Inside the World of Cambridge Analytica

[Burnt Hill]

The copy/paste argument has got to go.
If I were moderator I would insist we stop complaining about something that is a necessary and appreciated sharing of information. Its getting old, just scroll down and quit complaining, or maybe read the article and comment on it.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The copy/paste argument has got to go.
If I were moderator I would insist we stop complaining about something that is a necessary and appreciated sharing of information. Its getting old, just scroll down and quit complaining, or maybe read the article and comment on it.

One last reply before I go:

The c&p argument has merits, IMHO, when it applies to 20-30 consecutive posts by the same poster with no discussion in a thread on the General Discussion forum.

As I said before, as it concerns this thread the charge is bullshit and the complaint unwarranted.

Good night.

ON EDIT: PLEASE!!!

[Elvis]

This is all great news. I've been waiting for this. It's funny how the MSM talks as if they've never heard of Cambridge Analytica until now, and suddenly it's "news." If they'd been reading RI they'd know all about it. Or maybe they've known, but kept quiet.

Rememeber the ex-NYTimes reporter who said the paper plans its story lines a year in advance? I wonder if this little Cambridge/Facebook SNAFU was on the schedule; my guess is that, like the Trump victory, it was an unexpected "Uh-oh..."

[Burnt Hill]

Oh, okay, thanks, and have a nice evening!

[JackRiddler]

The copy/paste argument has got to go.
If I were moderator I would insist we stop complaining about something that is a necessary and appreciated sharing of information. Its getting old, just scroll down and quit complaining, or maybe read the article and comment on it.

It's too damn long for a thread with discussion going. It's a lot of scrolling! I'm not always logged in, so "foe" doesn't work and scroll-scroll-scroll it goes just to reach someone's one-liner before the next scroll-scroll-scroll. It's impolite. A headline, a few paragraphs and the link suffice. I did it in the days of the Wall Street thread, but no one was complaining because that one moved a lot slower, and, humbly, I was finding a lot of different perspectives. If one fears the Memory Hole (that used to be the justification, for me too) and therefore wants to archive full articles, I'm for it but not in the middle of active discussions. Often it's done passive-aggressively, as an answer to someone's point.

[JackRiddler]

This is all great news. I've been waiting for this. It's funny how the MSM talks as if they've never heard of Cambridge Analytica until now, and suddenly it's "news." If they'd been reading RI they'd know all about it. Or maybe they've known, but kept quiet.

Rememeber the ex-NYTimes reporter who said the paper plans its story lines a year in advance? I wonder if this little Cambridge/Facebook SNAFU was on the schedule; my guess is that, like the Trump victory, it was an unexpected "Uh-oh..."

It is! It is! It's 100 times the news and probably 10,000 times the size of the "Russian" bots and ad buys that drove the Mercers out of the news for months and have still received 1,000 times the coverage. What the U.S. billionaires did in this and all U.S. elections. It's also possible that the "Russian" social media op (such as it was) was just a tentacle of the Mercer efforts.

[seemslikeadream]

AGAIN

Sen Dianne Feinstein

I’m asking @ChuckGrassley to join me in seeking documents and testimony from Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, whistleblower Christopher Wylie, Professor Aleksandr Kogan and Trump campaign officials.

Carole Cadwalladr
‏

@carolecadwalla
Follow Follow @carolecadwalla
More
Carole Cadwalladr Retweeted
Facebook's chief strategy officer wading in.
So, tell us @alexstamos why didn't you inform users of this "non-breach" after @guardian first reported the story in December 2015? https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/9 ... 1393187848 …

april glaser
‏

@aprilaser
Follow Follow @aprilaser
More
Here are @alexstamos now deleted tweets on the app Cambridge Analytica used to harvest millions of Facebook users' data.

Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation
By NICOLE PERLROTH, SHEERA FRENKEL and SCOTT SHANEMARCH 19, 2018


Alex Stamos, the chief information security officer for Facebook. He has urged more disclosure over Russian activity on Facebook. Credit Steve Marcus/Reuters
Facebook’s chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, will leave the company after internal disagreements over how the social network should deal with its role in spreading disinformation, according to current and former employees briefed on the matter.

Mr. Stamos had been a strong advocate inside the company for investigating and disclosing Russian activity on Facebook, often to the consternation of other top executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, the social network’s chief operating officer, according to the current and former employees, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.


After his day-to-day responsibilities were reassigned to others in December, Mr. Stamos said he would leave the company. He was persuaded to stay through August to oversee the transition of his duties because executives thought his departure would look bad, the current and former employees said. He has been overseeing the transfer of his security team to Facebook’s product and infrastructure divisions. His group, which once had 120 people, now has three, the current and former employees said.

Mr. Stamos would be the first high-ranking employee to leave Facebook since controversy erupted over disinformation on its site. His departure is a sign of heightened leadership tensions at the company.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Ms. Sandberg and other company leaders have struggled to address a growing set of problems, including Russian interference on the platform, the rise of false news, and the disclosure this past weekend that 50 million of its user profiles had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that worked on President Trump’s election campaign.

Facebook did not immediately have a comment
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/tech ... d=tw-share

Carole Cadwalladr
‏

@carolecadwalla
Follow Follow @carolecadwalla
More
It took journalists & academics & researchers on 2 continents 2 years to FINALLY force @facebook to acknowledge & actually investigate. It took the @nytimes to get involved, probably. Because remember @facebook is not global, it's American. Big difference

Where's Zuck? Facebook CEO silent as data harvesting scandal unfolds
Amid calls for investigation and a #DeleteFacebook campaign, company releases an official statement but its figurehead keeps quiet

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco

Mon 19 Mar 2018 19.39 EDT First published on Mon 19 Mar 2018 17.57 EDT

Everything you need to know about the Cambridge Analytica exposé – video explainer
The chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has remained silent over the more than 48 hours since the Observer revealed the harvesting of 50 million users’ personal data, even as his company is buffeted by mounting calls for investigation and regulation, falling stock prices, and a social media campaign to #DeleteFacebook.

Facebook’s shares slid 6.77% on Monday following the news, knocking $36bn off the company’s valuation as investors worried about the consequences of the revelations. Zuckerberg owns 16% of the company and personally saw his fortune fall $5.5bn to $69bn, according to Forbes’ live tracker of the world’s wealthiest people.

The embattled social media company announced on Monday that it will engage a digital forensics firm to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica to determine whether or not the firm still has copies of the data in question.

The Observer reported this weekend that a company called Global Science Research (GSR) harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and sold the data to Cambridge Analytica. The New York Times reported on Saturday that Cambridge Analytica still possesses “most or all” of the harvested data. Cambridge Analytica has denied knowing that the data was obtained improperly.

“If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook’s policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made,” Facebook said in a statement.

The engagement of the digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg is unlikely to assuage officials in the US or UK, where lawmakers have issued calls for Zuckerberg to testify about the data breach. Representatives of Stroz Friedberg were at Cambridge Analytica’s office in London on Monday evening when the UK Information Commissioner’s Office asked them to leave so the authorities could pursue its own investigation, Facebook said hours after the first announcement.

‘It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page,’ a Conservative politician said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest

On Monday, the US senator Ron Wyden sent Zuckerberg a detailed list of questions related to the breach, with a demand for answers by 13 April. Two members of the Senate judiciary committee, Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Republican John Kennedy, called for hearings with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google.

“It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page,” said the Conservative MP Damian Collins, chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee.

Referencing the government’s request for Facebook’s auditors to leave Cambridge Analytica’s offices, Collins tweeted: “These investigations need to be undertaken by the proper authorities.”

The three social media companies testified in Washington last fall, following the revelation that their platforms had been used by foreign agents seeking to illegally influence the US presidential election. All three companies sent their general counsels, a move that was criticized at the time. It is unlikely that Zuckerberg will be able to avoid congressional questioning a second time.

Experts have long criticized Facebook’s privacy practices, but their warnings have done little to dissuade users – now numbering more than 2 billion around the world – from signing up for the platform.

Facebook employs psychologist whose firm sold data to Cambridge Analytica
Read more
Whether the scandal will result in actual change in user trust of the company remains to be seen, but the hashtag #DeleteFacebook trended on Twitter on Monday as users shared their intention to log off the social network for good. Others tweeted #WheresZuck, in reference to the executive’s silence.

Also on Monday, the New York Times reported that Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, would be leaving the company following disagreements with other executives over the handling of the investigation into the Russian influence operation.

Stamos obliquely referenced the report on Twitter, though he did not issue a full denial, writing: “Despite the rumors, I’m still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It’s true that my role did change. I’m currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election security.”

The Times reported that Stamos’ responsibilities were reassigned in December and that almost all of the 120 people on his team were transferred to other departments, but that he had agreed to remain at the company through August. Facebook did not immediately respond to a query regarding Stamos.

Stamos is one of a small handful of Facebook executives who addressed the data harvesting scandal on Twitter over the weekend while Zuckerberg and Facebook’s chief operating officer, Shery Sandberg, said nothing.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... are_btn_tw

The backlash against Facebook has destroyed $40 billion in market value in a matter of hours
https://qz.com/1232563/cambridge-analyt ... -of-hours/

Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians
By DANNY HAKIM and MATTHEW ROSENBERGMARCH 17, 2018


Alexander Nix, chief executive of the data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, told the British Parliament last month that his company had no connections to Russia. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.

“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.

“As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

But Mr. Nix’s business did have some dealings with Russian interests, according to company documents and interviews.

Mr. Nix is a director of SCL Group, a British political and defense contractor, and chief executive of its American offshoot, Cambridge Analytica, which advised the Trump campaign. The firms’ employees, who often overlap, had contact in 2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.

Lukoil was interested in how data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders who said there were at least three meetings with Lukoil executives in London and Turkey. SCL and Lukoil denied that the talks were political in nature, and SCL also said there were no meetings in London.

The contacts took place as Cambridge Analytica was building a roster of Republican clients in the United States — and harvesting the Facebook profiles of over 50 million users to develop tools to analyze voters’ behavior.

Cambridge Analytica also included extensive questions about Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in surveys it was carrying out in American focus groups in 2014. It is not clear what — or which client — prompted the line of questioning, which asked for views on topics ranging from Mr. Putin’s popularity to Russian expansionism.

On two promotional documents obtained by The New York Times, SCL said it did business in Russia. In both documents, the country is highlighted on world maps that specify the location of SCL clients, with one of the maps noting that the clients were for the firm’s elections division. In a statement, SCL said an employee had done “commercial work” about 25 years ago “for a private company in Russia.”

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, left, meeting with Vagit Alekperov. He is the head of Lukoil, an oil giant that was in talks with Cambridge Analytica employees. Credit Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin, via Reuters

Cambridge Analytica has been a political flash point since its role in the Trump campaign attracted scrutiny after the election. While Mr. Nix’s firm turned over some records to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during its investigation of Russian interference, Democrats on the committee want a fuller review. “It is imperative to interview a broader range of individuals employed by or linked to Cambridge Analytica,” they said in a report this month.

Asked about the Russian oil company, a spokesman for SCL said that in 2014 the firm’s commercial division “discussed helping Lukoil Turkey better engage with its loyalty-card customers at gas stations.” The spokesman said SCL was not ultimately hired.

Arash Repac, chief executive of Lukoil Eurasia Petrol, offered a different explanation for the talks. He said that a meeting he attended with SCL in Turkey involved a promotional campaign with local soccer teams.

“We needed somebody to guide us with the customer data that we were collecting,” he wrote in response to a question from The Times. “Even though our campaign went ahead, we decided not to cooperate with SCL. No contracts were signed.”

But Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica and develop the company’s voter-profiling technology, said Lukoil showed interest in how the company used data to tailor messaging to American voters.

“I remember being super confused,” said Mr. Wylie, who took part in one of the Lukoil meetings.

“I kept asking Alexander, ‘Can you explain to me what they want?’” he said, referring to Mr. Nix. “I don’t understand why Lukoil wants to know about political targeting in America.”

“We’re sending them stuff about political targeting — they then come and ask more about political targeting,” Mr. Wylie said, adding that Lukoil “just didn’t seem to be interested” in how the techniques could be used commercially.

Mr. Wylie, a former contractor, left SCL before the talks concluded and could not say what became of the relationship with the oil company. He had a falling out with SCL and tried to set up a rival business. SCL said he had violated a nondisclosure agreement and that his comments were an attempt to hurt the company.

A second person familiar with the discussions backed up Mr. Wylie’s account, but spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a confidentiality agreement.

Though Lukoil is not state-owned, it depends on Kremlin support, and its chief executive, Vagit Alekperov, has met with Mr. Putin on a number of occasions. Reuters reported last year that Lukoil and other companies received instructions from the state energy ministry on providing news stories favorable to Russian leadership.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/p ... ussia.html

[Elvis]

It's also possible that the "Russian" social media op (such as it was) was just a tentacle of the Mercer efforts.

This has occurred to me too, taking into account the existing connections among the Trump gang, Slater, Mercer, etc. and the various Russian and Ukrainian operators. Maybe some work was subbed out.

[Jerky]

But it's NOT substantive, though. It's just more reflexive honking cant. As if the fact that NOT EVERY aspect of the Trump atrocity exhibition involves Putin/Russia means that there is no Putin/Russia aspect to the Trump atrocity exhibition. It's literally a sub-moronic attempt at point-scoring, and works on none but the already convinced, and/or the far too generous (you in this case). It's a bullshit, bad faith argument that I'm pretty sure even Rory doesn't believe. It's pure point-scoring nonsense.

J.

Mueller been barking (intentionally) up the wrong tree the whole time. There was foreign interference, but not where what's attracted all that bandwidth on these parts.

Ok, this is better, somewhat substantive.

Now this is curious: your hypothesis is that Mueller knew going in to his position as Special Prosecutor that there was no Russia there? Is your contention that the thirteen Russian indictments are just empty window dressing?

And if so, isn't that just a wee bit off-topic?

[JackRiddler]

But it's NOT substantive, though. It's just more reflexive honking cant. As if the fact that NOT EVERY aspect of the Trump atrocity exhibition involves Putin/Russia means that there is no Putin/Russia aspect to the Trump atrocity exhibition.

That you phrase it this way is interesting. Seeking more accurate language, I would say that although 99% or more of the Trump "atrocity exhibition" is not a product of actions of Russian state action, this of course does not mean that there was no Russian state or state milieu aspect to his election at all. Okay. I figure there was, although the main exhibit at the moment appears laughable (and I do not refer to the alleged origins of the Wikileaks releases, which seems for now to have been dropped as a big story for some reason, but the small-scale FB/Twitter bot/ad capers). But you know professionals manipulating elections would actually know what they are doing, be better at hiding their tracks, and look more like Cambridge Analytica (the effects if not the scale of which are probably company hype).

Any potentially illegal Russian angle should be investigated -- preferably as an item alongside the long criminal histories of Trump, Trump Org, the campaign, donors, family, clients, international business partners from Riyadh to Moscow to Tel Aviv, Deutsche Bank, etc. Which Mueller seems to be dipping into to an extent. (There's little hope this investigation will go into the main factors in electing GOP presidencies and legislatures since 2000, which are the systematic GOP actions especially at the state level to suppress the vote, fix district lines, presumably fix vote counts, supported by anonymous and unaccountable billionaire dark money.)

One day of the new Cambridge Analytica and Mercers story has revealed election-manipulation moves on a scale hundreds of times bigger than the "Russian" FB/Twitter machinations. As one might expect, given that billions in dark money were thrown behind Trump after he secured the nomination, and almost all of it came from U.S. entities.

So therefore I'd also say the horrendous lack of proportion about the Russian state allegations among the corporate media and politicians -- even as the Trump regime escalates and accelerates all-American atrocities and attempts to invent new ones daily -- has so far played into the hands of the society's worst establishment elements, both the pro-Trump and anti. The non-stop Russia talk has distracted from miles and miles of crimes committed by the regime, and often played into its hands. It's like, if Mueller doesn't come up aces on the unlikely "collusion" scenario, Trump comes out smelling like roses! It will legitimate him and continue to galvanize his base, who will see confirmation that it was all a put-up job and that he's a great guy unfairly hated by the media and liberals because he tells it like it is, blah blah. A failure on this thin approach (prosecutorially speaking, it is thin) will make it harder, not easier, to bring charges on the mountains of other shit.

Meanwhile the MSNBC version of "Resistance," the Democratic alliance with the neocons and Bushistas, the escalating attack on a variety of leftist movements as Russian-influenced, the calls to censorship and heightened state surveillance and control of communications, and the unending relitigation of 2016 and seeking blame for Clinton's loss everywhere (including Moscow) except with Clinton, have been among the hindrances to building an organized, forceful, effective opposition, and may yet lead to wins for the GOP in 2018 or worse, 2020.

.

[Jerky]

Cambridge Analytica and Russian Bots Used the Same Strategy

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/1 ... -strategy/

One of the big stories over the weekend was about the fact that the Trump campaign’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica, stole the Facebook data of millions of people in order to psychologically profile them for targeting.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

I’ll have more to say about all of that later, but in digging into this story, I found a very interesting connection. What Mueller and his team of investigators will be interested in is whether or not there was a connection between this voter profiling with the kind of intrusion into social media he has already included in recent indictments of Russians.

One clue that might merely be coincidence is the timing. Here is what we learn from the indictment:

Starting at least in or around 2014, Defendants and their co-conspirators began to track and study groups on U.S. social media sites dedicated to U.S. politics and social issues. In order to gauge the performance of various groups on social media sites, the ORGANIZATION tracked certain metrics like the group’s size, the frequency of content placed by the group, and the level of audience engagement with that content, such as the average number of comments or responses to a post.

According to Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who is the main source for the article linked above, he met Steve Bannon in the fall of 2013 and by 2014 their work was underway.

But there is another confluence of events that is even more interesting. Back in October 2016, just days before the election, Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg did some reporting on the Trump campaign and the work of Cambridge Analytica in particular. Here is how they described their strategy at the time:

Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans…

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

Those Facebook “dark posts” seem to be a favorite tool used by Parscale and the Cambridge Analytica consultants. I’d bet that we haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of how those were used during the campaign. But compare the above to what the Mueller investigation included in their indictment of the Russian bots.

In or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their ORGANIZATION-controlled personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.

In other words, in the final stages of the 2016 election, both the Trump campaign and the Russian bots engaged in a voter suppression strategy with core Clinton supporters. Is it possible that was merely a coincidence? You tell me.

[seemslikeadream]

Carole Cadwalladr
‏
16m16 minutes ago

BREAKING: New details about Aleksandr Kogan's research. A different personality quiz he was using to pull @facebook data via its API in St Petersburg in summer 2014. To measure - gulp - the "dark triad": psychopathy, narcissism, machiavellianism



That's summer 2014, when he was also pulling @facebook data for Cambridge Analytica. Summer 2014 when Cambridge Analytica was pitching to Lukoil. Summer 2014, when Robert Mueller's indicted Russians were starting to use the platform for "information warfare"..


Sound familiar....?


https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/stat ... 5719107584

[Grizzly]

Fuck going after Cambridge Analytica. The $cam has been ran by SCL SINCE 2006. But you know, do as thou wilt...

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2006/09/un ... b499f053ef

They've been scrubbed...

Strategic Communication Laboratories
Joe Mon, 02/09/2009 - 8:51pm

http://www.scl.cc/home.php

Strategic Communication Laboratories

Strategic Communication Laboratories has pioneered a new methodology to enable governments and countries to manage their relationships with their key audience groups through more powerful communication.

The methodology is based on 16 years of academic research and development conducted at 42 universities around the globe. It uses scientific techniques from a variety of social sciences to make ‘communications with groups’ far more effective (and measurable).

SCL offers various solutions based on this methodology to help countries in specific governmental areas such as defence, foreign affairs, internal security, health, finance and tourism.

In a world where the perception is the reality, all countries need to have the capability to manage their own perceptual alignment – otherwise someone else will.

"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public opinion is greater than he who enacts laws." President Abraham
Lincoln

An Opcentre is a command facility for strategic communications.

In this always-ready environment researchers can identify target audiences using highly advanced statistical models, strategists can orchestrate campaigns using the most effective scientific methods and media producers have access to innovative production techniques.

These units of expertise combine to create one of the most dynamic and influential ‘weapons' in the world.

An Opcentre puts influence, control and power back into the hands of the government and military, giving them greater power to influence the enemy in time of conflict and enhanced access to their citizens during a crisis. For instance, an Opcentre can be designed to override all national radio and TV broadcasts, allowing the government and military to communicate with the public as the need arises.

The Opcentre is a formidable tool for Homeland Security, Conflict Reduction, International Public Diplomacy and un-mediated Government communications.

What can the OpCentre do?

* Launch a powerful psyop campaign against an engaged enemy
* Engender support within the national community for proposed military action
* Re-engineer foreign perceptions to potentially avert conflict altogether
* Develop national resilience and behavioural compliance for homeland security issues
* Produce powerful public diplomacy campaigns for political, economic, military issues
* Maintain an ‘always ready' public communication command centre for critical incidents
* Develop more effective public information campaigns for social and health issues

Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) is the world’s first provider of strategic communication solutions that can change minds, reduce casualties and manage major incidents.

Our History

Formed in 1993, SCL is a successful project company with 12 years experience of managing and executing military and humanitarian strategic communication campaigns for governments worldwide.

Its customers include NGOs, police departments, military forces, municipal authorities, and the UN.

During this time the company has invested nearly $20 million into research at the Behavioural Dynamics Institute (BDi), the world’s leading authority on persuasion, communication psychology and public diplomacy. The powerful new methodologies developed from this research are proprietary to the company and have allowed SCL to help its clients achieve outstanding results through the use of strategic communications.

SCL was formed as an agency that did not rely on creativity (such as advertising) for results, but on proven scientific method. The demand for the agency grew out of the failure and frustration many clients experienced when trying to apply traditional marketing techniques to non-commercial issues, such as resolution of wars and civil strife, strike aversion, international crises and riot control.

SCL’s management board comprises: Chairman Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Pattie PC, Chief Executive Nigel Oakes, Directors - Alex Oakes and Alexander Nix, and advisory board members Rear Admiral John Tolhurst CB, Peter Varnish OBE, Dr Andrew Stewart, Lord Birdwood and Lord Ivar Mountbatten.

Funding for SCL has been provided by a number of private high net worth individuals all based in the UK.

An OpCentre can be made up of many different custom modules. Any of the following may be incorporated into an OpCentre:

What modules are in an OpCentre?

* Media capture & analysis
* Concept Development
* Secure Communications
* Target audience archive filtering
* Cultural Alignment Unit
* Recruitment & Training
* Target audience issue analysis
* Command Interface
* Scenario Planning Team
* Archive and recall systems
* Radio Production
* Redundancy Unit
* Evaluation & MOE Unit
* Radio Transmission
* Media Management Unit
* Strategic Campaign Planning
* TV Production
* Word-of Mouth Unit
* Risk Analysis Unit
* TV Transmission
* Communication Planning Unit
* Print Production
* Message Development
* Distribution & Logistics
* Channel Management
* Forward Command/Tactical
* Environment Development
* Administration/Management

Addendum: Hope this kid, Christopher Wylie lives through the night... I'll light a candle for him.

Crisis manager questions why Trump's use of social media data is 'sleazy' and Obama's 'innovative'
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/crisis- ... -good.html

[JackRiddler]

In other words, in the final stages of the 2016 election, both the Trump campaign and the Russian bots engaged in a voter suppression strategy with core Clinton supporters. Is it possible that was merely a coincidence? You tell me.

Is this question supposed to be a joke? Is the story some kind of put-on? Is it possible that two tentacles of the money supporting the GOP followed the entire range of standard voter-suppression strategies that the entire GOP has been engaging in for decades and consistently winning with since 2000? How could they do this without an expert to explain "purple states" to them?

Also, is it possible that Cambridge Analytica engaged in the same data mining as every other Facebook client, responding to the Facebook business model of packaging and selling user-contributed data? How can this be a coincidence?

[seemslikeadream]

Cambridge Analytica = Nix= Mercer = Strategic Communication Laboratories

Stole the personal data from Facebook and is still in possession of the data of 50 million people.....what they did or didn't do with it is another matter......and they are STILL in possession of that STOLEN data

Facebook did not inform users whose data had been harvested. The lack of disclosure could violate laws in Britain and in many American states.

Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by Jared Kushner to run Trump’s data operation, had contacts with Russians, specifically a Russian energy firm Lukoil

Even if it never intended to bolster Trump, it’s hard to disagree that it was lax in recognizing manipulation of its platform and in disclosing the extent of the misuse of users’ data. “What’s clear is that Facebook has built up a massive intelligence tool that can be exploited by foreign actors who don’t care at all if they are violating Facebook’s user agreements,” remarks Max Bergmann, who heads the Moscow Project at the Center for American Progress
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ri ... fdcb5e2817

.