Mass. Attorney General just opened an
investigation into Trump and his shady election data company
BY GRANT STERN
The New York
Times and London’s Observer broke a joint story that proves Trump’s
primary 2016 election data company, Cambridge Analytica, obtained hacked
Facebook records to illegally harvest the data of 50 million
American voters.
Data scientist Chris Wylie built the Cambridge Analytica data company into
“Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf*ck tool,” and he has the proof that
his tools were built on illegally obtained Facebook data. (video
below)
They turned Facebook
“likes” into a political weapon exploited by the
Republican Party to help install Donald Trump into the White House.
That’s why
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey just launched a new investigation into
the UK-based data company formed by hedge fund billionaire GOP kingmaker Robert
Mercer, who owned Breitbart News.
The Trump campaign used Cambridge Analytica to micro-target voters and to attempt to persuade them to vote against their own interests or to stay home on election day.
“Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We are launching an investigation. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html …”
The reporting, based
on Carole
Cadwalladr‘s dogged reporting in the Times, explains
how Cambridge Analytica used unlawfully obtained information from Facebook to
create psychographic profiles of every US voter, then conduct information
warfare to help get Donald Trump elected.
Jared Kushner infamously told a group of interns that
the Trump Campaign was too disorganized to collude with Russia, but the August
2016 shakeup following indicted campaign manager Paul Manafort’s departure
changed everything.
Trump hired Cambridge
Analytica VP Steve Bannon to replace him (who also ‘worked for free’) at the
direction of GOP megadonor Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer.
Bannon and Mercer’s
development of Cambridge Analytica stretched back to two years and relied on a
dark secret. The Times reports:
The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.
So the firm harvested
private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users
without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates
and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s
history.
The breach allowed the
company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the
American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on
President Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Amazingly, CEO
Alexander Nix lied to multiple UK investigations about using stolen Facebook
data, which his whistleblowing Canadian colleague can prove because he’s got a postcard from Facebook
in August 2016 asking him to delete the information.
That’s why
Facebook suddenly announced late on Friday night
that they’ve cutoff Cambridge Analytica and parent company SCL.
The social media giant
denies calling their illicit activities a “hack,” but it represents the largest
known systematic misuse of Americans personal data since the advent of Mark
Zuckerberg’s revolutionary internet platform:
We are suspending
Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), including their political data
analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from Facebook.
In 2015, we learned that
a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan
lied to us and violated our Platform
Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook
Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and
military work around the globe.
He also passed that data to Christopher Wylie
of Eunoia Technologies, Inc.
In addition to the
obvious moral and ethical outrage raised by the revelation of Republicans using
stolen data to create a propaganda machine and use it to help elect a white
nationalist as America’s president, there are serious legal problems.
It’s illegal for
non-US citizens or green card holders to hold decision making roles in a vendor working
on American federal elections, but that didn’t stop Bannon and
Mercer from doing just that; totally ignoring election law and leaving CEO
Alexander Nix in charge of most of the company’s operations.
“This story is more
evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild
West.” says Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), who has
been at the forefront of Congressional investigations into the devious use of
social media in elections – when he hasn’t been busy helping Republicans deregulate the financial industry and roll back the
Dodd-Frank Act, that is.
“Whether it’s allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear that left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency.”
If only those same
concerns were extended to the finance industry.
Most of America’s
election laws date back to the post-Watergate era, but a withering legal
assault since then has allowed dark money to pour into the democratic process
from all angles, and enforcement action takes years and can easily be hindered.
But the Republican
Party’s disgusting marriage between a few American oligarchs and their
propaganda machines has come about as a direct result of the utter absence of
democratic norms in highly influential 1%ers, people who made their fortunes on
the backs of US citizens for whom today they show nothing but contempt.
“If you do not respect
the agency of people,” remarked Wylie the data scientist to The
Guardian, “anything you do after that point is not conducive to democracy.”
Shamefully, the
Republican Party has no respect for democracy, or the agency of individuals to
make choices based on facts rather than lies.
Watch Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie tell all about the
propaganda machine that spawned Brexit and helped Donald Trump get elected:
To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M&feature=youtu.be