Inside the World of Cambridge Analytica

[seemslikeadream]

thanks Grizzly


Why would a Russian oil company be targeting American voters?



Cambridge Analytica➡️BCCI 2.0

Cambridge Analytica and Online Manipulation

It's not just about data protection; it's about strategies designed to induce addictive behavior, and thus to manipulate

Marcello Ienca, Effy VayenaMarch 30, 2018

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is more than a “breach,” as Facebook executives have defined it. It exemplifies the possibility of using online data to algorithmically predict and influence human behavior in a manner that circumvents users’ awareness of such influence. Using an intermediary app, Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest large data volumes—over 50 million raw profiles—and use big data analytics to create psychographic profiles in order to subsequently target users with customized digital ads and other manipulative information. According to some observers, this massive data analytics tactic might have been used to purposively swing election campaigns around the world. The reports are still incomplete and more is likely to come to light in the next days.

Although different in scale and scope, this scandal is not entirely new. In 2014, Facebook conducted a colossal online psychosocial experiment with researchers at Cornell University on almost seven hundred thousand unaware users, algorithmically modifying their newsfeeds to observe changes in their emotions. The study results, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), showed the ability of the social network to make people happier or sadder on a massive scale and without their awareness—a phenomenon that was labeled “emotional contagion.” As in the Cambridge Analytica case, Facebook’s emotional contagion study sparked harsh criticism, with experts calling for new standards of oversight and accountability for social-computing research.

A common lesson from these two different cases is that Facebook’s privacy policy is no absolute guarantee of data protection: in 2014, it allowed the reuse of data for research purposes even though “research” was not listed in the company’s Data Use Policy at the time of data collection. A couple of years later, it allowed an abusive app to collect data not only on users who signed up for it, but also on their friends. Mark Zuckerberg himself has admitted that the data were not protected as they should have been. In trying to make sense of this scandal, however, there are two more subtle considerations that go beyond data protection:

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First, accepting terms of service (ToS) and privacy policies (PP) is a prerequisite for using most online services, Facebook included. Nonetheless, it is no secret that most people accept ToSs without even scrolling to the end of the page. This well-known phenomenon raises the question of whether online agreements qualify as informed consent. Berggruen Prize winner Onora O’Neill has argued that “the point of consent procedures is to limit deception and coercion,” hence they should be designed to give people “control over the amount of information they receive and opportunity to rescind consent already given.”

Online services, from the most mainstream like Facebook and Twitter to the most shady like Cambridge Analytica, seem to do exactly the opposite. As a German Court has recently ruled, there is no guarantee that people are sufficiently informed about Facebook’s privacy-related options before registering for the service, hence informed consent might be undermined. On top of that, the platform hosts activities that use online manipulation to reduce people’s rational control over the information they generate or receive, be it in the form of micro-targeted advertising or fake-news-spreading social bots. Instead of being limited, deception is normalized.

In this ever-evolving online environment characterized by weakened consent, conventional data protection measures might be insufficient. What data are used for is unlikely to be controlled by the users who provided the data in the first place. Data access boards, monitoring boards and other mechanisms have a better chance to control and respond to undesirable uses. Such mechanisms have to be part of a more systemic oversight plan that spreads throughout the continuum of regulatory activities and responds to unexpected events across the life cycle of data uses. This approach can target new types of risk and emerging forms of vulnerability arising in the online data ecosystem.

The second consideration is that not just Cambridge Analytica, but most of the current online ecosystem, is an arm’s race to the unconscious mind: notifications, microtargeted ads, autoplay plugins, are all strategies designed to induce addictive behavior, hence to manipulate. Researchers have called for adaptive regulatory frameworks that can limit information extraction from and modulation of someone’s mind using experimental neurotechnologies. Social computing shows that you don’t necessarily have to read people’s brains to influence their choices. It is sufficient to collect and mine the data they regularly—and often unwittingly—share online.

Therefore we need to consider whether we should set for the digital space a firm threshold for cognitive liberty. Cognitive liberty highlights the freedom to control one’s own cognitive dimension (including preferences, choices and beliefs) and to be protected from manipulative strategies that are designed to bypass one’s cognitive defenses. This is precisely what Cambridge Analytica’s attempted to do, as their managing director revealed during an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News: the company’s aim, he admitted, is to “to take information onboard effectively” using “two fundamental human drivers,” namely “hopes and fears,” which are often “unspoken or even unconscious.”

Attempts to manipulate other people’s unconscious mind and associated behavior are as old as human history. In Ancient Greece, Plato warned against demagogues: political leaders who build consensus by appealing to popular desires and prejudices instead of rational deliberation. However, the only tool demagogues ancient Athens could use to bypass rational deliberation was the art of persuasion.

In today’s digital ecosystem, wannabe demagogues can use big data analytics to uncover cognitive vulnerabilities from large user datasets and effectively exploit them in a manner that bypasses individual rational control. For example, machine learning can be used to identify deep-rooted fears among pre-profiled user groups which social-media bots can subsequently exploit to foment anger and intolerance.

The recently adopted EU General Data Protection Regulation, with its principle of purpose limitation (data collectors are required to specify the purpose of collecting personal information at the time of collection) is likely to partly defuse the current toxic digital environment. However, determining where persuasion ends and manipulation begins, is a question which goes, as recently admitted by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), “well beyond the right to data protection.”

The EDPS has underscored that microtargeting and other online strategies “point towards a culture of manipulation in the online environment” in which “most individuals are unaware of how they are being used.” If recklessly applied to the electoral domain, they could even change reduce “the space for debate and interchange of ideas,” a risk which “urgently requires a democratic debate on the use and exploitation of data for political campaign and decision-making.” Last year, international experts have addressed the question of whether democracy will survive big data and artificial intelligence. The answer will partly depend on how we govern data flows and protect the liberty of the individual mind.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ob ... ipulation/

Larisa Alexandrovna is describing this as BCCI 2.0

"Cambridge Analytica is a shell corp majority owned by Robert Mercer created to hide foreign actors and optics to obscure SCL Group, a military contractor with a tainted past. He came forward because military grade psychological operations have no place in democracies" h/t to Prof David Carroll (who is suing CA on behalf of the US public).

Cambridge Analytica Affiliate Gave John Bolton Facebook Data, Documents Indicate

by Jeremy Kahn

March 29, 2018, 10:06 AM CDT

Parliament releases trove of whistleblower documents, emails

Evidence bolsters claims U.K. company didn’t destroy data

A British company at the heart of the Facebook Inc. data-privacy scandal agreed to give a political action committee founded by John Bolton, U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser, data harvested from millions of Facebook users, documents released by Parliament show.

The papers were provided by whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, a former employee of both Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate company SCL Elections, part of London-based SCL Group. The U.K. Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sports released the documents Thursday, which include more than 120 pages of business contracts, emails and legal opinions.

Revealed are indications that Aggregate IQ, a Canadian company that worked closely with both Cambridge Analytica and SCL, had access to data from Aleksandr Kogan, an academic who had set up an app designed to build psychological profiles of people, based in part from Facebook data. The social-media giant has said that Kogan violated its terms of service by using this information for commercial purposes, but Kogan has said he is being "scapegoated" by the companies involved.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement released Thursday that it didn’t use Facebook data from Kogan’s company in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. "We provided polling, data analytics and digital marketing to the campaign," the statement said. The company said it didn’t use personality profiles of the sort Kogan specialized in. And it said the data it did have was used to "identify ’persuadable’ voters, how likely they were to vote, the issues they cared about, and who was most likely to donate."

In a statement Tuesday, following Wylie’s testimony before the parliamentary committee, Cambridge Analytica said it had never provided Aggregate IQ with any data from Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

Emails released by Parliament show that SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s U.K. affiliate, discussed with Aggregate IQ how it could provide Kogan’s data, and models for how to target voters in several U.S. states based on it, to Bolton’s PAC.

In one email chain that included Alexander Nix, the suspended chief executive officer of Cambridge Analytica, and Jeff Silvester, the co-founder of Aggregate IQ, the two discussed using Kogan’s data to help create "personality cluster information for the target voter segments" in New Hampshire, Arkansas and North Carolina.

The executives also discussed getting Kogan data from another survey firm so that he could combine it with the data he had from Facebook. "This would need to be modeled for target voters by end of next week so it can be used to help micro targeting effort to be pushed out in the following week," an unnamed individual at SCL wrote in the message, which contained numerous redacted passages.

News that Bolton’s political group, The John Bolton Super PAC, was a beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s psychometric profiles was first reported by The New York Times last Friday.

The documents released by Parliament also show that SCL Group contracted Aggregate IQ in November 2013, agreeing to pay the company up to $200,000 for services that included "Facebook and social media data harvesting." Another document shows that in 2014, SCL paid Aggregate IQ $500,000 to create a platform it could use to target U.S. voters.

The documents also include a confidential legal memorandum, stated to be prepared for Rebekah Mercer, daughter of Trump supporter Robert Mercer, which warns Cambridge Analytica that it could run afoul of U.S. laws barring foreign nationals from participating in U.S. elections. The memo advises Mercer, former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon, and Nix that Nix ought to recuse himself from supervising any of Cambridge Analytica’s U.S. election activity and that foreign nationals without green cards should not be involved in "polling and marketing" or providing strategic advice to U.S. campaigns.

The name of the lawyers who prepared the memo are redacted in the version released by Parliament. Wylie has told reporters and testified before Parliament that many of those Cambridge Analytica employed to help on U.S. campaigns were foreign citizens.

A 2012 memo from the U.K. Ministry of Defense released by the committee revealed that the British military’s psychological warfare unit paid SCL to train its staff on how to assess the effectiveness of "psychological operations" and that SCL had helped "support 15 (UK) PsyOps," including operations in Libya and Afghanistan
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ata-crisis

[seemslikeadream]

Carole Cadwalladr
‏

This week marked a major milestone for us. Parliament heard the story & released the documents that prompted Cambridge Analytica’s legal action against us. And it was nothing to do with Facebook data...Carole
So. One day ahead of publication, Squire Patton & Boggs, lawyers for Cambridge Analytica, drop @guardian a line....


Seven hours ahead of publishing this article, Cambridge Analytica threatened to sue. It was nothing to do with Facebook data. It was the link to AggegateIQ. To Vote Leave. To Brexit.

Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire?

We reveal how a confidential legal agreement is at the heart of a web connecting Robert Mercer to Britain’s EU referendum

Carole CadwalladrSun 14 May 2017 03.00 EDT
Robert Mercer
US billionaire Robert Mercer in Washington DC in March this year. Photograph: Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post via Getty Images
This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of SCLE and Cambridge Analytica.
On 18 November 2015, the British press gathered in a hall in Westminster to witness the official launch of Leave.EU. Nigel Farage, the campaign’s figurehead, was banished to the back of the room and instead an American political strategist, Gerry Gunster, took centre stage and explained its strategy. “The one thing that I know is data,” he said. “Numbers do not lie. I’m going to follow the data.”

Eighteen months on, it’s this same insight – to follow the data – that is the key to unlocking what really happened behind the scenes of the Leave campaign. On the surface, the two main campaigns, Leave.EU and Vote Leave, hated one other. Their leading lights, Farage and Boris Johnson, were sworn enemies for the duration of the referendum. The two campaigns bitterly refused even to share a platform.

But the Observer has seen a confidential document that provides clear evidence of a link between the two campaigns. More precisely, evidence of a close working relationship between the two data analytics firms employed by the campaigns – AggregateIQ, which Vote Leave hired, and Cambridge Analytica, retained by Leave.EU.

The leaked intellectual property licence document that shows a link between AggregateIQ and SCL Elections (the company behind Cambridge Analytica).
The leaked intellectual property licence document that shows a link between AggregateIQ and SCL Elections (the company behind Cambridge Analytica). Photograph: Observer
British electoral law is founded on the principle of a level playing field and controlling campaign spending is the key plank of that. The law states that different campaigns must not work together unless they declare their expenditure jointly. This controls spending limits so that no side can effectively “buy” an election.

But this signed legal document – a document that was never meant to be made public and was leaked by a concerned source – connects both Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s data firms directly to Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who bankrolled Donald Trump.

This is a deeply complex story. It has taken three months of investigation to unravel the web of connections – both human and contractual. But these connections and threads linking two separate foreign data analytics companies – one based in Canada and one based in London – raise profound and troubling questions about our democratic process. Because these intricate links lead, in not many steps, to Robert Mercer.

This ordinary-looking document is at the heart of a web of relationships that link Mercer with the referendum to take Britain out of the EU. What impact did Mercer have on Brexit? Did the campaigns know of the link? Did they deliberately conceal it? Or could they, too, have been in the dark?

Because, legally, these two companies – AggregateIQ in Canada and Cambridge Analytica, an American company based in London, have nothing to connect them publicly. But this intellectual property licence shown to the Observer tells a different story. This created a binding “exclusive” “worldwide” agreement “in perpetuity” for all of AggregateIQ’s intellectual property to be used by SCL Elections (a British firm that created Cambridge Analytica with Mercer).

The companies may have had different owners but they were legally bound together. And, the Observer has learned, they were working together on a daily basis at the time of the referendum – both companies were being paid by Mercer-funded organisations to work on Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in America. What is more, several anonymous sources reveal the two companies, working on two separate British Leave campaigns, actually shared the same database at the time.

In fact AggregateIQ had a non-compete clause. Leave.EU announced in November 2015 it was working with Cambridge Analytica which means that AggregateIQ must have had explicit permission to work with Vote Leave.

And yet none of this was visible. Dominic Cummings, a former Tory special adviser who was Vote Leave’s chief strategist, was a vocal critic of Ukip, Farage, Leave.EU and its millionaire backer, Arron Banks. And the two campaigns followed different strategies – Leave.EU targeting Ukippers and disaffected working-class Labour voters with images of queues of refugees. Vote Leave targeted middle England with a message about returning £350m a week from Europe to the NHS.

Follow the data, however, and another story is revealed, which leads directly to Mercer and his close associate, Steve Bannon, now Donald Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Mercer was the owner of Cambridge Analytica, a firm which, as the Observer detailed last week, was spun out of a British firm with 30 years experience in working for governments and militaries around the world, specialising in “psychological operations”. At the time of the referendum, the Observer has learned, Bannon was the head of it.

What was not known, until February, was the relationship between all these figures and the Leave campaign. That was when Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, revealed to this paper that Farage was a close friend of both Bannon and Mercer. He said that the Leave campaign was a “petri dish” for the Trump campaign. “We shared a lot of information because what they were trying to do and what we were trying to do had massive parallels.”

Wigmore also said that Mercer had been “happy to help” and Cambridge Analytica had given its services to the campaign for free. It was the general secretary of Ukip, a British lawyer called Matthew Richardson, who effected Leave.eu’s introduction to Cambridge Analytica, Wigmore said. “We had a guy called Matthew Richardson who’d known Nigel for a long time and he’s always looked after the Mercers. The Mercers had said that here’s this company that we think might be useful.”

Screengrab of Cambridge Analytica website
Screengrab of Cambridge Analytica website Photograph: SCL
He said that Mercer, Farage and co had all met at a conference in Washington. “The best dinner we ever went to. Around that table were all the rejects of the political world. And the rejects of the political world are now effectively in the White House. It’s extraordinary. Jeff Sessions. [Former national security adviser Michael] Flynn, the whole lot of them. They were all there.”

When the Observer revealed Mercer’s “help” in February, a “gift” of services, it triggered two investigations. One by the Information Commissioner’s Office about possible illegal use of data. And another by the Electoral Commission. Cambridge Analytica is a US company and Mercer is a US citizen and British law, designed to protect its electoral system from outside influence, expressly forbids donations from foreign – or impermissible – donors. The commission is also looking into the “help” that Gunster gave the campaign. It was not declared in Leave.EU’s spending returns and if donated, it would also be impermissible. Gavin Millar QC, an expert in electoral law, says it raises questions of the utmost importance about the influence of an American citizen in a UK election.

But the contents of this document raise even more significant and urgent questions. Coordination between campaigns destroys the “level playing field” on which UK electoral law is based. It creates an unfair advantage.

Millar said that one of the significant and revealing aspects of the arrangement was that it was hidden. “It’s the covert nature of the relationship between these two companies and campaigns that I find particularly revealing and alarming. If there is covert cooperation via offshore entities, [it] is about as serious a breach of the funding rules as one can imagine in the 21st century.”

Millar said that this case was without precedent. “To have a billionaire so directly buying influence in a British election is absolutely unheard of. This is completely out of the ordinary. And what’s clear is that our electoral laws are hopelessly inadequate. The only way we would be able to find the truth of what happened is through a public inquiry.”

The link between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ was never supposed to come to light. And it is still uncertain how Vote Leave came to work with AggregateIQ. There are several major Tory donors and pro-Brexit figures associated with Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections, including Lord Marland, former treasurer of the Conservative party and head of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council. The pro-Brexit Tory donor Roger Gabb, the owner of South African wine company Kumala, is also a shareholder and was involved in one of the Leave campaigns. In a separate incident he was fined £1,000 by the Electoral Commission for failing to include “imprints” – or campaign branding – on newspaper ads.

The Observer revealed last week that two core members of the Vote Leave team used to work with both Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ. Cummings said that he found the company – on which he spent by far the biggest chunk of his campaign budget – “on the internet”.

He declined the opportunity to comment for this article. On Twitter, he accused the Observer of “bad journalism” and said the story was “an embarrassment to a national paper” but he did not comment further on how he found AggregateIQ, a firm with fewer than 10 employees based on an island off the west coast of Canada, on LinkedIn. Or if he knew of its relationship to Cambridge Analytica and Mercer. Though he has been a keen follower of Mercer’s dealings, tweeting several times about his company, Renaissance Technologies, which he describes as “the world’s most successful quant fund” [a hedge fund that uses automated trading].

Dominic Cummings tweet
Tweets from Dominic Cummings referring to Renaissance Technologies, which is owned by Robert Mercer. Photograph: Twitter
Dominic Cummings tweet
Millar said: “It is appalling that Vote Leave, whose lead campaign status was authorised by the state (and whose campaign was partly funded by the state), does not feel an obligation to give … public answers to the questions you raise.”

Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica have responded by telling the Observer that they did no work with each other. Arron Banks, the head of Leave.EU, said it had talked to Cambridge Analytica about working with it “if we won the official designation – but we didn’t”.

This directly contradicts his own memoir, The Bad Boys of Brexit. Under the entry for 22 October 2015, Banks writes: “We’ve hired Cambridge Analytica, an American company that uses ‘big data and advanced psychographics’ to influence people.” There are multiple further pieces of evidence. The YouTube video of Leave.EU’s launch event, the same event in which Gunster talks about data, shows Banks sitting next to a senior executive of Cambridge Analytica, Brittany Kaiser. She is described on Leave.EU’s Facebook pages as its director of programme development, and she told the British press about the “large-scale research” that would identify what people were really interested in and how this would “help inform our policy and our campaigns”.

Screenshot of Leave.EU launch event
A screenshot of the Leave.EU launch event on 15 November 2015. Arron Banks, second from right, is seated between Brittany Kaiser of Cambridge Analytica, and Gerry Gunster. Banks now denies Cambridge Analytica does any work for the campaign. Photograph: YouTube
A now deleted post on Leave.EU’s website (but available via archive), entitled The Science Behind Our Strategy, details how Leave.EU was working with Cambridge Analytica, whose “psychographic methodology” is “on another level of sophistication”.

Leave EU campaign screenshot
Leave EU campaign screenshot Photograph: Twitter
In November, Kaiser told Bloomberg the first stage of the work involved interviewing “close to half a million Britons”. To put this in context, typical polling samples conducted by firms such as YouGov are of about 1,200 people. Research on this scale and magnitude would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, say experts – though nothing has been declared or accounted for by any campaign. Any donation of services by Cambridge Analytica or Mercer would be “impermissible” under UK law.

In February 2016, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, told Campaign magazine: “Recently, Cambridge Analytica has teamed up with Leave.EU – the UK’s largest group advocating for a British exit (or ‘Brexit’) from the European Union – to help them better understand and communicate with UK voters. We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’s social media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online and the campaign’s Facebook page is growing in support to the tune of about 3,000 people per day.”

On 2 February, Banks tweeted: “Our campaign is being run by Gerry Gunster (won 24 referendum in the USA and Cambridge analytica experts in SM”. (This post has since been deleted, though screenshots exist.)

Arron Banks tweet
Photograph: Twitter
In March 2016, Kaiser gave an interviewer further details: “Well, actually right now we are working on the Brexit campaign so we are working with all three of the main parties. […] It’s a very exciting campaign because it has forced the British government to run their third ever national referendum.”

In January 2017, Banks responded to a dismissive tweet about Cambridge Analytica, with: “Interesting, since we deployed this technology in leave.eu we got unprecedented levels of engagement. 1 video 13m views. AI won it for leave.”

Arron Banks tweet
Photograph: Twitter
All this has taken so long to come to light because the spending returns for the different campaigns were published only in February. Martin Moore, director of the Study of Communication, Media and Power at King’s College London described how he began to investigate the returns back then.

“I went through the invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

Other outlets found discrepancies. Buzzfeed published a story about how Vote Leave had given a 23-year-old fashion student, Darren Grimes, a gift of £625,000 in the week before the election, – which was spent on the BeLeave social media campaign – as well as a further £50,000 from another third party donor. Vote Leave and Grimes both claimed there was no coordination between campaigns. Grimes, the Observer has learned, had previously worked with Chris Wylie, a Canadian political strategist, who introduced AggregateIQ to Cambridge Analytica.

The returns showed that Vote Leave donated a further £100,000 to Veterans for Britain – which then spent exactly that amount of money with AggregateIQ. Both campaigns denied any “coordination”. Nor was there coordination, Vote Leave said, with the Democratic Unionist Party, which spent a further £32,750 with AggregateIQ.

Leaked emails published in February last year appeared to reveal a plan to break spending laws by creating different campaigns and covertly coordinating them. Steve Baker, Conservative MP for Wycombe, wrote to colleagues: “It is open to the Vote Leave family to create separate legal entities each of which could spend £700k: Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum.”

But if coordination did occur, it is unclear which parties knew what. A spokesman for Veterans for Britain told the Observer that AggregateIQ approached it. “I didn’t find AggregateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us.”

However lawyers for Cambridge Analytica say that neither it nor SCL Elections has had any contractual or other link with AggregateIQ for 12 months, when it was retained to provide some software development and digital marketing support. They add that neither SCL Elections nor Cambridge Analytica was involved in AggregateIQ’s alleged involvement in the Vote Leave campaign.

A number of individuals, including Stephen Kinnock, MP for Aberavon, have sent a file of evidence to the Electoral Commission, the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police pointing out a catalogue of issues. They all referred it back to the Electoral Commission, saying it was the body with jurisdiction over the matter.

Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit
Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit in May 2016. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
The commission announced it was going to pursue an investigation of Leave.EU. Publicly, it has made no statement about Vote Leave. Sources have told the Observer that it is unable to pursue a proper investigation because AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Observer has learned that the Information Commissioner’s Office is actively investigating BeLeave, Vote Leave, Veterans for Britain and the DUP for potential offences, including illegal sharing of data, but it is believed to have the same problem: the evidence is offshore.

Kinnock said: “It’s clear the Electoral Commission, the body which is meant to uphold it, is completely toothless … That’s the heart of the problem. Even if it finds a problem, it can only impose a fine which is just the cost of doing business. There’s clear evidence of channelling funding through third parties, including DUP and BeLeave as front organisations to circumvent the rules. And there is no way of properly holding anyone to account. What you’ve shown is that there is a much bigger story here that I believe needs a full public inquiry. There are so many issues. Thousands of pounds of work apparently unaccounted for. Evidence of coordination between multiple campaigns. Multiple breaches of data protection. And this question of foreign influence, of a foreign billionaire buying influence in a British election, goes right to the heart of our entire democratic process.”

The Observer asked Cambridge Analytica for comment on the financial and business links between Cambridge Analytica, Mercer, Bannon, AggregateIQ, Leave.EU and the Vote Leave campaigns. We asked about an apparently coordinated campaign strategy between Leave.EU, Vote Leave, BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the DUP “in part funded and enabled by Robert Mercer”.

A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said: “Cambridge Analytica did no paid or unpaid work for Leave.EU.”

Lawyers for Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections wrote to the Observer on Saturday to complain about our previous stories, which they said contained significant inaccuracies and amounted to a sustained campaign of vilification designed to paint a false and misleading picture of their clients. They said we were conducting a concerted campaign to undermine their clients and cause them damage. They said their clients have done no wrong, broken no laws and breached no one’s rights and had not been part of a “shadowy” or unlawful campaign to subvert British democracy or dupe the British public.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... are_btn_tw

This is the document we published seven fraught hours after receiving that legal threat. And which on Thursday was released in full by parliament...


This might not look like much of a smoking gun but it places US billionaire & Trump donor Robert Mercer bang smack in the middle of Brexit..





Today, I write about how the documents that Parliament now has lead directly to the heart of government. To @BorisJohnson & especially @michaelgove.

AggregateIQ: the obscure Canadian tech firm and the Brexit data riddle

Documents released last week shed more light on the puzzle of the company’s links to Cambridge Analytica

Carole CadwalladrSat 31 Mar 2018 16.00 EDT

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video
‘Find Christopher Wylie.” That instruction – 13 months ago – came from the very first ex-Cambridge Analytica employee I met. He was unequivocal. Wylie would have answers to the two questions that were troubling me most. He could tell me about Facebook. And he would know about Canada.

What Christopher Wylie knows about Facebook, the world now knows. Facebook certainly knows – its market value is down $100bn. But the Canadian connection remains more elusive. What it is. Why it matters. And why it triggered my search for Wylie.

We heard from him at a session of the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee that the BBC parliamentary correspondent Mark D’Arcy described as “by a distance, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in parliament”. Perhaps not because of Wylie’s arresting appearance – though there was that too, his pink hair offset with a suit for the occasion – but because of what he said: a four-hour account of his involvement with Cambridge Analytica that he backed up with documents, a selection of which the committee published two days later.

It was a moment that marked a significant milestone in our coverage of this story. Because back on 13 May 2017 we received a letter from Squire Patton Boggs, lawyers for Cambridge Analytica, that set out their intention to issue a “pre-action protocol for defamation” – though its immediate concern was regarding an “article that is proposed to be published this weekend”.

Seven fraught hours later, we published an article headlined “Follow the data” . It was centred on one particular document. A document that linked Cambridge Analytica to a small, seemingly inconsequential firm based above an optician’s shop in Victoria, Canada. A document that was among the stash of those released by the DCMS committee on Thursday.

The firm – AggregateIQ – didn’t appear inconsequential. In the words of Vote Leave’s campaign manager, Dominic Cummings, it played a crucial role in the Brexit campaign. For more than a year, a quote from Cummings – “we couldn’t have done it without them” – was emblazoned across AIQ’s website. Words that disappeared from the website a week ago, removed after we submitted our questions to the firm.

The first major article I wrote about Cambridge Analytica last February outlined a relationship between Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign and Cambridge Analytica and the relationships with Robert Mercer, the firm’s main investor, and its shareholder and vice-president Steve Bannon. It kicked off an investigation by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. Then, a few days later, a reader from Canada got in touch. Did I know that the telephone number and address listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its Canadian office – SCL Canada – belonged to Zackary Massingham? Did I know that he was the chief executive of a company called AggregateIQ? A firm that had worked for Vote Leave? I didn’t.

Because Vote Leave was the official campaign. It was of a different order of importance to Farage’s Leave.EU. Vote Leave had been recognised by the Electoral Commission. It had been entrusted with taxpayers’ money. It was headed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – now both ministers in Theresa May’s government. And who are now seeing the scandal currently engulfing Cambridge Analytica arriving at their doorstep.

Last week we published the account of another whistleblower, Shahmir Sanni, and how he believed that Vote Leave senior officials took advantage of him and his friend, Darren Grimes, to ramp up their own spending. Vote Leave gave their campaign, BeLeave, £625,000 – but in November the Electoral Commission opened an investigation into it. The donation was legal only if BeLeave really was an independent organisation, operating separately. And Sanni had startling new evidence: he said it wasn’t. Sanni – the treasurer – wasn’t even allowed to get his train tickets refunded. Instead, the money was paid directly to AggregateIQ – the company that a year earlier I had found listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as SCL Canada.


The Brexit whistleblower: 'Not cheating is the core of what it means to be British' – video
The documents published last week finally make the legal connection between AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica public. The committee has published an intellectual property agreement between AIQ and SCL Elections – Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. There’s also a service agreement between the two firms that set out revenue-sharing clauses and payment details, an internal Cambridge Analytica staff list that names Massingham, and emails about work the two firms did together for John Bolton, the newly appointed national security adviser to Donald Trump. On 21 August 2014, Alex Tayler, the acting managing director for Cambridge Analytica, wrote to Jeff Silvester, co-founder of AggregateIQ, and said: “Personality Cluster information for the target voter segments for all 3 states (modelled for all voters of interest, not just Kogan sample/seeders).”

“Kogan” is Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University psychologist that Cambridge Analytica contracted to harvest Facebook data. And the “sample/seeders” are the individuals who Kogan’s company, GSR, paid to fill in personality surveys and allow access to their friends’ data.

Last week, AIQ sent us a legal letter. It said that AggregateIQ is not a direct part and/or the Canadian branch of Cambridge Analytica and that it has not been involved in the exploitation of Facebook data or otherwise been involved in any of the allegations of wrongdoing made against Cambridge Analytica. It did not secretly and unethically coordinate with Cambridge Analytica on the EU referendum. It did not share technology with Cambridge Analytica. It never represented itself as SCL Canada. The first it knew of its phone number being on the website was when the Observer reported it. And it is 100% Canadian-owned.

But Wylie told MPs that he had helped set up both Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ and that it was based in Canada, in his hometown of Victoria, because Silvester and Massingham, the directors, were friends. From Hansard: “They had new families, had just got a house, and it is not easy to just get up and move to a different country when you have young kids.

Screengrab taken from AIQ’s homepage.The words disappeared from the site a week ago.
Screengrab taken from AIQ’s homepage.The words disappeared from the site a week ago. Photograph: AggregateIQ
“The compromise was that a Canadian company would be set up … But the deal was that they would sign an intellectual property licence whereby all of the work that they were doing for the company would be assigned to SCL Group and they would trade as SCL Canada, but they set up a Canadian entity, and the legal name was AggregateIQ.”


Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Vote Leave 'cheating' may have swayed Brexit referendum – video
The same week, Gizmodo, a specialist tech site, published an article headlined “AggregateIQ created Cambridge Analytica’s Election Software and Here’s the Proof” based on research that a cybersecurity firm, UpGuard, had produced. Chris Vickery, the director of cyber-risk research at UpGuard, claimed they had found a repository of code that AggregateIQ left exposed online. The code suggested that it was AggregateIQ that had developed the Ripon platform – the software product that is the foundation of Cambridge Analytica’s technology.

This was part one of the AggregateIQ Files. The second part, which UpGuard published on Thursday, revealed code that suggested that AIQ had built websites and landing pages for Vote Leave, Veterans for Britain, the DUP, Change Britain and Gove 2016. These were all new claims. Last May, David Banks of Veterans for Britain told me it had engaged AIQ in the last weeks of the campaign after it had received a donation from Vote Leave, which it used for digital marketing. For Facebook ads. There was no mention of a website and the AIQ invoice for £100,000 it submitted to the Electoral Commission is for a “digital ad campaign”. The Observer could not reach Banks for comment.

The repository also appears to include code for landing pages for the DUP’s website. The AIQ invoice it submitted to the Electoral Commission, for £32,750.73, is for digital advertising, and a spokesman for Jeffrey Donaldson MP, whose name is on it, told the Observer: “AIQ did not build any pages for the DUP website at any point.”

Another of the sites in the repository appears to be for a campaign not previously associated with AIQ. Change Britain was a “grassroots campaign” with “1000s of volunteers who want to help make Brexit happen” led by Gisela Stuart, formerly Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and the chair of Vote Leave. Its code appears to contain details of a Vote Leave staff member’s email address. Stuart did not respond to questions about who had paid for or commissioned this site.

The final discovery in UpGuard’s AIQ find is code for a website for Gove 2016. This was the campaign Gove launched on 30 June, six days after the referendum result, to be leader of the Tory party. AIQ gained administrator access to the site the same day Gove turned on leadership candidate Boris Johnson and announced his own intention to run. When asked about the work AIQ did for Gove, a spokesman said: “The Gove 2016 campaign paid AIQ £2,720.46 in July to set up its website. The payment was authorised by the campaign manager and paid for from funds donated to the campaign. All campaign spending was fully declared to CCHQ as required under Conservative party leadership election rules.”

AIQ did not respond to inquiries about its work on the Gove 2016, Change Britain, DUP and Veterans for Britain websites, or the UpGuard report. Gove 2016 never went live – according to reports, the campaign failed to secure the domain, http://www.gove2016.co.uk. And a week later, Gove’s leadership bid was over.

Gove’s statement above wasn’t just given to the Observer, however. It found its way to the rightwing gossip site Guido Fawkes two days ago, in an apparent spoiler for this story.

It’s not a good look. But then, of the many questions being asked by the British authorities investigating Vote Leave – the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office – one must be: what did Gove know?

Sanni, the whistleblower who came forward last week to tell his story about the BeLeave donation, claims Gove knew everything. “Everyone associated with the campaign knew who Darren was,” he says. “Everybody congratulated us and knew what role we’d played. Michael Gove knew exactly how important we’d been. He’s a close friend of Dom Cummings. Of course he knew. Boris Johnson knew. Everybody knew.”

The building housing Cambridge Analytica’s office in central London.
The building housing Cambridge Analytica’s office in central London. Photograph: Hannah Mckay/Reuters
Cummings, the campaign mastermind behind Vote Leave, had worked as a special adviser to Gove when he was in the Department for Education. His fellow adviser was Henry de Zoete, the head of Vote Leave’s digital operations. This is a tight-knit group who have known each other for years. “The thing about Gove and Cummings is that they are friends,” says Sanni. “They hang out at each other’s houses. It’s a relationship that goes well beyond being colleagues.”

It was Cummings’s name – along with de Zoete’s – that was deleted from 140 files on a Google shared drive two weeks after the Electoral Commission opened an investigation last March. A drive that was set up by Vote Leave to share content with BeLeave and AIQ. Vote Leave says it acted “ethically, responsibly and legally in deleting any data”. Last week Cummings said of Sanni and Wylie: “I think they have lied to the Observer and its lawyers”.

But it is Gove, the co-convener of the campaign, along with Stuart, its chair, and Johnson, its figurehead, who need now to answer questions. It’s the proximity of Vote Leave’s activities to the heart of government that is the most troubling aspect of this. Gove and Johnson are Theresa May’s ministers. Two other Vote Leave directors implicated, Stephen Parkinson and Cleo Watson, are advisers to May. Watson said: “I absolutely deny the claims being levelled against me.” Parkinson said the allegations were “factually incorrect and misleading”.

Campaigns are forbidden by law from coordinating. Unless they declare spending jointly. None of these campaigns did. They were all separate. They were all separate – and all connected to AggregateIQ. Facebook would know, of course, if there was a common plan. But Facebook is a black unknowable box. And Mark Zuckerberg has, for the third time, turned down parliament’s request to answer questions on that and other issues.

A year ago, I was told that Christopher Wylie was the key to understanding AggregateIQ. To unravelling Cambridge Analytica’s Canadian connection. Last week, the week that marked the one-year countdown to Britain exiting the EU he told parliament about it in explicit detail. Now it is up to parliament. It is in possession of Cambridge Analytica’s and AIQ’s corporate documents. It supports a government that is intimately entwined in this. And how it negotiates those two irreconcilable facts may be a yardstick that future generations will come to measure it by.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... are_btn_tw

Because Theresa May’s government is right at the heart of this. Two government ministers @BorisJohnson & @michaelgove & two of the PM’s chief advisors, Stephen Parkinson & Cleo Watson.


Will Parliament hold @michaelgove to account? Will @DamianCollins committee call him to testify? Because @michaelgove, a minister of state, is caught right up in the middle of this.



So many questions for @michaelgove....



And @michaelgove knows this. He knows he’s in trouble. It’s why he tried to get ahead of the story by leaking a private email. To @GuidoFawkes! Yeah, Govey. That’ll do it. Totes innocence proven & confirmed



Why is fashion student @darrengrimes_ in the frame for the illegal Vote Leave overspending scheme? Or let’s put this another way. Who do you think is the power player here?



How did Vote Leave, BeLeave, the DUP, Veterans for Britain, @GiselaStuart & @michaelgove all find the same data firm? It’s 5,000 miles away. And it didn’t come up in any Google searches at the time. But! It is outside British jurisdiction...


And here they are. Published by Parliament this week. One of a number of docs that link AIQ, the firm at heart of Brexit, to Cambridge Analytica. Parliament now has this info. Question is: what’s it going to do about it?




If you’ve been following the Cambridge Analytica story unfold, today’s the day it leads to the heart of Theresa May’s government. What comes next is a test for Parliament. A test for Britain. Happy Easter.



Oh. And FYI. This isn’t a ‘riddle’. It’s a cover-up.


And yes! Here’s the Mail covering the story here...

Gove 'used Vote Leave data firm in secret bid to be PM'

The Tory leadership rift between Michael Gove and Boris Johnson was dramatically reignited last night by fresh claims about an alleged plot to ‘fix’ Brexit.

A whistleblower claimed that work had started on Mr Gove’s leadership campaign in June 2016 before the Cabinet Minister’s shock decision to knife Mr Johnson and run for leader himself.

The new allegations are made by Christopher Wylie, who has been at the centre of the global storm over claimed links between Facebook, secret data firms and the Brexit vote.

Electoral chiefs are investigating allegations that Mr Gove’s Vote Leave tried to dodge spending limits by paying money to a linked pro-Brexit group, which was then channelled to a Canadian company called AggregateIQ (AIQ).


The Tory leadership rift between Michael Gove and Boris Johnson (pictured the morning after the EU referendum) was reignited last night by fresh claims about an alleged plot to ‘fix’ Brexit

Mr Wylie claims:

AIQ had started to build Mr Gove’s campaign website in June 2016 while he was still publicly backing Mr Johnson;
Mr Gove must have been aware of the controversial £625,000 donation to BeLeave, a supposedly separate wing of the campaign.
Last night Mr Gove categorically denied that any work had been carried out on the website before he made his leadership announcement – or that he had any knowledge of the donation to BeLeave.

The suggestion that Mr Gove was already at work on his campaign before his announcement on June 30 will shock Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson, who only found out about Mr Gove’s betrayal two hours before he launched his own bid.

Mr Gove said he had ‘come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead’.

Mr Johnson’s allies described Mr Gove’s behaviour as ‘utter treachery’, and said they suspected he had intended all along to use the popular Mr Johnson to win the referendum vote before ambushing him at the last moment – described as the ‘cuckoo nest plot’.

One said at the time: ‘Gove is a **** who set this up from the start.’

Tory MP Nick Boles played a key role in the U-turn, switching his support from Mr Johnson to Mr Gove in the hours before Mr Gove’s bombshell announcement. It was Mr Boles, as Mr Gove’s campaign manager, who put through a payment of £2,720 to AIQ to pay for the website.

Electoral chiefs are investigating allegations that Vote Leave tried to dodge spending limits by paying money to a linked pro-Brexit group, which was then channelled to a Canadian company called AggregateIQ (AIQ)
Electoral chiefs are investigating allegations that Vote Leave tried to dodge spending limits by paying money to a linked pro-Brexit group, which was then channelled to a Canadian company called AggregateIQ (AIQ)

AIQ was paid almost £4 million by Vote Leave to run their social media campaign before also building Mr Gove’s website. The Electoral Commission is investigating whether the donation to BeLeave, run by 23-year-old fashion student Darren Grimes, was an attempt to dodge limits on campaign spending.

Mr Wylie, who exposed the data firm Cambridge Analytica’s plundering of private details from Facebook – and has also alleged close links between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica – told The Mail on Sunday last night that the Gove campaign website, which launched on July 1, would have needed several more days’ work on it in advance.

He said: ‘Michael Gove’s website was being worked on by an AIQ employee on June 30, but it would take a couple of days [before then] to set up a website like this.’

Mr Wylie said: ‘Michael Gove was co-convenor of the Vote Leave Campaign Committee which ran everything and met daily, and this was the single largest expenditure of the campaign. So do you think that committee would not discuss the largest single expenditure? Gove saw Darren in the office all the time, so it looks suspicious to me.’

Mr Wylie added: ‘The donation to BeLeave went to the same company [AIQ] which then built Gove’s campaign website.’

Last night a source in Mr Johnson’s camp said: ‘We always thought that Michael was much more heavily involved in the inner workings of the Vote Leave operation.’

Mr Gove, now Environment Secretary, has since spoken of his regret at the way he treated Mr Johnson. They have cautiously reformed their political alliance – including writing a joint letter to Prime Minister Theresa May last year urging her to back a ‘hard’ Brexit.

Mr Wylie’s claims were echoed by fellow whistleblower Mr Shahmir Sanni, who worked on the BeLeave campaign. Mr Sanni was last week embroiled in a sex smear row with one of Mrs May’s aides over the alleged Brexit plot, after Mr Sanni tried to implicate Mrs May’s chief of staff, Vote Leave campaigner Stephen Parkinson, in the alleged breach of spending limits.

Mr Parkinson, denying all wrongdoing, revealed that he used to be in a gay relationship with Mr Sanni – which Mr Sanni said amounted to an ‘outing’ which had placed his relatives in Pakistan in danger.

A whistleblower claimed that work had started on Mr Gove’s leadership campaign in June 2016 before the Cabinet Minister’s shock decision to knife Mr Johnson and run for leader himself

Mr Sanni said: ‘Michael Gove sat on the campaign committee which made the decision about this donation and received regular reports from the finance committee. Added to which he used AIQ for his leadership bid to make the website.

‘Michael Gove knew who Darren was and congratulated him after the result on the work that BeLeave had done. Gove was fully aware that BeLeave was an outreach group of Vote Leave. Every time I was in the [Vote Leave] office I would see him there.’

The row came as a new poll showed a majority of voters would back a second Brexit vote if evidence emerged of ‘cheating’. The YouGov survey for the pro-remain Best For Britain campaign found that 49 per cent would support a new vote, with 30 per cent against.

A spokesman for Mr Gove said: ‘Anyone who claims you can’t build a holding page for a website in 24 hours hasn’t got a clue what they’re talking about. The start of Michael’s leadership campaign has been widely documented… everyone knows his decision was made after Andrea Leadsom withdrew her support late on June 29.

‘It is false to claim the campaign committee discussed donations – this claim is made by two people who never attended a campaign committee and have no evidence whatsoever for their allegations. This is nothing more than smear and innuendo.’

Brexit data gurus 'faked voters' email accounts'

By Nick Craven for The Mail on Sunday

The secretive Canadian IT firm at the centre of the Vote Leave spending and donation controversy was also involved in an election scandal in its home town last month.

There was uproar when it emerged that AggregateIQ (AIQ) created more than 1,300 ‘fake’ email accounts in the contest for the Liberal Party leadership in the province of British Columbia.

The data firm, hired to work for candidate Todd Stone, created email addresses in bulk attached to a domain name they set up to be given to 1.349 new party members the Stone campaign had signed up, mainly non-English speaking Chinese who had no email accounts of their own. Party officials stepped in when they realised that if Stone’s campaign controlled the email accounts, rather than the members, they could theoretically also rig the votes in the online poll.

The vacant headquarters for Aggregate IQ in downtown Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

A source in the Liberal Party – whose leader Justin Trudeau is Canadian Prime Minister – told the Mail on Sunday: ‘It was ham-fisted and looked bad, certainly creating the impression that something was underhand, even if it wasn’t.’

The row broke out days before the vote and rivals called for Stone to be disqualified. He lost anyway.

Since AIQ was set up in 2014 it has been based in British Columbia’s capital Victoria, but there was little sign of the firm last week. Its headquarters was deserted. The landlord said it suddenly left two months ago.

Its website had carried a quote from Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings saying: ‘We couldn’t have done it without them [AIQ].’

That has disappeared. Now it says: ‘AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates.’
https://dailym.ai/2GqYapV

And here’s the email - published by Parliament - that shows Jeff Silvester of AIQ & Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica working jointly on the Facebook data. They’ve both denied this. Repeatedly. So, here’s a q. Did Vote Leave have access to it?? Or models derived from it?


https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/stat ... 0424948737

[seemslikeadream]

Cambridge Analytica: Nigeria, Kenyan opposition to probe firm's alleged role in their elections

Did Cambridge Analytica impact Kenya's election?

Nairobi, Kenya (CNN)Officials in Nigeria and Kenya are looking into whether data-crunching firm Cambridge Analytica tried to interfere with elections in their countries by organizing rallies and orchestrating whole campaigns to sway public opinion away from certain candidates.

Leaders in both nations vowed to drag the data-crunching firm into court if evidence supports their claims. Their tough talk adds to mounting global fury over the British company, which also was hired by Donald Trump's campaign and tried to influence American voters in 2016 using information gleaned from 50 million Facebook users.

Cambridge Analytica offers new defense of 2016 practices

Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate, SCL Elections, did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment about the African leaders' claims. The firm suspended its chief executive amid the US election allegations but denies any wrongdoing.

In Nigeria, criminal prosecutions could follow if Cambridge Analytica is found to have interfered with elections, said Garba Shehu, a spokesman for President Muhammadu Buhari.

A government committee is probing claims that SCL Elections organized anti-election rallies to dissuade opposition supporters from voting in 2007, Shehu said, according to Reuters. The panel also will examine claims that Buhari's personal data was hacked in 2015, when he was an opposition candidate for president, he said.
"We don't want to leave it open that Cambridge Analytica could have interfered with these elections," Shehu told CNN. "The committee will scrutinize reports and allegations made against Cambridge Analytica. The government may prosecute, if the reports are found to be true. We just want to take lessons from what happened."

Kenyan opposition wants answers


In Kenyan politics, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections was filmed telling undercover reporters for the UK's Channel 4 news that his company managed two of President Uhuru Kenyatta's campaigns.
"The Kenyatta campaign, which we ran in 2013 and 2017 for Kenyatta, we have rebranded the entire party twice, written the manifesto, done research, analysis, messaging," Mark Turnbull said. "I think we wrote all the speeches, and we staged the whole thing -- so just about every element of this candidate."


The company also claimed it surveyed 47,000 people in Kenya in 2013.

Since revelations surfaced of Cambridge Analytica's efforts to influence the US election, opposition voices in Kenya have called for an investigation, and opposition leader Raila Odinga said he will sue the company.

"Finally, the world has woken up (to) the fact that there is a real danger posed to democracy, not only in Kenya," Odinga told CNN. "This was really the extreme end of negative campaigning, and it was so intensive, and I think also capital intensive."

"Somebody needs to take responsibility for this. Somebody needs to be made to answer," he added.


Odinga was the subject of a video that went viral during Kenyan elections last year titled "The Real Raila Odinga," which imagined a dystopia in 2020 with Odinga as president and in which "whole communities and tribes are removed from their homes."

The video was made by Texas-based Harris Media, which also worked on the campaigns of Trump and far-right groups in Europe, according to the London-based charity Privacy International.

Harris Media did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment.

In the first round of last year's elections, courts nullified Kenyatta's victory over Odinga over "irregularities and illegalities." Kenyatta went on to win re-election.
New information about Cambridge Analytica, however, "puts the results into question, the whole election infrastructure," Sen. James Orengo told CNN. "The elections which were held last year must be fully audited. I think we'll see the footprints of Cambridge Analytica, and I think that is why they're advertising Kenya as a success story."

'A dark manipulative arch'


But a spokesman for Kenya's ruling Jubilee Party downplayed the British data firm's involvement in the election campaign. Raphael Tuju, the party's secretary-general, told CNN it hired SCL "to do analysis of focus group discussions. They did demonstrate to us that they had that kind of expertise. That was it."

Embattled data firm sent foreign workers to US campaigns
Tuju, speaking at the party's headquarters in Nairobi, said the party will not press Cambridge Analytica on the Channel 4 report.

"We really don't have time for that," he told CNN.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica describes its work in the 2013 Kenya election campaign as "based on the electorate's real needs (jobs) and fears (tribal violence)."

Elections in Kenya are tense, and in 2007, more than 1,100 people were killed and more than 660,000 were forcibly displaced during Kenya's worst electoral violence.

Kenyan newspaper publishes obituary for opposition figure -- who isn't dead
One commentator said companies like Cambridge Analytica play with lives when they "cling to destructive narratives."

"A negative narrative can flip to violence quickly if it follows a dark manipulative arch," said John Githongo, a former permanent secretary for governance and ethics in Kenya and a founder of the social movement Inuka Kenya Trust.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/africa/n ... index.html

Cambridge Analytica and the Perils of Psychographics

Sue Halpern

In September, 2016, Alexander Nix, the C.E.O. of Cambridge Analytica, the data and messaging company that was working at the time with Donald Trump’s supposedly flagging Presidential campaign, explained his firm’s work like this: “If you know the personality of the people you’re targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups.” The fancy term for this is psychographic targeting. A few weeks later, Trump won the Presidency, against all odds and predictions, sending political operatives and journalists scrambling for explanations. “There was a huge demand internally for people to see how we did it,” Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s former business-development director, told the Guardian last Friday. “Everyone wanted to know: past clients, future clients.”

Whether Cambridge Analytica’s targeting work actually swayed the outcome of the election has been a subject of debate since then—because the firm’s record is spotty, psychographic targeting in political campaigns is a relatively new concept, and it has not yet been definitely shown that C.A. successfully used these methods on behalf of Trump’s campaign.

Christopher Wylie, the former C.A. employee who recently came forward to detail how the company improperly acquired personal data from fifty million Facebook users, has said that the company used that data to create a “psychological warfare mindfuck tool.” But Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher who provided the company with the Facebook data, has described it as “not that accurate at the individual level.” Kogan’s conclusion tracks with research that has been done by the U.K.-based Online Privacy Foundation, whose research director, Chris Sumner, recently told me that psychographics are much more accurate for groups rather than individual people.

Earlier this week, Chris Vickery, the director of cyber-risk research at the cyber-security firm UpGuard, announced on Twitter that he had found the code used by Cambridge Analytica for its election work. It was located in a publicly accessible online repository maintained by an employee of a small software-development firm in British Columbia called AggregateIQ (A.I.Q.) that was under contract with the S.C.L. Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. This code provided a look at the internal mechanics of what the company had been doing.

The software uncovered by Vickery appears to have been first created in 2014, when Cambridge Analytica was working on a number of midterm election campaigns, and used at least until the period in the 2016 cycle when the company was working for Senator Ted Cruz during his Presidential primary campaign. According to Vickery’s initial report, the A.I.Q. repository includes “a set of sophisticated applications, data management programs, advertising trackers, and information databases that collectively could be used to target and influence individuals through a variety of methods, including automated phone calls, emails, political websites, volunteer canvassing, and Facebook ads.” Its core instrument, which its authors called the “Database of Truth,” was designed to gather and integrate voter-registration data, consumer data, polling data, and data “from third-parties”—it is possible that the fifty million profiles of unwitting Facebook users that Cambridge Analytica acquired would fall under this final, vague category. Vickery is currently combing thousands of pages of code to see how, or if, it might have used people’s psychological touch points.

While Vickery looks for proof of C.A.’s psychographic work, Kimberly Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County, Illinois, has filed a civil suit against both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook for deceptive business practices, claiming, among other things, that “armed with swaths of misappropriated data, Cambridge Analytica created ‘psychographic profiles’ on every American adult, which it claims helped it have significant influence on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” The suit takes for granted that C.A. engaged in psychographic targeting, and argues that psychographic methods bypass “individuals’ cognitive defenses by appealing directly to their emotions, using increasingly segmented and sub-grouped personality type designation and precisely targeted messaging based on those designations.”

The question remains whether this kind of targeting can actually influence people’s behavior. Last summer, at the DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas, Sumner, who has been studying variants of this question for the last seven years through his work at the Online Privacy Foundation, presented the group’s latest research.

Sumner and his research partner, Matthew Shearing, used survey questions—along with a process, similar to one developed at Cambridge University, that enables social scientists to find subjects based on Facebook’s understanding of their psychological makeup—to evaluate 2,412 people’s propensity for a single underlying psychological tendency, in this case authoritarianism. They then created advertisements that either advocated or opposed state-sanctioned mass surveillance. An ad that read, “Terrorists—Don’t let them hide online. Say yes to mass surveillance,” with a picture of a mangled, bombed-out buildings appealed to people with higher authoritarian tendencies. An ad that said, “Do you really have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide? Say no to mass surveillance,” alongside a photo of Anne Frank, appealed to those on the low end of the authoritarian spectrum.

Then Sumner and Shearing flipped the script. Respondents with an authoritarian bent reacted positively to an ad with the words “They fought for your freedom—Don’t give it away. Say no to surveillance” superimposed over a photo of a D-Day landing. And those who would otherwise be described as anti-authoritarian were swayed to support surveillance by an ad that listed a host of bad things, including human trafficking, cyber crime, terrorism, and money laundering, with the words “Crime doesn’t stop where the Internet starts. Say yes to surveillance.” By rewording the ads to appeal to the respondents’ underlying psychological disposition, the researchers were able to influence and change their opinions. According to Sumner, “Using psychographic targeting, we reached Facebook audiences with significantly different views on surveillance and demonstrated how targeting . . . affected return on marketing investment.” Psychological messaging, they said, worked.

Facebook has come to this conclusion, too. As Cook County’s lawsuit points out, Facebook has undertaken a number of research projects—without the consent of its users—aimed at understanding how the platform might be used to influence user behavior. Most famously, there was its mood-control experiment, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in 2014, in which the company manipulated its news feed so that seven hundred thousand of its users saw primarily positive or primarily negative content. The goal was to find out if “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” The company found that they could. Even more germane, in 2010, Facebook successfully showed that it could influence voter turnout. These were not purely academic inquiries. The Cook County lawsuit also points out that Facebook is more valuable to both its business and political clients if it can demonstrate that it can be used “to manipulate its users into making decisions that they want them to make.”

The lawsuit seeks damages on behalf of the residents of Illinois, and if the court accepts its demand for a jury trial, discovery promises the possibility of exposing truths belied by promotional material and obscured in software. It may seem quixotic to sue a slippery outfit like Cambridge Analytica or a behemoth like Facebook. But it is no more quixotic than a handful of computer programmers endeavoring to upend liberal democracy with nothing more than strings of zeroes and ones.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... hographics

[American Dream]

Cambridge Analytica and the Death of the Voter

The anxiety that swirls around Cambridge Analytica reveals a deeper crisis in the private, individualist conception of democracy.




The idea that electoral power should cohere in individuals rather than groups continues to be the dominant way of thinking about politics. We associate democracy with the expression of millions of isolated votes, arrived at independently, and conducted in secret.

We still live with this conception of politics, but it is coming under intolerable pressure. Theorists from various different disciplines have long known that people’s desires and preferences are shaped by massive forces beyond their control. The essential problem of false consciousness for Marxists stems from this tension. Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated models of voter behaviour can predict, based on address, income, race, gender, religion, and countless other traits, who any individual will vote for. The idea that the sovereign mind of the voter may not be as sovereign as we might hope is instinctive, but is nothing new.

What is new in the debates that have emerged in the last few years about the effect of “fake news," of targeted stories aimed at millions based on data breaches, and of Russian intervention in Western elections is the fear that people’s politics are being shaped, not by vast social processes or by facets of their identity, but by deliberate and invisible forces. By obtaining your data companies like Cambridge Analytica, some worry, know you better than you know yourself, and can rule your mind without your knowledge.

It is extremely unlikely that either “fake news” or Russian interference had a tangible impact on the 2016 presidential election or the EU referendum in Britain. On the contrary, it seems clear that these claims offer a deus ex machina, designed to avoid asking difficult questions about the implosion of a neoliberal settlement that can no longer command political consent. What is striking, however, is how the present anxiety about firms such as Cambridge Analytica has distant echoes of the century in which the individual political subject was born. In fears over the manipulation of voters by secret algorithms controlled by nefarious and invisible agents you see a re-emergence of something like the “corruption” of the nineteenth century, the intoxicating bribery of candidates or the social pressure of the crowd. The free thinking political subject, quietly forged in nineteenth century polling booths, is under pressure like never before.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3720-c ... -the-voter

[seemslikeadream]

I'm seeing a pattern here

How Cambridge Analytica’s parent company helped ‘man of action’ Rodrigo Duterte win the 2016 Philippines election
Strategic Communications Laboratories’ website said in the run up to the vote, its client was perceived as kind and honourable, but it rebranded the candidate as a strong, no-nonsense man of action to win
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 04 April, 2018, 6:31pm

A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower has said firm had done “extensive” work in Indian politics in the past decade, but would not say if Prime Minister Narendra Modi was involved. Photo: Reuters

Strategic Communications Laboratories, or SCL Group, which owns the political consultancy at the centre of a Facebook data harvesting scandal linked to the 2016 US presidential race, boasted on its website that it helped get Duterte elected in 2016 by rebranding him as a tough crime fighter.
The company removed the website content about the 2016 Philippine election, however, archived versions are still visible on the internet. Though SCL did not identify its Philippine client by name, the brief pointed clearly to former Davao City mayor Duterte, who was one of the six candidates in the 2016 race.
Cambridge Analytica in Asia: modern-day colonialism, or empathy in the digital age?

“In the run up to national elections the incumbent client was widely perceived as both kind and honourable, qualities his campaign team thought were potentially election-winning,” the SCL web content said. “But SCL’s research showed that many groups within the electorate were more likely to be swayed by qualities such as toughness and decisiveness. SCL used the cross-cutting issue of crime to rebrand the client as a strong, no-nonsense man of action, who would appeal to the true values of the voters.”

A screen capture of SCL’s website shows that their client should be promoted as a ‘no-nonsense man of action’, a clear reference to Rodrigo Duterte. Photo: Raissa Robles
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte won the 2016 presidential election. It has surfaced that he used controversial political campaign advisory firm Strategic Communications Laboratories during his successful bid. Photo: Reuters

SCL still lists the Philippines as an area of operations, but no longer describes what it does there.
But a year before the 2016 Philippine election, a key SCL senior executive gave a rather revealing talk at the National Press Club (NPC) of the Philippines. He was Alexander Nix, who last month was suspended as chief executive at SCL affiliate Cambridge Analytica, the firm accused of siphoning 50 million Facebook users’ data to aid Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign.
NPC president at the time Joel Egco, now undersecretary of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), covered Nix’s visit to Manila in May, 2015.
How Cambridge Analytica exploited Facebook users’ data, and why it’s a big deal

He told the South China Morning Post that at the time, he did not know SCL was operating in the Philippines, nor did he have any “inkling” that Duterte would become a client of the firm.
“I was still a member of the press,” Egco said, insisting he was not linked to Duterte’s presidential bid at the time.
“I don’t even remember his [Nix’s] face any more … But what I remember is that I was taken aback when he said that mobile phone texting is going to affect the presidential elections.”
Watch: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s data collection methods

Alexander Nix, former chief executive of Cambridge Analytica. Photo: Washington Post
In Egco’s story, published in the The Manila Times in May 2015 and titled “Text, emails to decide future polls – expert”, Nix provides a rare glimpse into SCL’s clandestine activities in the Philippines and potentially dozens of other countries.
We need to make use of behavioural drivers which will ultimately influence the voter once he or she is in a polling placeALEXANDER NIX
“Election campaigning will never be the same again due to the advent of cutting-edge technology,” the SCL executive at the time was quoted.
“The traditional and conventional methods that have been employed through all the elections in the last century may still work, but they will be unlike new strategies and tactics that are products of behavioural micro-targeting, psychographic profiling, predictive analytics and many other modern tools.”
Nix boasted that SCL had seen a “100 per cent success rate” in more than 100 election campaigns in Asia, Africa, India and western Europe, and said the firm’s methods could get a “fundamentally flawed” candidate elected by maximising their “likeable traits”.
“Even if you have just one staggering likeable trait, given the right combination of strategies, you could win an election against a very formidable opponent.”

He also said in 2015 that SCL was “helping the Republican Party in the United States in regaining the White House from the Democrats”.

A screen capture SCL website shows campaigns it worked on. Photo: Raissa Robles
Screen capture from SCL website shows the company’s ‘OpCentre’ in Thailand, where it determined voter behaviour. Photo: Raissa Robles
Although Nix did not mention Facebook in the story, he did say the company was able to reach voters through social media and gadgets such as mobile phones and personal computers. And unlike traditional polling methods, Nix said SCL used “psychographics” to change opinions.
“We need to make use of behavioural drivers which will ultimately influence the voter once he or she is in a polling place … Technology can be more effective in getting straightly to them and change their behaviour toward something.”
Two steps we can take to break up Facebook’s monopoly on our data

The SCL website also used to claim testimonials from former heads of state, including late Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, whom it quoted as saying: “I am indebted to SCL for their strategic management of my election success.”
Likewise, former Thai prime minister Chuan Leekpai was quoted by SCL as saying: “Winning an election is about choosing your battles carefully. SCL made clear those conflicts that could be won, those that could not, and those that had to be hard fought for.”
Regarding its Thai operations, SCL explained that via “the world’s largest electoral campaign OpCentre” it was able to “determine Thai voter behaviour down to the constituency level”.
Leekpai is now being eyed as a possible contender for prime minister.
http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast ... man-action

Carole Cadwalladr
‏

There are people being murdered in this video: macheted to death, burned alive.
It was made by Cambridge Analytica. And distributed by AggregateIQ - the Canadian firm @vote_leave used in Brexit. To scare voters.

Cambridge Analytica used violent video to try to influence Nigerian election

Whistleblower says firm directed AggregateIQ to target voters with Islamophobic video in 2015

Carole CadwalladrWed 4 Apr 2018 09.40 EDT

Cambridge Analytica sought to influence the Nigerian presidential election in 2015 by using graphically violent imagery to portray a candidate as a supporter of sharia law who would brutally suppress dissenters and negotiate with militant Islamists, a video passed to British MPs reveals.

The Guardian has obtained the video, which has graphic scenes of violence from Nigeria’s past. In testimony to the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee last week, the whistleblower Christopher Wylie told MPs: “[The video was distributed] in Nigeria with the sole intent of intimidating voters. It included content where people were being dismembered, where people were having their throats cut and bled to death in a ditch. They were being burned alive. There was incredibly anti-Islamic, threatening messages portraying Muslims as violent.”

Wylie also said Cambridge Analytica directed AggregateIQ (AIQ), the Canadian digital services firm that worked for Vote Leave during Britain’s EU referendum, to target voters with the video during the Nigerian presidential campaign.

Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, has now handed the material to MPs. Giving testimony last week, he said: “Cambridge Analytica sent AggregateIQ the video after they [CA] got banned from several online ad networks because the graphic nature of the content violated the terms of service. AIQ was quite freaked out about it. It’s a very disturbing video. They told Cambridge Analytica that. They called it ‘the murder video’.”

In his testimony Wylie said: “AIQ is the firm that’s right at the heart of the official Vote Leave campaign – one-third of all leave spending went through it – and this shows them working closely with Cambridge Analytica to distribute violent, divisive Islamophobic material that should be nowhere near an election campaign.” There is no suggestion that AIQ was involved in the production of the video.

Cambridge Analytica was hired by a Nigerian billionaire to run a campaign in support of Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, and the video was targeted at his Muslim opponent, Muhammadu Buhari, who went on to win the election. There is no suggestion that Jonathan was aware of the campaign.

The anti-Buhari video imagines a future in which he is president and sharia law has been imposed. “Coming to Nigeria on February 15th 2015,” the voiceover says in the manner of a trailer for a Hollywood movie. “Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all.” It poses the question: “What would Nigeria look like if sharia were imposed by Buhari?” It suggests he would strike a deal with the Islamist militant group Boko Haram that would be “a pact with the devil”. The video also suggests “Buhari will punish all who speak against the regime” and that “women will be veiled”. It ends by saying: “You can stop this movie becoming real.”

Another former Cambridge Analytica employee who worked on the campaign said: “It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in Buhari regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting. People were working on it in Cambridge Analytica’s office. They’d be sitting there eating their lunch and editing this incredibly graphic and disturbing material.”The video will be seen as further evidence of dirty tricks that Cambridge Analytica employed in the campaign. Last month the Guardian revealed that during the Nigerian election campaign Cambridge Analytica was offered material from Israeli hackers who had accessed private email accounts of two politicians there.

Former Cambridge Analytica employees described how the hackers passed a thumb drive of hacked material relating to Buhari to them in Cambridge Analytica’s offices and they were directed by Alexander Nix, its chief executive, and Brittany Kaiser, a senior director, to search Buhari’s personal emails for compromising material that could be used to smear him. The material included private medical information that employees say was leaked to the press.

The video separately demonstrates the ties between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, the firm that its parent company SCL Elections employed. Last week the DCMS committee published documents that link Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections with AIQ, including a contract, a service agreement and an intellectual property agreement that was first revealed in the Observer a year ago.

AggregateIQ is part of a current Electoral Commission investigation into a donation of £625,000 that Vote Leave made to a youth outreach group, BeLeave, which was paid directly to the Canadian firm and it is the focus of allegations made by a second whistleblower, Shahmir Sanni.

AggregateIQ did not respond to previous Guardian inquiries about the video, but said: “AIQ provides digital advertising, web and software development services to third parties. It is completely independent of Mr Wylie, CA and SCL.”

It added: “AIQ is and has always been 100% Canadian owned and operated … the services it provided to Vote Leave were in accordance with instructions given by Vote Leave.” There is no suggestion that AggregateIQ unethically coordinated with Cambridge Analytica on the EU referendum campaign.

A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said: “You are referring to Chris Wylie’s comments before a select committee which included speculation and a serious misrepresentation of the facts. We are, however, taking all allegations about possible unethical practices in the past very seriously and will investigate.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... are_btn_tw

This was violent voter suppression. It was intended to incite Islamophobia. And it connects Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ. The video has been submitted to parliament. And it's too violent to publish in full.



It was the same campaign in which Cambridge Analytica worked alongside AggregateIQ & illegal computer hackers who stole the now president of Nigeria's emails. These are the companies at the heart of the Leave referendum campaigns.

Cambridge Analytica's ruthless bid to sway the vote in Nigeria

Carole CadwalladrWed 21 Mar 2018 15.00 EDT
Still terrified witnesses paint a shocking picture of how far a western firm will go to win an election

Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan
A rich supporter of Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan hired SCL for the 2015 elections. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
If Britain hadn’t voted to leave the EU, and Trump hadn’t won the US election, it’s unlikely anyone outside Nigeria would have given a second thought to what went on during its presidential election campaign three years ago.

But the 20/20 vision of hindsight casts a very different light on the events of early 2015, and a campaign that now seems to eerily prefigure what happened in the US a year later. Many of the same characters, some of the same tactics.

At the heart of it all – data analytics company, SCL – the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. It had been hired by a rich Nigerian who supported the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan.

“It was the kind of campaign that was our bread and butter,” says one ex-employee. “We’re employed by a billionaire who’s panicking at the idea of a change of government and who wants to spend big to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

This was a standard variation on what SCL had done around the world for 30 years – this time, with a twist. Weaponising information to harm an opponent was standard methodology.

It was a methodology honed and developed in the company’s defence and military work – the fifth dimension of warfare, defined by the US military as “information operations”.


Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video
What was new, or at least new to those employees who have now spoken out, was bringing these techniques to the company’s election work.

Seven individuals with close knowledge of the Nigeria campaign have described how Cambridge Analytica worked with people they believed were Israeli computer hackers.

The sources – who spoke to the Observer over many months – said the company was looking for “kompromat” on Muhammadu Buhari – at the time, leader of the opposition.

They said the hackers offered Cambridge Analytica access to private information about Buhari.

Their testimony paints an extraordinary picture of how far a western company would contemplate going in an effort to undermine the democratic process in a country that already struggles to provide free and fair elections.

Their claims are disputed by the company, which insists it did not take possession of or use any personal information for any purpose and did not use any “hacked or stolen data”.

The company confirmed, however, that it had been hired to provide “advertising and marketing services in support of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign”.

That work seems to have come about through Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica, who would go on to play a public role at the launch of Nigel Farage’s Leave.eu campaign, and a senior strategist on the Trump campaign.

Regarded by colleagues as a prolific networker, in December 2014 she was introduced to a Nigerian oil billionaire who wanted to fund a covert campaign to support Jonathan.

The billionaire wanted total discretion.

An ex-employee said: “[Kaiser] got a phone call. It was just before Christmas and she flew out to meet them in Washington DC. It was all a bit ridiculous. It was only six to eight weeks before the election and they were looking to spend nearly $2m.”

The election was a big deal. At stake, the future of the most populous country in Africa, and potential access to its lucrative oil reserves. The sitting president was favourite to win, though Buhari was doing unexpectedly well.

Not least because his team had hired AKPD, once the firm of former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod, which was pushing a slick, social media heavy Obama-esque message of hope.

“There were a lot of scared millionaires worried that Buhari would get in. It was all very last-minute. A team flew out to Abuja and put together a communications campaign. It was a straightforward, normal comms campaign in most respects,” the employee said.

Most but not all respects. The Observer has obtained an astonishing and disturbing video that Cambridge Analytica used in the campaign.

“Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015,” the voiceover says in the manner of a trailer for a Hollywood movie.

“Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all.” And then it poses the question: “What would Nigeria look like if sharia were imposed by Buhari?”

Its answer to that question is certainly dark. And scary. It’s also graphically, brutally, violent. One minute and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria’s troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack.

There are scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in. A former contractor said: “It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in Buhari regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting.”

If Buhari wins, the film warns: women would wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced. And the inference is, you may be macheted to death.

It wasn’t just videos spreading fear. The Cambridge Analytica campaign team in Nigeria were jumpy too.

“It felt risky, being there. There were various points when we were told we were in danger.” And in the Abuja hotel to which the team was confined in early 2015, rumours abounded.

The tales are Graham Greene-esque. The hotel was where slick western consultants, including a team from the now disgraced Bell Pottinger, partied with their Nigerian counterparts. Mingling among them, western intelligence operatives - state backed, or privately commissioned, nobody was quite sure.

And then there were the meetings: three sources have told the Guardian about one that took place between Cambridge Analytica employees and two people they were told were Israeli intelligence operatives.

“There was a two-hour meeting that took place in the hotel lobby between two senior campaign members and Israeli intelligence. After which they swept our hotel rooms for listening devices and said they would switch out our phones. The story we were told was that there were intelligence agents from a number of different countries, including Israel and France, who were supporting Goodluck Jonathan and helping the campaigns.”

There is no suggestion that Jonathan was aware of or implicated in this support. Another employee said: “Basically the Israelis didn’t want [Buhari] to win.”

Other employees questioned whether they were “real” Israeli intelligence operatives, or Israeli private contractors.

A few weeks later, as the campaign was drawing to a close, there was another meeting at Cambridge Analytica’s London office.

An expert had flown in from Israel with a laptop, sources say.

And Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s now suspended CEO, and Kaiser, asked employees to take a thumb drive and download the contents on to their own computers.

The content was private emails and the information, they were told, related to Buhari’s financial and medical records.

One employee who was present at the London meeting said he had initially assumed the visiting expert was Mossad or Israeli intelligence passing on what he called “legtimate information”.

But he began to realise this wasn’t the case, he said, when he saw the reaction of his colleagues. One of them had “freaked out”, he said. “He was like, ‘What the fuck? I don’t want anything to do with this.’”

The witnesses are clear – at least in their own minds. The information they were shown had come from hackers.

Back in Nigeria, the team still on the ground found out what was going on from their colleagues in London. There was more “freaking out”. This time with live, pressing concerns.

“They were fucking scared,” said a colleague who spoke to them while they were in the country. The campaign fixer, the person with local knowledge who navigated them through the ins and outs of Nigerian politics, made it clear to them: they needed to get out of the country right away.

Cambridge Analytica had put them all in danger, they said. If opposition supporters found out, there was no saying what might happen.

One member of the team missed his flight and instead of asking the office to re-book it, he got the first fight out – to Dubai – and put it on his credit card. “Everyone just wanted to get out as soon as possible.”

A spokesman for the company said its team remained in country throughout the original campaigning period had “left in accordance with the company’s campaign plan”.

“Team members were regularly briefed about security concerns prior to and during deployment and measures were taken to ensure the team’s safety throughout.”

There are multiple wider political questions about what went on in the Nigerian election of 2015 and the role western powers played. Whether western political campaigners taking lucrative foreign contracts are contributing to the democratic framework of developing countries – or helping to destroy them. If they’re experimenting with methods and techniques that they later re-import back to our more developed democracies.

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who spoke to the Observer, called it “post-colonial blowback”.

“The west found a way of firehosing disinformation into weak and vulnerable democracies. And now this has been turned back on us. This really is about our chickens coming home to roost.”

Another said: “Everything the company did after the Mercers got involved was about refining a set of techniques that they would go on to use in the US elections. These campaigns in other countries were experiments. They worked out how to harvest data and weaponise it. And they got steadily better at it.”

And what comes across most strongly, the sources say, is how little thought, if any, the senior directors in London had given to their employees and colleagues who became caught up in the activities, many of whom were in their early to mid-20s.

One member of staff who met the Israelis in the office on another occasion described them as “special forces” types. He said: “They were cliche alpha males with a certain intellect. Looked military, very composed. They looked like they could beat the crap out of you.”

Three years on, there is still stress in some of their voices when they recount these stories. Stress and fear and anger – about the danger they put in, and the lack of care shown toward them, the morally compromising position they were put in, the lack of knowledge they had about what sort of the company they would be working for when they took their jobs.

It’s why, despite the personal risks, so many of them agreed to speak.

“When I took that job, I did not sign up to any of this,” said one. Three years on, he is still angry and shocked and fearful. “You don’t know what this company is capable of,” he said.

In a statement, SCL Elections, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, confirmed it had been hired in December 2014 in support of the Jonathan campaign.

“We can confirm that SCL Elections was hired in December 2014 to provide advertising and marketing services in support of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign.”

Asked specifically about the meetings in which staff described being asked to transfer personal information that they believed had been hacked, the firm said: “During an election campaign, it is normal for SCL Elections to meet with vendors seeking to provide services as a subcontractor.

“SCL Elections did not take possession of or use any personal information from such individuals for any purposes. SCL Elections does not use ‘hacked’ or ‘stolen’ data.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... are_btn_tw

Vote Leave, BeLeave, Veterans for Britain & the DUP all used AIQ. & also we now know @GiselaStuart & @michaelgove. Do they condone violent Islamophobia & voter suppression

[Grizzly]

WOW! What a dark and unmitigated monstrosity, how will this ever be explained to the public or for that matter, undone. Most people can't even rap their heads around it; let alone know what's been done to them.

[seemslikeadream]

Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have had data from as many as 87 million people

You can find out on Monday, April 9, if you were one of them.

By Kurt Wagner Apr 4, 2018, 2:30pm EDT

Cambridge Analytica may have had data from more unwitting Facebook users than originally thought.

Facebook now says that the data firm, which collected data about users without their permission, may have collected data on as many as 87 million people. Original reports from the New York Times pegged that number at closer to 50 million people.

“In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the U.S. — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica by apps that they or their friends used,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Facebook says it will begin alerting those users that their data may have been part of this batch on Monday, April 9. The company plans to put a link at the top of every Facebook user’s News Feed next Monday to help them understand which third-party apps have their data. That alert will also include whether or not your data was part of the set obtained by Cambridge Analytica.

The Cambridge Analytica debacle has created a firestorm for Facebook. In the weeks since the news broke, the company has scrambled to make sweeping changes to its data policies in an effort to soothe user and investor concerns. Those changes included rewriting Facebook’s terms of service and severely cutting access to the types of data third-party developers can collect from the company.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will also testify before a House Congressional committee next week on the company’s data privacy practices.
https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/1719927 ... collection

[seemslikeadream]

I ask again

Why would a Russian oil company be targeting American voters?

bolton is in trouble

Botlon Project

Bolton Super Pac

Bolton is central part of the story of CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA and the NRA in the U.S.

How John Bolton hyped himself — and got a job with Trump

It’s an unusual approach for a Washington bureaucrat — and a surprising background for a White House national security adviser.

By MAGGIE SEVERNS and MARIANNE LEVINE
04/04/2018 05:01 AM EDT


John Bolton’s super PAC ads, starring John Bolton

The John Bolton Super PAC ran ads, doled out campaign contributions and endorsed candidates for five years, all in the name of helping elect defense hawks to office.

But perhaps its greatest purpose was reflected in its name: It served as a hype machine for Bolton, boosting his image and political views.

Bolton raised more than $9 million during the 2016 elections and spent $2.6 million on television and other paid media that sometimes promoted the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations' brand as much as — if not more than — the candidates themselves. In one advertisement that aired in Nevada, Bolton issued stern warnings about President Barack Obama’s Iran deal and the threat from Islamic State militants. He mentioned the candidate he was promoting, Republican Joe Heck, 27 seconds into the 30-second ad.

During election season, Bolton — who weighed running for president more than once — could be found in New Hampshire and South Carolina, delivering stump speeches and rubbing elbows with state party chairs and candidates. For a $25 donation, fans could purchase a John Bolton coffee mug with his signature mustache printed on it.

Plenty of politicians have used super PACs to keep their names in the news until they launch a bid for elected office, but it’s an unusual approach for a Washington bureaucrat — and a surprising background for a White House national security adviser. But Bolton’s political operation shows his skill at courting public attention, a key to career success in President Donald Trump’s Washington.

“He’s become increasingly an independent spokesperson, as opposed to a spokesperson for other people’s policies,” said Vin Weber, a partner at the lobbying firm Mercury who first met Bolton during the Reagan administration. “He’s been around a long time. He’s clearly a person who wants to remain [at] the forefront of American conservative politics.”

Bolton’s super PAC, which shut down as of March 31, has drawn scrutiny since Trump named him national security adviser because of its ties to Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that allegedly used Facebook data harvested by an outside contractor without users’ knowledge. Bolton’s super PAC used the data to develop ads targeting voters with specific psychological profiles, The New York Times reported. Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica $1.1 million during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles.

Although Bolton — who left the George W. Bush administration in 2006 and worked for the American Enterprise Institute think tank — never launched a bid for president, his political operation was bigger during the 2016 elections than those supporting GOP candidate Bobby Jindal and many national labor unions.

But in a campaign cycle in which billions were spent on the presidential race and congressional candidates, Bolton wasn’t a huge factor either. His super PAC and a related PAC that could give directly to candidates, which raised a combined $9 million, doled out $700,000 to politicians and spent $2.6 million on ads promoting candidates. The rest went to consultants, fundraisers, travel companies, employees and other expenses associated with running a political outfit — including a direct-mail fundraising program that cost $1.8 million.

"Ambassador John Bolton set up his PAC and super PAC with the goal of electing sound, national-security-minded candidates, to help Republicans take and maintain control of Congress and to ensure that national security and foreign policy issues remained a top priority in elections,” said Sarah Tinsley, a senior adviser to Bolton who directed the super PAC. “He endorsed and his PAC contributed to more than 210 congressional candidates for elected office in the past two election cycles and in 2018.”

Others said the organization seemed more aimed at promoting Bolton’s views — which some conservatives welcomed.

“I personally always viewed it as a vehicle to promote John Bolton and an interventionist view of foreign policy,” said Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who hosted a gathering for Bolton at his home in 2013.

At the time, Cullen said, noninterventionists like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were gaining steam during the slow lead-up to the 2016 elections, so Cullen and others were happy to see Bolton injecting his point of view into the debate.

“There were deep-pocketed donors in the conservative movement who wanted to have him out there,” Cullen said.

Top political donors including Robert Mercer, who helped start Cambridge Analytica, and shipping magnate Richard Uihlein contributed millions of dollars to Bolton’s effort. In several cases, Bolton had already long been acquainted with powerful Republican donors — such as Texas financier T. Boone Pickens — who he called to ask for funds.

Other times, Bolton attended corporate events and dinners in his capacity as a former diplomat that doubled as venues for meeting contributors. Joel Peterson, who teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, gave $25,000 to Bolton after being seated next to him at a Hoover Institution dinner in 2017. “He gave a speech, I quite liked him. I was very impressed,” Peterson said.

Newt Gingrich, a close ally of Trump’s, said in an email that Bolton’s Fox News presence was crucial to the super PAC’s success. Fox “made him real to millions,” Gingrich said.

It attracted donors like Duane Burkholder, an 83-year-old retiree living in Germantown, Ohio, who made 30 donations via the mail totaling $1,500 to Bolton’s PAC in recent years, despite, he said, being on a pension.

“I’ve seen him on Fox News and I like him,” Burkholder said in an interview. “He’s a former ambassador to the U.N. — I just like what he says. I think he’ll be really good.”

The super PAC had made only one endorsement for the 2018 midterms: Kevin Nicholson, a Republican ex-Marine running for Senate in Wisconsin. An ad for Nicholson opened with a clip of the former U.S. ambassador wearing a suit, talking to the camera about dangers abroad, before turning to the candidate. “Courageous patriots like Kevin Nicholson put himself in harm’s way to defuse these tools of terror,” Bolton says in the ad.

Not every ad the super PAC ran stars Bolton, but many do. In an early ad for failed Senate candidate Scott Brown that ran in 2014 in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state to which Bolton made repeated trips, the first half sounds like a clip cut for a Bolton for President campaign.

“Before I was our ambassador to the United Nations, they told us that Americans needed to whisper off from the world and that we had no interest overseas,” Bolton says in the ad, as a photo of him at the U.N. with Condoleezza Rice pans across on the screen. “I’m John Bolton — I’ve spent my career fighting that idea.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/ ... ump-498885

John Bolton runs into potential ethics issues before he becomes Trump’s national security advisor
John Bolton is continuing to meet with White House attorneys over possible conflicts of interest.
Bolton is slated to take over as President Trump's national security advisor April 9.
Bolton resigned from his foundation in March. His two political action committees have gone dormant, although both are currently holding on to money they raised.
Brian Schwartz
Published 6 Hours Ago Updated 50 Mins Ago
CNBC.com
John Bolton
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
John Bolton
John Bolton, who is days away from becoming President Donald Trump's national security advisor, has been meeting with White House attorneys about possible conflicts of interest, CNBC has learned.

The exact sticking points for Bolton are unclear, but ethics experts say the appearance of a possible future role for Bolton with an entity such as a political action committee could be a cause for concern for White House officials. Bolton's PAC and super PAC, which are no longer receiving or spending capital, have been financial players in the early going of the midterm election cycle.

White House lawyers and Bolton continue to discuss and review any potential conflicts of interests for the former U.N. ambassador, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told CNBC on the condition of anonymity. A spokesman for Bolton, however, said that there haven't been any issues.

John Bolton will be advocate for hardline policies, says expert John Bolton will be advocate for hardline policies, says expert
12:58 PM ET Fri, 23 March 2018 | 03:11
"The ambassador's transition to national security advisor is going very smoothly and the ambassador will start on Monday," the spokesman, Garrett Marquis, told CNBC.

Bolton will succeed H.R. McMaster in the role.

So far, Bolton has done everything that he's been advised to do, according to people familiar with the matter. When the White House suggested his PACs cease all political activity, including his super PAC, Bolton agreed.

There were also questions about his role as chairman of his nonprofit group, the Foundation for American Security and Freedom. Bolton internally announced in March that he will be stepping down from his foundation with the plan to take his name off the website on April 8, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Another representative for Bolton confirmed that he is continuing to meet with White House lawyers, but declined to comment further about the details of those conversations.

"The ambassador's conversations with White House attorneys are off-the-record conversations," the spokeswoman said.

Bolton and the White House did not return repeated requests for comment.

Bolton's PACs aren't officially shutting down

Ethics attorneys outside the administration are skeptical about Bolton's two PACs, the John Bolton PAC and Super PAC, not officially shutting down. A PAC is a committee that collects contributions to spend for or against certain campaigns. A super PAC, meanwhile, cannot spend on a particular candidate, but it is allowed to spend and raise unlimited amounts of money on independent entities that could sway elections, such as partisan television and digital advertisements.


The Hatch Act doesn't require the PACs to dissolve. The law, which was first enacted in 1939 and is monitored by the government watchdog known as the Office of Special Counsel, or OSC, says federal employees "may not campaign for or against candidates or otherwise engage in political activity," but does not explicitly demand that political operations be entirely eliminated if they were previously run by White House personnel.

A representative for the OSC told CNBC that as long as Bolton's PAC wasn't raising or spending any money while he worked in the White House, it could still keep his name and would not be violating the Hatch Act.

"A federal employee whose name is also the name of a political action committee would be in violation of the solicitation provisions of the Hatch Act, if the PAC is soliciting or accepting donations," the representative said.


Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the nonprofit money in politics watchdog group Common Cause, said there could still be a conflict of interest because Bolton looks to be holding onto some authority within his two political fundraising assemblages.

"He should shut it down because the general gist of the Hatch Act is that they shouldn't be maintaining a super PAC," Ryan said. "That's what we're talking about here. It goes against our ethics laws for someone to be maintaining a super PAC at any level when they are high-level officials within the White House."

The Trump White House is no stranger to Hatch Act violations. In March, the OSC said senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway committed two violations during last year's Alabama special Senate election. The report claimed Conway "impermissibly mixed official government business with political views about candidates" during two media interviews in the run-up to the election, but left it up to the president to move ahead with disciplinary action against her.

The White House has yet to bring down any form of punishment against Conway, one of the president's key advisors.

What could happen to the money

Another issue that could pose a problem for Bolton is what happens to the millions of dollars being held by the PACs. People familiar with the groups' work said that they plan to hold onto the funds in the immediate future and do not intend to wind down their finances, at least for now.

Republican finance experts said that PACs sometimes hold onto their financial reserves as their leaders take jobs in the White House or any federal position as part of a larger deal with their new employer.

Charles Spies, leader of the political practice at law firm Clark Hill and chief financial officer of Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, said there may have been an agreement between the Trump administration and Bolton to transfer fundraising power to a new leader while they maintain their financial apparatus.

"There would usually be an ethics agreement whereby the public official relinquishes all control over the political entity (in this case, the PAC), but it can either give the money away, or in theory could keep it with someone else having control over the accounts," Spies said.

Big money donors

The John Bolton Super PAC has been a big player during the early stages of the 2018 midterm elections. The group has raised $3.8 million in the most recent election cycle, including receiving the financial backing of this year's top Republican donor, Richard Uihlein, founder of the shipping supplies company Uline. Robert Mercer, former chairman of hedge fund giant Renaissance Technologies and a key Trump supporter, also contributed, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

So far, the group has spent $1.2 million with the majority of their funds going toward various advertisements and polls.

However, watchdogs such as Common Cause have brought the PAC's past spending efforts to light with a number of legal complaints filed to the FEC. All of the complaints relate to the Bolton groups' work with political data firm Cambridge Analytica, a company under scrutiny for gaining access to 50 million Facebook accounts and allegedly distributing user data to the Trump campaign in 2016.

Bolton's super PAC in 2014 spent $340,000 on what it described as research and then more than $800,000 the following year. While it's unclear what was obtained through Cambridge Analytica's research, The New York Times reported in March that Bolton was purchasing services for "behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging."

The groups' decision not to close could reflect an ongoing legal inquiry. According to the FEC's rules and regulations, a PAC cannot shut down if they are involved with any type of official litigation or enforcement action.

The FEC declined to acknowledge whether it is investigating Bolton's super PAC.

WATCH: What you need to know about Trump's new security advisor
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/john-bo ... ssues.html

Criminal complaint filed against Bannon, Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica and Bolton Super PAC

CRIMINAL COMPLAINT FILED AGAINST BANNON, TRUMP CAMPAIGN, CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA AND BOLTON SUPER PAC

Washington—The FBI should investigate whether SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, Stephen Bannon, the John Bolton Super PAC, and the Trump campaign criminally violated federal law prohibiting foreign nationals from participating in American elections, according to a complaint filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Democracy 21.

As recently reported by Britain’s Channel 4, numerous non-U.S. citizens appear to have participated in U.S. elections through work for SCL Elections Ltd., a corporation based in the United Kingdom, and Cambridge Analytica, its U.S. arm. Alexander Nix, a British national, directed much of this work in his role as a manager at Cambridge Analytica; Nix, in turn, was directed by Stephen Bannon, a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica. In particular, Nix and other SCL Elections Ltd. employees reportedly participated in strategic decision-making processes of John Bolton Super PAC, a U.S. political committee, starting as early as 2014, and according to Nix played a similar role in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

“The law prohibits foreign nationals from participating, directly or indirectly, in elections in the United States,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. “What’s worse than the fact that it apparently happened in this case is that the people involved apparently knew they were breaking the law and continued to do so anyway.”

[Grizzly]

Millions? Try ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... df55d2ebc2

2 billion users worldwide

To lazy/tired, and apathetic to post the whole thing...

[seemslikeadream]

Carole Cadwalladr
‏
Cambridge Analytica is under investigation for its role in referendum. As is its affiliate AIQ. Yet Zuck made no mention of referendum. Why?

Zuck took just one just q each from UK, Canada, Mexico...everything else was US. Here he is responding to @BBCRoryCJ about how he will face Congress but other ‘top folks’ will come to UK. Do we need to start thinking of Facebook as a hostile non-state actor? Genuine q

[seemslikeadream]

Trump’s shady data firm is already trying to hijack the next election

By Caroline Orr - April 4, 2018761

Cambridge Analytica has already set its sights on the 2018 midterm elections.

As the scandal surrounding the Trump campaign’s shady data firm Cambridge Analytica continues to grow, the company is quietly offering its services to Republican campaigns for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.

According to a report by Colorado-based ABC affiliate Denver7, a Cambridge Analytica employee recently contacted the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Robinson, offering to help him win “however we can.”

“Hello, this is Michael calling with Cambridge Analytica in Washington, D.C. Just wanted to give you a call because we’ve been tracking the governor’s race here in Colorado for the last few weeks, and we would love to offer services, and help you win, by however we can,” the Cambridge Analytica employee said in a voicemail left with Robinson’s campaign and later obtained by Denver7.

As Denver7 noted, the GOP-backed Senate Majority Fund used two Colorado political nonprofits to pay Cambridge Analytica nearly half a million dollars in 2014 and 2015. Republicans successfully regained the majority in the state Senate in 2014 — the year when most of that spending took place.

Just three months ago, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix — who has since been suspended amid the fallout from the unfolding scandal — said the company was backing away from seeking work in America.

But the offer to Robinson shows that the data firm is still very much at work in America, actively seeking contracts with Republican campaigns ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

And that’s not the only sign of the company’s ongoing attempts to influence U.S. politics.

On Monday, Politico reported that newly appointed Trump national security council aide Kirsten Fontenrose had worked until recently for the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.

The revelation “underscores the firm’s influence in Trump’s Washington,” Politico noted.

There are also lingering questions surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s work for Trump’s new national security adviser, John Bolton.

Bolton’s super PAC has paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1.1 million since 2014 for “research” and “survey research,” according to an analysis of campaign finance filings by the Center for Public Integrity.

On March 30, Bolton’s super PAC announced that it would cease operations as of March 31 — but Bolton previously said his super PAC would spend $1 million in the 2018 election cycle in a bid to help Republican Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson in Wisconsin. Nicholson is challenging Democratic incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“Bolton’s super PAC spent roughly $2.5 million during the 2016 election cycle to support the bids of Republican U.S. Senate candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The press release announcing support for Nicholson said that ‘Ambassador Bolton looks to increase those contributions for the 2018 midterm elections,'” the Center for Public Integrity reported.

The Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016, and went on to pay the company at least $6 million for its work on data analytics.

After Trump won the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica touted its work as integral to Trump’s victory and reported a surge of interest in its services.

“It’s like drinking from a fire hose,” Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge’s head of product, told the Washington Post in February 2017. “Besides Antarctica, we’ve gotten interest from every continent.”

The data firm even set up shop in a brand new office space near the White House, apparently anticipating an influx of new clients in the U.S.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the fact that the personal data harvested by Cambridge Analytica — which was used to build the digital operation that guided Trump’s campaign for the presidency — can’t be reigned back in. And according to a new report, Cambridge Analytica likely siphoned data from far more Americans than initially reported.

In a report issued Wednesday afternoon, Facebook announced that the personal information of many as 87 million users, mostly in the U.S., had been “improperly shared” with Cambridge Analytica. That figure is a sharp increase from the initial estimate of 50 million users worldwide.

To put that number in context, an estimated 139 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election.

No one associated with the Trump campaign, including Trump himself, have given any indication that they see a problem with Cambridge Analytica’s practices. In fact, Trump appeared to brag about the data company’s work in a recent tweet.

Furthermore, Brad Parscale, who worked side by side with Cambridge Analytica employees and used the stolen data to develop the digital strategy for Trump’s 2016 campaign, was recently hired to run Trump’s re-election campaign.

And now, after hijacking the 2016 presidential election, the company has set its sights on a new target: the fast-approaching 2018 midterms.
https://shareblue.com/cambridge-analyti ... elections/

[Grizzly]

https://www.wired.com/2004/02/pentagon- ... g-project/
Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project

----

Zuckerberg Hospital!?...lol

[seemslikeadream]

David Carroll


Meet Sam Patten, former #CambridgeAnalytica operative who teamed up with accused Russian intel asset, Konstantin Kilimnik. In 2014, #AggregateIQ built RIPON for SCL Elections Ltd. AIQ is now suspended by Facebook.

Carole Cadwalladr

Here they are. Brexit's unholy trinity.
Breitbart - UKIP - Cambridge Analytica



3:55 PM - 5 Apr 2018

Ooh. How interesting. I was going to post my favourite clip of @Nigel_Farage thanking @SteveKBannon for Brexit. 'We couldn't have done it without you...you helped hugely etc.' But Breitbart has pulled the video.

IT'S HERE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDxN54flYyo

Blimey. Look at this. @DamianCollins DCMS committee is becoming a force to behold. The next batch of witnesses include Cambridge Analytica's Alexander Nix, Brittany Kaiser, Aleksandr Kogan & Facebook's CTO.



https://twitter.com/RVAwonk

Erik Prince And Big Data

APRIL 5, 2018

by David Isenberg

Revelations that data-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used ill-gotten personal information from Facebook for the Trump campaign masks the more scandalous reality that the company is firmly ensconced in the U.S. military-industrial complex. As The New York Review of Books notes, Cambridge Analytica is one of the “boutique companies specializing in data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies.”

So, it should come as no surprise then that the scandal has been linked to Erik Prince, co-founder of Blackwater and the Energizer Bunny of the world of private military and security contractors (PMSC). Having left the country years ago in a well-publicized huff for more comfortable, and less democratic, environments like the United Arab Emirates, Prince has once again popped back up to pitch his wares.

Prince has had more than his share of scandals since he started in Blackwater in 1997. But the ongoing revelations regarding Cambridge Analytica may prove his greatest challenge yet. The number of links between Prince and propaganda and psychological operations is getting harder and harder to pass off as mere coincidence.

As has been widely reported, British corporate records show that Alexander Nix, the suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, is also director of a company called Emerdata Ltd., which executives at Cambridge Analytica incorporated in August 2017. Two more layers of ownership higher, the parent company SCL Group is extremely well connected to the British government.

Emerdata directors include Johnson Ko Chun Shun, who was appointed in January. Ko is also deputy chairman of the Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, a company that describes itself as an “Africa-focused security, aviation and logistics company.” The chairman of Frontier Services Group is Prince. Also on the board, according to Bloomberg, is a woman named Cheng Peng, whose address is the same as Luk Fook Financial Services, the parent company of the firm that helped Frontier place new shares last year.

Other directors of Emerdata include Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer, daughters of the U.S. hedge fund chief and billionaire Robert Mercer, who funded Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica, which grew out of SCL Group, was founded in 2014 with a $15 million investment from Mercer, whose daughter Rebekah sits on the firm’s board of directors. Steve Bannon was also a co-founder. Back when he was still a White House adviser, Bannon pushed Prince’s plan to privatize U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. Robert Mercer was also the primary funder of the Make America #1 PAC, to which Prince and his mother contributed $200,000. That political action committee in turn paid Cambridge Analytica over $1.5 million in 2016.

The new U.S. National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is also linked to Cambridge Analytica. Bolton’s Super PAC has paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1.1 million since 2014 for “research” and “survey research.” Last year, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, John Bolton boasted that his Super PAC’s implementation of “advanced psychographic data” would help elect filibuster-proof majorities in 2018.

Prince’s Proposals

Erik Prince works well with autocratic leaders, dictators, occupying militaries, and dodgy regimes. Put another way, he is an über-libertarian. It is as if the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute hooked up after meeting at a Friedrich Hayek lecture and out popped Erik Frankenprince. According to Robert Young Pelton, a perceptive observer of his work:

Prince’s father got very committed to supporting religious and conservative causes after his first heart attack. Religion and business are transnational forces with money and propaganda as the weapon to shape opinion legislation and elect candidates.

When their candidate is not in power they use information operations, influence, lobbying and money to attack the left. Ironically creating a Soviet style environment in which “dirty tricks”, propaganda and insider deceit are put into play. Since they all study the Soviets they emulate their tricks. Prince’s history with Dana Rohrabacher, Jack Wheeler, Paul Behrends, Jack Abramoff and Olly North are worth reading just for the mirror imaging of Soviet duplicity to create right wing movements worldwide. His autobiography was originally written by a professor of Soviet propaganda.
Prince’s actions in the past several years confirm that he has long been interested in shaping public opinion. He is a savvy self-promoter. For instance, he allowed business partner Adam Ciralsky to publish an article in late 2009 in Vanity Fair about Prince’s work for the CIA in which he outed himself as a CIA asset, then cited the article in his book as proof.

Just in the past year, Prince pitched private security contractors as the low-budget way to fight the war in Afghanistan, an idea he published on The New York Times op-ed page. Then he reportedly pitched a global assassination and intel network to circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies. After such proposals, supporting white-collar data nerds to slice and dice the American electorate’s voting preferences must seem like a cakewalk. And, after all, companies like Cambridge Analytica are just as important to regime change as hired guns. As a New Yorker article noted, “the ethical difference between outright electoral corruption and psychographics is largely a matter of degree. Both are shortcuts that warp the process into something small and dirty.”

Prince and Disinformation

In the past Prince accused Huma Abedin of being a terrorist in the employ of the Muslim Brotherhood and claimed he had insider knowledge of why former FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation into the issue of Clinton’s email server just 11 days before the 2016 election. As this 2017 article notes, Prince “went public as part of a calculated propaganda campaign in a November 4 Breitbart News interview, making a host of wild and demonstrably false allegations in connection with the Weiner/Clinton revelations.”

Prince tells Breitbart that he has learned what is in the newly discovered emails from well-placed sources in the NYPD, and claims that it includes evidence of “money laundering” and of a Clinton “sex island” with “under-age sex slaves” that is “so disgusting…”

None of these assertions held up, but for the next four days they would spread like wildfire on fake news sites and stoke the renewed cries of “lock her up.”
Prince’s accusations were so over the top that if he’d been a dog people would think he had rabies.

In 2016, he made numerous appearances on the Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show, praising Trump. Robert Mercer was a major investor in Breitbart News, back when Steve Bannon was running it. Rebekah Mercer is also on the board of the Moving Picture Institute, the non-profit that produced Erik Prince’s film about his Somali adventure.

Last year, Prince suspected that George Soros was trying to orchestrate an effort to sabotage the Trump administration through a so-called “Purple Revolution.” This campaign of resistance was purported to have begun in the moments right after the election, spurred along—supposedly—by Hillary Clinton and her husband.

Erik Prince didn’t invent big data or behavioral-science-based Facebook apps. But given his willingness to spout big lies and support influence-shaping operations, he has shown a clear interest in circumventing the democratic process. If he can’t directly influence a government with his mercenary forces, he will gladly do so indirectly, with his new disinformation mercenaries. Perhaps it’s time to give Prince a new name: Private Rabid Influence Contractor King (PRICK).
https://lobelog.com/erik-prince-and-big-data/

[seemslikeadream]

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Data could have come from more than 87 million users, be stored in Russia

By Caroline Kelly
Updated 9:08 AM ET, Sun April 8, 2018
LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 20: Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie attends an event at the Frontline Club on March 20, 2018 in London, England. British authorities are seeking a court order to search the offices of the data mining and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The company allegedly used the information of 50 million Facebook users in order to influence the 2016 US Presidential election. (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 20: Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie attends an event at the Frontline Club on March 20, 2018 in London, England. British authorities are seeking a court order to search the offices of the data mining and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The company allegedly used the information of 50 million Facebook users in order to influence the 2016 US Presidential election. (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
(CNN)Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says the data the firm gathered from Facebook could have come from more than 87 million users and could be stored in Russia.

The number of Facebook users whose personal information was accessed by Cambridge Analytica "could be higher, absolutely," than the 87 million users acknowledged by Facebook, Wylie told NBC's Chuck Todd during a "Meet the Press" segment airing Sunday.
The former Cambridge Analytica employee said that "a lot of people" had access to the data and referenced a "genuine risk" that the harvested data could be stored in Russia.
"It could be stored in various parts of the world, including Russia, given the fact that the professor who was managing the data harvesting process was going back and forth between the UK and to Russia," Wylie said.
Aleksander Kogan, a Russian data scientist who gave lectures at St. Petersburg State University, gathered Facebook data from millions of Americans. He then sold it to Cambridge Analytica, which worked with President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
When asked if he thought Facebook was even able to calculate the number of users affected, Wylie stressed that data can be copied once it leaves a database.
"I know that Facebook is now starting to take steps to rectify that and start to find out who had access to it and where it could have gone, but ultimately it's not watertight to say that, you know, we can ensure that all the data is gone forever," he said.
Wylie cited the risks of the data's exposure as a reason he blew the whistle on the company. "Part of the reason that I spoke out was so that this could be looked at," he said.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/08/politics ... index.html

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie supports a second Brexit referendum — here's why

Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower in the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach, says Britain should have a second vote on Brexit.
This is because "we need absolute clarity that the decision made by the British people was made fairly and is compliant with the law," he said on Sunday.
Wylie has previously claimed that "cheating" by Vote Leave, the official Brexit campaign, may have swayed the 2016 Brexit poll.
Wylie, a progressive Eurosceptic, wants a democrative mandate for Brexit.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie has expressed support for a second Brexit referendum.

Wylie blew the lid off of a massive Facebook data breach last month. Latest figures indicate the breach affected 87 million profiles, of which one million were British.

Wylie, a data scientist, also went on the record to say "cheating" by Vote Leave, the official Brexit campaign, may have swayed the 2016 Brexit poll, according to the BBC.

Wylie accused Vote Leave of improperly channeling cash through Aggregate IQ (AIQ), which he says is a subsidiary firm of Cambridge Analytica. Voters were also targeted online, he claimed.

The 28-year-old is a self-described progressive Eurosceptic, but now expresses support for a second EU vote. "If we can't go back from Brexit, if this is a one time decision, we need absolute clarity that the decision made by the British people was made fairly and is compliant with the law," he said on "The Andrew Marr Show," on Sunday.

"And if that means we have to go back to the British people and ask for clarification, I think the British people should have a say and make sure that what we're doing is with the consent of people. I want a democratic mandate for Brexit."

Even the Scottish government thinks the Cambridge Analytica scandal could spark a second EU referendum.

Scotland's Brexit minister Michael Russell MSP told Business Insider that allegations of electoral misspending linking Vote Leave to disgraced data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, pointed towards a "major scandal" which could have swung the referendum.

Wylie claims Vote Leave once credited AIQ, a franchise of Cambridge Analytica, as the reason the Brexit vote was a success. "The referendum was won by less than 2% of the vote. Could this have made the difference? Vote Leave's chief strategist said it did: on a quote - now deleted - for AIQ's website," he wrote in The Guardian.
http://www.businessinsider.com/brexit-c ... dum-2018-4

[seemslikeadream]

Cambridge Analytica boss Alexander Nix dined with two of Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign advisers in 2015
Nix and his companies have come under fire for using data harvested from Facebook, which recently revealed that some 1.2 million Filipinos on Facebook were affected by the data breach
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 08 April, 2018, 9:00pm

Could Cambridge Analytica boss be probed for Philippine meddling?
8 Apr 2018

When Alexander Nix, the recently suspended boss of Cambridge Analytica, went to Manila in May 2015, he did more than deliver a talk on his new method of managing elections.

Nix dined with Jose Gabriel “Pompee” La Viña and Peter Tiu Laviña, cousins who later played key roles in Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign, notable for its use of social media. At the time, Nix identified himself as a board director of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL).
Peter snapped photographs of Nix’s talk at the National Press Club (NPC) in Manila and his meal at the club’s dining room, and posted them on his Facebook page. Also present on that occasion were NPC president Joel Sy Egco – now Undersecretary at the Presidential Communications Operations Office or PCOO – and Taipan Millan, a lawyer and family friend of Duterte.
Six months after that meal with Nix, both cousins were among those who convinced Duterte to run for president. Duterte appointed “Pompee” La Viña as his social media director – a first in Philippine election history – and Peter Laviña as his campaign spokesman.
Sources who worked on the campaigns of Duterte’s two rival candidates told the South China Morning Post they had never met nor heard of Nix or SCL.


The source who worked on the presidential campaign of Senator Grace Poe said he was not aware of any contact from Nix or SCL. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity for lack of authority to comment, added: “We used our own social media strategy.”
Ibarra Gutierrez, the spokesman for Mar Roxas, the ruling party contender, said the same.
How Cambridge Analytica’s parent company helped ‘man of action’ Rodrigo Duterte win the 2016 Philippines election

“[The campaign had] no organised effort to the extent others were utilising social media,” he said. “The focus of the campaign was traditional organising of local political allies at the grass roots level.”
He laughed off recent accusations from Duterte supporters that it was Roxas and not Duterte who was the unidentified client of SCL in the Philippines. SCL had previously posted on its website it had managed elections for a male politician in the Philippines, who it recommended be rebranded into a tough crimebuster. This post has since been removed but archived copies remain.
I’m not sure who [Alexander Nix] is. I attended one forum at the NPC where a foreigner was resource speaker. Can’t recall if it was this guy you are mentioningPETER TIU LAVIÑA
Gutierrez said they had neglected to use social media because “we simply underestimated its impact on the elections”. He explained they based their strategy on a survey that indicated Filipinos got 70 per cent of their news from television.
Duterte won the election, although without a majority of votes. Roxas was a distant second, closely followed by Poe.
Basking in post-election glory, Pompee La Viña credited “Duterte social media warriors” for the win. He could not be reached for comment for this story.
However, his cousin, Peter, denied – via Facebook Messenger – the Duterte camp had contracted Nix or SCL for the election.

“We never had any foreign help during the campaign,” Peter Tiu Laviña said.
Asked how many times he met Nix, he replied: “I’m not sure who he is. I attended one forum at the NPC where a foreigner was resource speaker. Can’t recall if it was this guy you are mentioning.”
He did not reply whether this was the only time he had met this foreigner.
The “intervention” of foreigners and foreign entities in Philippine elections is a criminal offence. But to be punishable, such meddling has to occur during the campaign period, according the Commission on Elections (Comelec) regulations.

Christian Monsod, a former Comelec chairman, said the Post’s reporting of the activities of Nix and SCL in Manila provided “sufficient grounds” for a preliminary investigation. Such an investigation could consider “the accountability of any candidate or political party as principal, accomplice or accessory to the crime”.
Nix and his companies have come under fire for using data harvested from Facebook, which recently revealed that some 1.2 million Filipinos on Facebook were affected by the data breach.
http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast ... wo-rodrigo

WendySiegelman
Apr 8
From the Seychelles to the White House to Cambridge Analytica, Erik Prince and the UAE are key parts of the Trump story

In January 2017 Erik Prince attended a meeting in the Seychelles with the United Arab Emirate’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev, and George Nader, a former consultant for Erik Prince’s company Blackwater.
While Erik Prince testified in November 2017 to the House Intelligence Committee that the meeting with Dmitriev was unplanned, news broke last week that Mueller has evidence that Prince’s meeting with Putin’s ally Dmitriev may not have been a chance encounter, contradicting Prince’s sworn testimony. And, according to George Nader, a main purpose of the meeting was to set up a communication channel between the Russian government and the incoming Trump administration.
Earlier this year, a seemingly unrelated scandal erupted after a story broke about Trump’s data company Cambridge Analytica harvesting Facebook data on tens of millions of people. Shortly after that a Channel 4 News investigation revealed undercover film of Cambridge Analytica executives bragging about the dirty tricks they use to influence elections.
As the Cambridge Analytica scandal was unfolding, I broke the story about a new company Emerdata Limited, created by Cambridge Analytica executives, that in early 2018 added new board members Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer, Cheng Peng, Chun Shun Ko Johnson, who is a business partner of Erik Prince, and Ahmed Al Khatib, a ‘Citizen of Seychelles’.
In 2017 as Cambridge Analytica executives created Emerdata, they were also working on behalf of the UAE through SCL Social, which had a $330,000 contract to run a social media campaign for the UAE against Qatar, featuring the theme #BoycottQatar. One of the Emerdata directors may have ties to the UAE and the company name, coincidentally, sounds like a play on Emirati-Data…Emerdata.
The United Arab Emirates and people advocating for the interests of the UAE — including Prince, Nader, and Trump fundraiser Elliot Broidy who has done large business deals with the UAE — have started to appear frequently in news related to Mueller’s investigation. Erik Prince, the brother of the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, lives in the UAE, attended the Seychelles meeting with the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, is business partners with Chun Shun Ko who just joined the board of the new Cambridge Analytica/SCL company Emerdata, and SCL had a large contract to work on behalf of the UAE.
To better understand the role Erik Prince and the UAE have played in the Trump-Russia story — and in the much broader story of global political influence, and often corruption — below is a timeline tracking some key events. Not all events are related, but reviewing the information chronologically may help answer a few questions, including: Why was the UAE involved in a meeting with Erik Prince to set up a communication channel with Russia? Is the UAE involved with Cambridge Analytica’s new company Emerdata? Does Erik Prince have any connection to Cambridge Analytica, even if only indirectly through Chun Shun Ko, Steve Bannon, or the Mercers? And what role has the UAE had in influencing the Trump administration?
Note: this timeline may be updated periodically to include new pertinent information. Each event below includes the source data link.
2010
In a deposition Erik Prince said he had previously hired George Nader to help Blackwater as a “business development consultant that we retained in Iraq” because the company was looking for contracts with the Iraqi government. New York Times
After a series of civil lawsuits, criminal charges and Congressional investigations against Erik Prince’s company Blackwater and its former executives, Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates. New York Times.
2011
Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi hired Erik Prince to build a fighting force, paying him $529 million to build an army. Additionally, Prince “worked with the Emirati government on various ventures…including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates.” New York Times
A movie called “The Project,” about Erik Prince’s UAE-funded private army in Somalia, was paid for by the Moving Picture Institute where Rebekah Mercer is on the board of Trustees. Gawker Website
2012
Erik Prince, who works and lives in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, created Frontier Resource Group, an Africa-dedicated investment firm partnered with major Chinese enterprises. South China Morning Post
2013
The Russian Direct Investment Fund led by CEO Kirill Dmitriev, and the UAE’s Mubadala Development Company based in Abu Dhabi, launched a $2 billion co-investment fund to pursue opportunities in Russia. PR Newswire
2014
January: Erik Prince was named Chairman of DVN Holdings, controlled by Hong Kong businessman Johnson Ko Chun-shun and Chinese state-owned Citic Group. DVN’s board proposed that the firm be renamed Frontier Services Group. South China Morning Post
January: Erik Prince’s business partner, Dorian Barak, became a Non-Executive Director of Reorient Group Limited, an investment company where Ko Chun Shun Johnson was Chairman and Executive Director, and had done a $350 million deal with Jack Ma. 2014 Annual Report Forbes
Erik Prince’s business partner Dorian Barak joined the board of Alufur Mining, “an independent mineral exploration and development company with significant bauxite interests in the Republic of Guinea.” (Prince would later testify that the purpose of his Seychelles trip was to discuss minerals and ‘bauxite’ with the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed). Alufur website
August: The John Bolton Super PAC founded by John Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, hired Cambridge Analytica months after the firm was founded and while it was still harvesting Facebook data. In the two years that followed, Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for “survey research” and “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging” using Facebook data. New York Times
2016
August/September: Erik Prince donated $150,000 to Make America Number 1, a pro-Trump PAC for which Robert Mercer has been the largest funder. Open Secrets
October: Erik Prince donated $100,000 to the Trump Victory fund and $33,400 to the Republican National Committee. FEC
October 11: Erik Prince did an interview with Breitbart News Daily describing Hillary Clinton’s “demonstrable links to Russia, particularly her complicity in “selling 20 percent of the United States’s uranium supply to a Russian state company.” Breitbart
November 4: Erik Prince told Breitbart News Daily that “The NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making” in the Anthony Weiner investigation, but received “huge pushback” from the Justice Department.” Prince described criminal culpability in emails from Weiner’s laptop related to “money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play.” Breitbart
December: The United Arab Emirate’s crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, visited Trump Tower and met with Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon. In an unusual breach of protocol, the Obama administration was not notified about the visit. Washington Post
Erik Prince told the House Intelligence Committee that Steve Bannon informed him about the December Trump Tower meeting with Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Prince also said he had sent Bannon unsolicited policy papers during the campaign. CNN
2017
January 2017
One week prior to the meeting in the Seychelles, sources reported that George Nader met with Erik Prince and later sent him information on Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, contradicting Prince’s sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that the meeting with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles was unexpected. ABC News
January 11: A meeting was held in the Seychelles with Erik Prince, the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Kirill Dmitriev, and George Nader, who had previously consulted for Prince’s Blackwater. According to Nader the meeting was to discuss foreign policy and to establish a line of communication between the Russian government and the incoming Trump administration. ABC News
February 2017
“After decades of close political and defense proximity with the United States, the United Arab Emirates have concluded three major agreements with Russia which could lead to its air force being ultimately re-equipped with Russian combat aircraft.” Defense Aerospace
March 2017
Elliott Broidy, a top GOP and Trump fundraiser with hundreds of millions of dollars in business deals with the UAE, sent George Nader a spreadsheet outlining a proposed $12.7 million campaign against Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood. Broidy also sent an email to George Nader referring to Secure America Now as a group he worked with. New York Times
The largest funder of Secure America Now, a secretive group that creates anti-Muslim advertising, is Robert Mercer, who is also the largest funder of Cambridge Analytica. Open Secrets
April 2017
Jared Kushner’s father Charles Kushner met with Qatar’s minister of finance Ali Sharif Al Emadi to discuss financing of Kushner Companies’ 666 Fifth Avenue building. Intercept
“Tom Barrack, a Trump friend who had suggested that Thani consider investing in the Kushner property, has said Charles Kushner was “crushed” when his son got the White House job because that prompted the Qataris to pull out.” Washington Post
May 2017
May 20–21: Donald Trump made his first overseas trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, accompanied by Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon and others. On his first day there Trump signed a joint “strategic vision” that included $110 billion in American arms sales and other investments. Washington Post
May 23: Per U.S. officials, the UAE government discussed plans to hack Qatar. Washington Post
May 24: Per U.S. officials, the UAE orchestrated the hack of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani. Washington Post
Late May: Following the hack, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt banned Qatari media, broke relations and declared a trade and diplomatic boycott. Washington Post
June 2017
June 5: The Gulf Cooperation Council members Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt released coordinated statements accusing Qatar of supporting terrorist groups and saying that as a result they were cutting links to the country by land, sea and air. Washington Post
June 6: Trump tweeted his support for the blockade against Qatar, while Rex Tillerson and James Mattis called for calm. The Guardian
June 7: U.S. investigators from the FBI, who sent a team to Doha to help the Qatari government investigate the alleged hacking incident, suspected Russian hackers planted the fake news behind the Qatar crisis. CNN
June 27: Rex Tillerson “reaffirmed his strong support for Kuwait’s efforts to mediate the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt” and “leaders reaffirmed the need for all parties to exercise restraint to allow for productive diplomatic discussions.” U.S. Department of State Readout
An aide to Tillerson was convinced Trump’s support for the UAE came from the UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otabie, a close friend of Jared Kushner, known to speak to Kushner on a weekly basis. The American Conservative
July 2017
U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that the UAE orchestrated the hack of Qatari government news and social media sites with incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani. Washington Post
August 2017
Emerdata Limited was incorporated in the UK with Cambridge Analytica’s Chairman Julian Wheatland and Chief Data Officer Alexander Tayler as significant owners. Company filing
September 2017
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix and Steve Bannon both present at the CSLA Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong. CLSA is part of Citic Securities, which is part of Citic Group, the majority owner of Erik Prince and Ko Chun Shun Johnson’s Frontier Services Group. Bloomberg Tweet
October 2017
October 6: Elliott Broidy, whose company Circinus has had hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the UAE, met Trump and suggested Trump meet with the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Broidy said Trump thought it was good idea. Broidy also “personally urged Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Tillerson, whom the Saudis and Emiratis saw as insufficiently tough on Iran and Qatar.” New York Times
October 6: SCL Social Limited, part of SCL Group/Cambridge Analytica, was hired by UK company Project Associates for approximately $330,000 to implement a social media campaign for the UAE against Qatar, featuring the them #BoycottQatar. FARA filing
October 23: Steve Bannon spoke at a Hudson Institute event on “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” and called the Qatar blockade “the single most important thing that’s happening in the world.” Bannon “bragged that president’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May gave the Saudis the gumption to lead a blockade against Doha.” The National Interest
October 29: Jared Kushner returned from an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia to discuss Middle East peace. Tom Barrack, a longtime friend and close Trump confidant said “The key to solving (the Israel-Palestinian dispute) is Egypt. And the key to Egypt is Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.” Politico
November 2017
November 4: A week after Kushner’s visit Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, launched an anti-corruption crackdown and arrested dozens of members of the Saudi royal family. Per three sources “Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince.” However, “Kushner, through his attorney’s spokesperson, denies having done so.” Another source said Mohammed bin Salman told UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed that Kushner was “in his pocket.” The Intercept
November 15: Dmitry Rybolovlev sold his Leonardo Da Vinci painting ‘Salvatore Mundi’ for $450.3 million, setting a new record for the highest priced painting sold at auction. Rybolovlev — who had purchased a Florida home from Trump in 2008 for $95 million, more than $50 million above Trump’s purchase price — sold the Da Vinci painting for $322 million above his purchase price. The painting was bought by Saudi Prince Bader bin Abdullah on behalf of crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman. The price was driven up by a bidding war with the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, as both bidders feared losing the painting to the Qatari ruling family. After the purchase came under criticism, the Da Vinci painting was swapped with the UAE Ministry of Culture in exchange for an equally valued yacht. Daily Mail
November 20: Erik Prince testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and said that he arranged his trip to Seychelles with people who worked for Mohammed bin Zayed to discuss “security issues and mineral issues and even bauxite.” Prince then described how someone, maybe one of Mohammed bin Zayed’s brothers, told Prince he should meet with Kirill Dimitriev, describing him as “a Russian guy that we’ve done some business with in the past.” Erik Prince Transcript
December 2017
Buzzfeed broke a story on how Erik Prince had pitched the Trump administration on a plan to hire him to privatize the Afghan war and mine Afghanistan’s valuable minerals. A slide presentation of Prince’s pitch described Afghanistan’s rich deposits of minerals with an estimated value of $1 trillion, and described his plan as “a strategic mineral resource extraction funded effort.” Buzzfeed
2018
January 2018
George Nader emailed a request to Elliott Broidy saying the leader of the UAE asked Trump to call the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to smooth over potential bad feelings created by the book “Fire and Fury.” Nader also reiterated to Broidy the desire of the ruler of the UAE to meet alone with Trump. Days later as Nader went to meet Broidy at Mar-a-lago to celebrate the anniversary of the inauguration, he was met at Dulles Airport by FBI agents working for Mueller. New York Times
January to March 2018
Emerdata Limited added new directors Alexander Nix, Johnson Chun Shun Ko, Cheng Peng, Ahmad Al Khatib, Rebekah Mercer, and Jennifer Mercer. Johnson Chun Shun Ko is the business partner of Erik Prince. Ahmad Al Khatib is identified as ‘Citizen of Seychelles’. Shares are issued valued at 1,912,512 GBP. Emerdata article
SCL/Cambridge Analytica founder Nigel Oakes told Channel 4 News it was his understanding that Emerdata was set up a year ago to acquire all of Cambridge Analytica and all of SCL. Channel 4 News
A website for a company called Coinagelabs.org displayed Cambridge Analytica as a partner. The team was led by CEO Sandy Peng, who previously worked at Reorient Capital, part of Reorient Group where Chun Shun Ko had been executive chairman. The site is no longer available. Twitter Thread
March 2018
March 13: A key goal of UAE political advisor George Nader, and Elliott Broidy who had hundreds of millions of dollars of business with the UAE, was accomplished, and Rex Tillerson was fired. New York Times
March 19: Russia-friendly California representative Dana Rohrabacher, who has criticized the Magnitsky Act and who Prince had interned for in the 1990’s, posted on his Facebook page “Proud that two patriots like Ollie North and Erik Prince are with me in my re-election campaign. Erik hosted today at his farm near Middleburg, VA a highly successful fundraiser for me. Ollie along (with) rising stars Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Tom Garrett Jr. inspired the 100+ patriots who showed up to support me.” Rohrabacher Facebook
April 2018
Sources reported that “Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained evidence that calls into question Congressional testimony given by Trump supporter and Blackwater founder Erik Prince last year, when he described a meeting in Seychelles with a Russian financier close to Vladimir Putin as a casual chance encounter “over a beer.”” ABC News
John Bolton is set to begin as Donald Trump’s new National Security Advisor, replacing Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who had opposed Erik Prince’s plans to privatize the war in Afghanistan. Washington Post
Robert Mercer, the largest funder of Cambridge Analytica, has given $5 million to Bolton’s super PAC since 2013. He was the Bolton super PAC’s largest donor during the 2016 election cycle, and so far, is also the largest donor for the 2018 election cycle, according to federal campaign finance filings. The Center for Public Integrity
A source close to Erik Prince said, “now that McMaster will be replaced by neocon favorite John Bolton, and Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo, who once ran an aerospace supplier, the dynamics have changed. Bolton’s selection, particularly, is “going to take us in a really positive direction.”” Forbes
According to an SEC filing, Kushner Companies appears to have reached a deal to buy out its partner, Vornado Realty Trust, in the troubled 666 Fifth Avenue property. The Kushners had previously negotiated unsuccessfully with Chinese company Anbang Insurance Group, whose chairman has since been prosecuted and regulators have seized control of the company. The Kushners also negotiated unsuccessfully with the former prime minister of Qatar, and shortly afterwards Qatar was hacked and blockaded by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt. It is not clear who will provide the financing for the deal. New York Times
2019
February: $1.2 billion debt on Kushner Companies’ 666 Fifth Avenue building becomes due. Bloomberg
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