Wow. Britain's Information Officer announces she is seeking a warranting to raid Cambridge Analytica and seize servers
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
Facebook has been "co-operative" with ICO says Elizabeth Denham. Cambridge Analytica on the other hand has required them to seek to use their statutory powers to compel evidence….
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
Here’s the Channel 4 expose of Cambridge Analytica:
Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
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.
The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.
Here’s the actual video:
What Nix and Turnbull are caught describing as their standard operating practice is separate from whatever program Christopher Wylie built for Cambridge Analytica. Rather, they’re describing a hybrid of privatized human intelligence and what are sometimes referred to as black psychological operations (black PSYOP), which is a misuse of the term. Initially black PSYOP was used as short hand for the highly compartmented covert form of PSYOP necessary to support special operations. This is not surprising as Cambridge Analytica is subsidiary business development unit of SCL Group, which claims to provide these services to the British Ministry of Defense and the US DOD. Several boutique companies were created to do this type of work in support of coalition operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and people eventually left these companies and started their own boutique shops. All they’re really doing is creating propaganda and then trying to insert it into the news and social media space without it seeming to come from non-natives.
I’ve had dealings with some of these folks and to be perfectly honest I find them to be largely full of crap about what they actually can and cannot do. Usually they have a very limited understanding of both socio-cultural considerations in general and the specific socio-cultural dynamics of the people they’re trying to influence in specific. One of the most obnoxious of them, another Brit, has only the bare minimum idea of what this work, especially the descriptive statistical analyses, actually entail. But he’s memorized a bunch of jargon, talks a good game, sounds posh, and gets contracts. He gets away with this because there are really no institutionalized quality assurance/quality control programs in place to ascertain if this stuff actually is helpful, let alone if it works, and whether it actually is useful to the uniformed and civilian personnel at the pointy end. And because there are too few folks like me who actually know better, so it is hard to preemptively block these folks before they make there clients dumber and put people’s lives at risk.
Updated at 5:10 PM EDT:
Breaking: Channel 4 just announced they’re airing another undercover film tomorrow where Cambridge Analytica say they won the election for Donald Trump and describe how. This is a car crash airing live on TV. Journalism matters.
— Kevin Beaumont, Esquire (@GossiTheDog) March 19, 2018
Updated at 5:22 PM EDT:
The ICO is trying to get a warrant tonight to go in tonight. BUT no judge available…
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
And this is a very good question:
What is Facebook doing at Cambridge Analytica's offices tonight??? Good question from MP @DamianCollins. This should be a matter for the authorities, he says. Exactly. Also #WheresZuck?
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
Delete your Facebook page!
Don’t take any online surveys!
Stay frosty!
Open thread.
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