by Roger Herried
The Netflix
documentary about Cambridge Analytica
titled "The Great Hack," made in conjunction with the UK's Guardian
newspaper, contains a number of important themes worth flagging:
• The loss of privacy due to social media
and big data;
• The new age of advanced voter suppression
tactics – referred to as weapons grade psychological warfare;
• The mainstream media's role in voter
suppression;
• Facebook as God - or did we all miss the
moment when it took over?
• Steve Bannon and his chump Trump's
crusade to break democracy;
• and our Voter's ranked choice: What Authoritarian State do you prefer to be
trapped within?
“The Great Hack”
uses the personal stories of three different characters, David Carroll, Britney
Kaiser and Carole Cadwalladr to develop
Cambridge Analytica's (CA) role in the 2016 Brexit vote and the U.S.
2016 presidential elections. David
Carroll, who teaches computer sciences in the U.S., and concerned that his
8-year-old daughter would likely have 70,000 data points she could not control
by the time she reached 18 years of age, filed suit against CA in an attempt to
obtain the personal data the company had on him. At the end of the film he
bemoans the fact that after suing CA, it refused to give him his data and
likely went into bankruptcy rather than releasing the government ordered
release. Britney Kaiser, who was an employee of CA, claimed it aimed "weapons grade communications"
technology against voters in the US and UK elections, while the glue that
brings the CA scandal together comes from the Guardian's investigative
journalist, Carole Cadwalladr who spent two years, day and night tracking down
the story and its main characters. 
“The Great Hack” is
a complicated but well done story about issues intentionally buried by the US
media in keeping with its own historic
role of electoral voter suppression since the days of Jim Crow. Central to the
film is Carroll's use of the CA scandal to legally obtain a copy of the
personal data the company had on him. Yet for most Americans, data privacy is
considered a dead cow, or more to the point, it suggests the immoral state of
most of the country's media and those who have led us down a path that makes
1984 look like a happy alternative. Prior to going bankrupt, CA claimed to have scooped up to 5,000 data points for every U.S. citizen, aiming their weapons grade software system at US and UK citizens, specifically against undecided voters in an attempt to suppress or shift their voting behavior. At one point, the documentary shows a Washington Post headline from the Ted Cruz campaign claiming to credit the CA system taking him from last place to actually beating Trump in the Iowa primary. The Netflix presentation glosses over this rather quickly, but there is a 30 minute Youtube piece made in Germany by Alexander Nix, the head of CA, that goes into extensive detail about the weapons grade voter profiling system.
Before delving into
the details of the CA system, readers should understand what is meant by a data
point. A single data point might be the entire history of every single time
anyone uses a debit/credit card to purchase groceries or when and where someone
buys gas, dines out, etc. Such a large
data point can then be sorted through by category and used to create a personal
map of what that person bought, why and when that can then be integrated back
into the digital advertising world growing around us. And this traces just one data point.
Who is selling and
trading these data points? A decade ago
progressives were already alarmed about what data the government had on the
public, unaware that corporate data collection and sales go far beyond what the
government has. Phone companies, banks
and telecommunication companies retain digital copies of everything anyone does
today, not just the meta-data. Google
for example has a database listing every single search anyone ever looked at or
went to. That's another data point. Imagine what PG&E is collecting with
their smart meters (another) or Amazon's cute little Ring video security box
(another) that EFF recently exposed as having a direct line to law enforcement—without
the user's knowledge.
Thus, David's
concern is ultimately supported by Kaiser and Carole, shown giving a TED Talk
in Silicon Valley where she confronts
Bay Area tech companies about their role manipulating elections here and
around the world with their deployment of big data models.
The documentary
itself starts out with a visit to Donald Trump's election headquarters in Texas
with images of both Google and Facebook staffers actually embedded along with Trump workers to help coordinate #45’s
online ad campaign. It shows that the
Trump campaign spent over a million dollars a day or $80 million in 2016 on
social media. During the election cycle
their social media project produced 5.9 million targeted ads compared to 66,000
by his challenger, who spent most of her far bigger budget on TV ads. 
The half hour
presentation by CA's Alexander Nix demonstrates specific details showing how
behavioral science, data analytics and addressable ad technology, focused down
to the individual, were applied during the Cruz and the Trump campaigns. Nix’s and CA's goal aimed to identify a very
tiny public minority undecided about whether to vote or for whom. Cambridge
psychologist (Professor Aleksandr Kogen) designed a short Facebook survey called
OCEAN or Openness - Conscientiousness - Extroversion - Agreeableness - and
Neuroticism specifically used to identify 5 major personality profiles as a way
to build personally targeted attack ads once other polling data identified
someone as a likely candidate meriting their attention.
It was this
specific OCEAN system that Britany Kaiser identified as the "weapons
grade technology" which was used in the key swing states of Michigan,
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania during the 2016 election. A UK government
investigation referred to it, claiming that the UK election system was no
longer safe. What happened to those databases?
Might they have been sold to the RNC or somebody else?
To clarify such
speculation it may be helpful to understand that CA was started by Steve
Bannon, Trump's campaign manager, and funded by the secretive right-wing
billionaire, Robert Mercer, the
Breitbart operative who suggested that Putin create a Europe-wide nationalist
movement and whose stated agenda has been to break up the United States through
social media disinformation.
Why would the U.S.
media establishment find it very uncomfortable to share the fact that the U.S.
is in the early stages of applying psychological warfare against its own
citizens? Or that CA's profiling model
on Facebook is just the tip of this country's historic voter suppression
agenda?
The Washington Post
published a couple of documentaries about Facebook's agenda going back to 2013
as well as experiments the social media giant had been conducting internally to
see if it could impact the mood of its users. But the Post has never repeated these
bombshell stories! It should be clear
that CA understood that their model doesn't necessarily work on everyone being
targeted, but then the full story of CA has yet to be exposed.
The company itself is
a subsidiary of the SCL Group which dates back to the 1990's
and has long been in the business of destroying elections in third-world countries
for its clients, the US and UK military and intelligence communities. Here is where the story gets really dirty.
Nix goes into detail how the company used fake movements they created and
seeded to undermine the elections of Trinidad and Tobago as well as over a
dozen other countries. The Guardian's
coverage finally broke out with underground footage of Alexander Nix vaunting his
claim for their involvement in election manipulation, and showed shots of them
partying, along with leaders of the Brexit campaign, with Trump during his
election eve victory. The Guardian revealed how CA's global skill-set
destroying elections helped them come up with the crooked Hillary meme and
launch it on the internet.
Footage shows
Zuckerberg prevaricating before Congress while Britany jumps on the phone to
text a senator an urgent question she thinks needs to be asked at the
hearing...
At the film’s
climax, with voice-over commentary by Britany it shows what at first appears to
be an onscreen file identifying the size of the CA's voter database but another
screen does identify the many different databases totaling 150 million
Americans that CA was using as part of the Trump campaign. Close-ups review her own life and testimony
in the UK and the US, along with shots of her involvement with the Brexit
campaign and explain why she went from working on the Obama election campaign
to working for Trump's election. But ultimately the viewer gets
the complicated story needing far more attention on this convergence of
critical issues.
How much of
Facebook's income is made by monetization of its users' personal data? Britany
and David follow up with their own answer to the question, "All of it."
This means we are
talking about one of the largest companies in the world actively seeking to
play a dominant role in manipulating elections here and around the world via
its AI newsfeeds and advertising models, and that the only country in the world
that has any regulatory authority over it is the U.S.
It’s been decades
since the McCain Feingold hearings heard testimony by witnesses exposing the
fact that the strongest opponent of campaign finance reform is the media and
its broadcaster's association, with the election cycle is its biggest cash
cow.
Maybe we
appear to be going through a three-year presidential election cycle because the
media has very nearly been overtaken monetarily by Facebook and is not yet ready to
spill the beans. At least not yet.
As the Amazon, the Arctic, and Africa burn, demand Trump take action on climate change before it’s too late at https://petitions.signforgood.com/ActionOnClimateNow?firstName=Cecile&lastName=Leneman&email=cecilep@sonic.net&zip=94704&ask=1&amounts=1,5,25,50,100,250&code=daga&redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fsurveys.signforgood.com%2Fdaga-climate-action%3Fcode%3Djtk799-ja-nd
Tell Congress and ICE to stop the raids that took over 600 people recently in Mississippi at https://action.momsrising.org/sign/ICEraids/?t=6&referring_akid=12720.8086.oTCoTa
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