3/19/18: Trump starts a new week the same way he ended the old, tweet-raging about the Russia investigation. We can assume his mood did not improve as the hours passed. The stock market took a tumble after it was revealed Facebook was duped into allowing a data-mining operation to steal the personal information of 50,000,000 users. What was the name of the company that did the mining? Cambridge Analytica. Who used that firm during his or her campaign for president?
Trump.
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Using social media to shift voter opinion. |
Christopher Wylie, who helped start the company before turning whistleblower, described how stolen data could be used in any political campaign:
Cambridge Analytica will try to
pick at whatever mental weakness or vulnerability that we think you [the voter
whose data has been mined] have and try to warp your perception of what’s real
around you. If you are looking to create an information weapon, the battle
space you operate in is social media [emphasis added]. That is where the
fight happens.
What kind of sleazy rats run
Cambridge? Of course, there’s a Russian-American, Professor Aleksandr Kogan,
involved! Kogan lied to Facebook, the site says, and got a digital foot in the door.
____________________
They could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house,” he said, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well.”
Alexander Nix of SCL, on methods used to win
political support
____________________
Channel 4 News in Britain, where Strategic Communications Laboratories Group (SCL), the parent company of Cambridge, is located, recently began investigating company practices. An undercover reporter “posing as a fixer for a very wealthy client” from Sri Lanka was sent to seek help from Chief Executive Alexander Nix of SCL. Here’s how Nix explained [punctuation follows the British rule] the way the company worked, all for the right price:
In one exchange, when asked
about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send
some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are
very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said: “We’ll offer
a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange
for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the
face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”
Offering bribes to public
officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered
in the United States.
…Mr Nix told our reporter:
“…we’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I
look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you.”
Along with Mr Nix, the meetings
also included Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA Political Global, and
the company’s chief data officer, Dr Alex Tayler.
Mr Turnbull described how,
having obtained damaging material on opponents, Cambridge Analytica can
discreetly push it onto social media and the internet.
He said: “… we just put
information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it
grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has
to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you
think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’.”
Mr Nix also said: “…Many of our
clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company… so often we
set up, if we are working then we can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be
students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists,
there’s so many options we can look at. I have lots of experience in this.”
In the meetings, the executives
boasted that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic
Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked in more than two hundred elections
across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and
Argentina.
As expected, a spokesman for the
British company denied any illegal activities had occurred.
Just for fun, who do you imagine worked with Cambridge on this side of the Atlantic, possibly in an illegal way, to shape the 2016 election? How about one-time Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski!
Not to mention – but, yes, him, too – “Sloppy Steve” Bannon.
We also learn, if we do due diligence, that Cambridge Analytica registered as a limited liability corporation in Delaware in 2013. Cambridge is a shell company, holding intellectual property rights, but with almost all work for clients carried out in the United Kingdom by people like Mr. Nix. The company is owned by Robert Mercer and his family, rich conservative mega-donors.
According to The New
York Times, during the 2016 campaign, Cambridge shared office space with
Trump’s San Antonio-based digital operation and took credit for his election
success.
On November 9, 2016, Nix explained, “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in President-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win.”
Trump’s campaign paid Cambridge $5.9 million in five separate
payments and has since tried to deny any links.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/11/2022): When you go back to
these stories there’s always more dirt to dig up. In July 2019, Facebook agreed
to pay a record fine of $5 billion for its role in allowing Cambridge
Analytica to harvest private data.
In September 2020, Mr. Nix received a seven-year ban from serving as the company’s director, as punishment for his part in the scandal. “Following an extensive investigation,” British authorities noted, “our conclusions were clear that SCL Elections [the parent company of Cambridge] had repeatedly offered shady political services to potential clients over a number of years.”
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