advertising.

The sinister genius behind this was the ballooning from the initial downloads – some 270,000 people – who exchanged personal data on their friends including their “likes” for personality predictions.  A broader data set of profiles were thereby created and quarried.

Kogan claims to have been approached by Cambridge Analytica, rather than the other way around, regarding “terms of usage of Facebook data”.  He was also reassured that the scheme was legal, being “commercial” in nature and typical of the way “tens of thousands of apps” were using social media data.  But it took Cambridge Analytica’s whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, to reveal that data obtained via Kogan’s app was, in fact, used for micro-targeting the US electorate in breach of privacy protocols.

Mark Zuckerberg’s response has entailed vigorous hand washing.  In 2015, he claims that Facebook had learned that Cambridge Analytica shared data from Kogan’s app.  “It is against our policies for developers to share data without other people’s consent, so we immediately banned Kogan’s app from our platform”. Certifications were duly provided that such data had been deleted, though the crew at Facebook evidently took these at unverified face value.  Not so, as matters transpired, leading to the claim that trust had not only been breached between Facebook, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, but with the users themselves.

Facebook, for its part, has been modestly contrite.  “We have a responsibility to protect your data,” went Zuckerberg in a statement, “and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”  His posted statement attempts to water down the fuss.  Data protections – most of them, at least – were already being put in place. He described the limitations placed on the accessing of user information by data apps connected to Facebook friends.

The networked sphere, as it is termed in with jargon-heavy fondness by some academics, has seen the accumulation of data all set and readied for the “information civilisation”.  Google’s chief economist Hal Varian has been singled out for special interest, keen on what he terms, in truly benign fashion, “computer-mediated transactions”.  These entail “data extraction and analysis,” various “new contractual forms” arising from “better monitoring”, “personalisation and customisation” and “continuous experiments”.

Such are the vagaries of the information age. As a user of such freely provided services, users are before a naked confessional, conceding and surrendering identities to third parties with Faustian ease.  This surrender has its invidious by products, supplying intelligence and security services accessible data.

Cambridge Analytica, for its part, sets itself up as an apotheosis of the information civilisation, a benevolent, professionally driven information hitman. “Data drives all we do,” it boldly states to potential clients.  “Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behaviour.”

This sounds rather different to the company’s stance on Saturday, when it claimed that, “Advertising is not coercive; people are smarter than that.”  With cold show insistence, it insisted that, “This isn’t a spy movie.”

Two services are provided suggesting that people are not, in the minds of its bewitchers, that intelligent: the arm of data-driven marketing designed to “improve your brand’s marketing effectiveness by changing consumer behaviour” and that of “data-driven campaigns” where “greater influence” is attained through “knowing your electorate better”.

On the latter, it is boastful, claiming to have supported over 100 campaigns across five continents. “Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections.”

CA has donned its combat fatigues to battle critics.  Its Board of Directors has suspended CEO Alexander Nix, claiming that “recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”

The comments in question, caught in an undercover video, show Nix offering a range of services to the Channel 4 undercover reporter: Ukrainian sex workers posing as “honey-traps”; a video evidencing corruption that might be uploaded to the Internet; and operations with former spies. “We can set up fake IDs and Web sites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university; we can be tourists.”

The company has also attempted to debunk a set of what it sees as flourishing myths.  It has not, for instance, been uncooperative with the UK’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, having engaged it since February 2017.  It rejects notions that it peddles fake news. “Fake news is a serious concern for all of us in the marketing industry.”  (Nix’s cavalier advertising to prospective clients suggests otherwise.)

In other respects, Cambridge Analytica also rejected using Facebook data in its political models, despite having obtained that same data.  “We ran a standard political data science program with the same kind of political preference models used by other presidential campaigns.”  Nor did it use personality profiles for the 2016 US Presidential election. Having only hopped on board in June, “we focused on the core elements of a core political data science program.”

The company’s weasel wording has certainly been extensive.  Nix has done much to meander, dodge and contradict.  On the one hand, he would like to take credit for the company’s product – the swaying of a US election.  But in doing so, it did not use “psychographic” profiles.

Surveillance capitalism is the rope which binds the actors of this latest drama in the annals of privacy’s demise.  There are discussions that political data mining designed to manipulate and sway elections be considered in the same way political donations are.  But in the US, where money and political information are oft confused as matters of freedom, movement on this will be slow.  The likes of Cambridge Analytica and similar information mercenaries will continue thriving.

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Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is being called upon by British and European parliamentarians to explain his company’s role in a data-mining scandal in which up to 50 million users of the social media platform appear to have had their private information exploited for electioneering purposes.

Exploited, that is, without their consent or knowledge. Facebook is being investigated by US federal authorities for alleged breach of privacy and, possibly, electoral laws. Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica looks less an academic outfit and more like a cheap marketing scam.

Zuckerberg has professed “shock” that his company may have unwittingly been involved in betraying the privacy of its users. Some two billion people worldwide are estimated to use the social media networking site to share personal data, photos, family news and so on, with “friends”.

Now it transpires that at least one firm, London-based Cambridge Analytica, ran a profitable business by harvesting the publicly available data on Facebook for electioneering purposes for which it was contracted to do. The harvested information was then used to help target election campaigning.

Cambridge Analytica was reportedly contracted by the Trump campaign for the 2016 presidential election. It was also used during the Brexit referendum campaign in 2016 when Britons voted to leave the European Union.

This week the British news outlet Channel 4 broadcast a stunning investigation in which chief executives at Cambridge Analytica were filmed secretly boasting about how their firm helped win the US presidential election for Donald Trump.

More criminally, the data company boss, Alexander Nix, also revealed that they were prepared to gather information which could be used for blackmailing and bribing politicians, including with the use of online sex traps.

The repercussions from the scandal have been torrid. Following the Channel 4 broadcast, Cambridge Analytica has suspended its chief executive pending further investigation. British authorities have sought a warrant to search the company’s computer servers.

Moreover, Zuckerberg’s Facebook has seen $50 billion wiped of its stock value in a matter of days. What is at issue is the loss of confidence among its ordinary citizen-users about how their personal data is vulnerable to third party exploitation without their consent.

Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of an iceberg. The issue has raised concerns that other third parties, including criminal identity-theft gangs, are also mining Facebook as a mammoth marketing resource. A resource that is free to exploit because of the way that ordinary users willingly publish their personal profiles.

The open, seemingly innocent nature of Facebook connecting millions of people – a “place where friends meet” as its advertising jingle goes – could turn out to be an ethical nightmare over privacy abuse.

Other social media companies like Amazon, Google, WhatsApp and Twitter are reportedly apprehensive about the consequences of widespread loss of confidence among consumers in privacy security. One of the biggest economic growth areas over the past decade – social media – could turn out to be another digital bubble that bursts spectacularly due to the latest Facebook scandal.

But one other, perhaps more, significant fallout from the scandal is the realistic perspective it provides on the so-called “Russiagate” debacle.

For well over a year now, the US and European corporate news media have been peddling claims about how Russian state agents allegedly “interfered” in several national elections.

The Russian authorities have consistently rejected the alleged “influence campaigns” as nothing but a fabrication to slander Russia. Moscow has repeatedly asked for evidence to verify the relentless claims – and none has been presented.

The US congress has carried out two probes into “Russiagate” without much to show for their laborious endeavors. A special counsel headed up by former FBI chief Robert Mueller has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to produce a flimsy indictment list of 19 Russian individuals who are said to have run influence campaigns out of a nondescript “troll farm” in St Petersburg.

It still remains unclear and unconvincing how, or if, the supposed Russian hackers were linked to the Russian state, and how they had any impact on the voting intentions of millions of Americans.

Alternatively, there is plausible reason to believe that the so-called Russian troll farm in St Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency, may have been nothing other than a dingy marketing vehicle, trying to use the internet like thousands of other firms around the world hustling for advertising business. Firms like Cambridge Analytica.

The whole Russiagate affair has been a storm in a teacup, and Mueller seems to be desperate to produce some, indeed any, result for his inquisitorial extravaganza.

The amazing thing to behold is how the alleged Russian “influence campaign” narrative has become an accepted truth, propagated and repeated by Western governments and media without question.

Pentagon defense strategy papers, European Union policy documents, NATO military planning, among others, have all cited alleged “Russian interference” in American and European elections as “evidence” of Moscow’s “malign” geopolitical agenda.

The purported Russiagate allegations have led to a grave deepening of Cold War tensions between Western states and Russia to the point where an all-out war is at risk of breaking out.

Last week, the Trump administration slapped more sanctions on Russian individuals and state security services for “election meddling”.

No proof or plausible explanation has ever been provided to substantiate the allegations of a Russian state “influence campaign’. The concept largely revolves around innuendo and a deplorable prejudice against Russia based on irrational Cold War-style Russophobia.

However, one possible beneficial outcome from the latest revelations of an actual worldwide Facebook election-influence campaign, driven by an ever-so British data consultancy, is that the scandal puts the claims against Russia into stark, corrective perspective.

A perspective which shows that the heap of official Western claims against Russia of “influencing elections” is in actual fact negligible if not wholly ridiculous.

It’s a mountain versus a hill of beans. A tornado versus a storm in a teacup. Time to get real on how Western citizens are being really manipulated by their own consumer-capitalist cultures.