Predicted response by Grassley: Nothing to see here… move along, the GOP has EVERYTHING under control.
This is our Rosetta Stone , neatly tying everything together
Yes Collusion! Yes Collusion! , You bet there was Collusion
There’s a lot of there there. Too much there there for Republicans to look there.
Squirrel! Look over there!
Good for her.
Especially in the House as currently organized you have to make these requests, even knowing nothing will come of it. Volunteer locally, folks, and give if you can. Even a pauper like me can rob his liquor budget a bit to buy the local committee stamps, envelopes, burner phones, bumper stickers, everything they need. Let’s get this done. Then after November we can make them pay.
Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Dix, confessed to using honeypots and blackmail to influence politicians on hidden camera. Really makes you wonder how many Republicans have been ensnared in this sinister plot led by the Mercers and Bannon.
Seems like Bannon should be called back to the Special Counsel’s offices, that is, if they didn’t already know this.
This isn’t even close to done exploding.
Apparently why the authorities were getting an emergency warrant to raid CA in London, FB had dispatched a team of lawyers and data cleaners to conduct an “audit” on the premises. They were ordered to cease and desist.
Now FB is “demanding” the phone and computer of the CA whistleblower…a move that screams desperation and has no legal basis.
And Channel4 isn’t even done airing all the footage they have. Next up is supposedly CA bragging about how they won the election here for Trump.
Its unraveling very, very fast.
Facebook is evil.
This is what I’m waiting for.
Well the GOP House has identified the real enemy here and wants an investigation. (Hint: it’s not CA)
These people are every bit as evil as Trump. As they say in the article, “No daylight between them.”
I’ve got small monthly donations going to Indivisible and Run fo Something. I donated to Jones and Lamb. Nothing huge — but if everyone did it? I am now a subscriber to the NYT, WaPo, and the Guardian (who got a tip from me last night❤️) And, of course, I joined TPM Prime the instant I discovered this website in July ‘16.
This sounds like a lot, but it’s not. There are 300,000+ million people in this country. The internet has caused this problem, and it can solve this problem. The flow of information and money can go to good actors as well as bad. We all need to step up and walk the walk by donating whatever we can comfortably afford and volunteering whatever time we can possibly spare.
You’re doing plenty. It’s important. I notice you’re a Prime member too. One reason I’m kind of a pest about MSM-bashing when it’s not deserved is that they really need our help and do more good work than many of us are willing to recognize. But most of all it’s those local Dem committees who knock on doors and make calls and get that damn vote out. If we get this done, the country’s saved. If not—no guarantees. Seems like an easy call.
FB will not get anything. They are in deep, deep do. Front page of this mornings NYT:
It very clearly spells out how Facebook betrayed their users — and the country — for profit. And they are about to pay:
Roger B. McNamee, an early investor in Facebook who said he considered himself a mentor to Mr. Zuckerberg, said the company was failing to face the fundamental problems posed by the Russian meddling and other manipulation of content.
“I told them, ‘Your business is based on trust, and you’re losing trust,’” said Mr. McNamee, a founder of the Center for Humane Technology. “They were treating it as a P.R. problem, when it’s a business problem. I couldn’t believe these guys I once knew so well had gotten so far off track.”
REPOSTING FROM ANOTHER THREAD
The recent Cambridge Analytica related pieces in print and video are a fascinating look into the weaponization of personal information, and the sheer greed and corruption of Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO. However, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. The larger arc of these stories is that we have found one of the missing pieces in Vladimir Putin’s expansive campaign to undermine the US elections and elect Donald Trump.
The Internet Research Agency indictment tells the story of what the Russians did on the social media front to target voters, and what laws they broke in doing so (with the assistance of US based collaborators known and unknown to the grand jury). The series of pieces on Cambridge Analytica (Guardian, Observer, Channel 4 and prior articles from Bloomberg and others) are telling us where and how the Russians got their data from to build fake profiles and develop fake news.
The Russians got their data and the methodology for the use of data from Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica got its source data from Facebook. Specifically, the Russians used two agents to gather an understanding of the methodology to build psychological profiles and to actually harvest data that could be used to build voter profiles: (1) Another Russian professor, Alexsandr Kogan (in my view a Russian spy) and (2) a large, state connected Russian enterprise, Lukoil (another large state oil company that appears to be thoroughly penetrated by Russian intelligence and was used as a front for Putin’s purposes).
(1) Alexsandr Kogan’s story
Kogan was a Cambridge based academic who owned a company called Global Science Research (GSR), but few knew that he was also an associate professor St Petersburg University in Russia who had received grants from the RU government to research social media and human behavior topics.
When Cambridge Analytica went hunting for the data to put Wylie’s idea to the test, Kogan inserted himself into the process, cutting the Cambridge’s preferred partner, Michal Kosinski, out of the deal and essentially replicated Kosinski’s research (which I think meant Kogan copied his database and then used it to plug in his own data set which he later obtained through FB). With financial backing from Cambridge Analytica (read: the Mercers + strong support from Steve Bannon) Kogan then created an app and got some baseline data by the old fashioned way of paying people to take surveys. Once he reached critical mass, he got that app on to Facebook’s platform and got permission from users to use their FB data. However, Kogan then grabbed all of the data from their FB friends (without permission) and the CA data bank mushroomed. Kogan also exceeded the scope of his license for ‘academic use only’. Whether Kogan shared that data or not with the Russian FSB is not clear. However, when you match up the profiling that Wylie had first conceived and what Mueller reported in the Internet Research Agency indictment, the pattern is clear. The Russians knew how to build psychological profiles of voters and it seems eerily similar to what Cambridge Analytica did.
Another thing to note is that this contract between CA and Alexsandr Kogan’s company was dated in 2014 (again, aligning with Mueller’s own timeline for the Russian interference campaign). Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, appears to have lied to British members of Parliament when asked directly whether CA had received data from Alexsandr Kogan’s company, GSR. Why would he lie? I think because Nix knew Kogan/GSR were a front for Russian intelligence. If you watch that Channel 4 broadcast, Nix is as corrupt as they come.
Moreover, when you read the commentary of Konstantin Rykov following the election, one of Putin’s tech and internet media savvy assets, who is a voice of the Kremlin on social media and who has vocally supported Brexit, Marine Le Pen and Trump, you see the connection in plain sight. (Incidentally, Rykov is very close with Yulya Alferova and her husband Artem Klyushin who were alongside Trump at the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant).
Here is Rykov on Facebook shortly after the election with a confession:
What was our idea with Donald Trump? For four years and two days. It was necessary to get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality. Ensure the victory of Donald in the election of the US President. Then create a political alliance between the United States, France, Russia (and a number of other states) and establish a new world order. Our idea was insane, but realizable. In order to understand everything for the beginning, it was necessary to “digitize” all possible types of modern man. Donald decided to invite for this task - the special scientific department of the “Cambridge University.”
British scientists from Cambridge Analytica suggested making 5,000 existing human psychotypes - the “ideal image” of a possible Trump supporter. Then … put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone.
Then it was only necessary to upload this data to information flows and social networks. And we began to look for those who would have coped with this task better than others. At the very beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev. The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.
This statement has been sitting on Facebook since Nov 2016. Here, we see Rykov make specific reference to both Cambridge Analytica and the special scientific department of Cambridge University. That latter reference seems to be to Alexsandr Kogan. There’s also a side of Wikileaks and hackers thrown in for good measure.
Also keep in mind that George Papadopoulos had several conversations with a Russia-connected professor, Joseph Mifsud (who is now missing). Carter Page also made his connection to Russia through a New Jersey based Russian professor and went to Moscow in July 2016 on the pretext of attending an academic conference. In other words, the Russians use academia as an avenue for intelligence operations. Kogan’s connection to Cambridge Analytica fits that pattern.
(2) Lukoil’s Story
Lukoil is Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In 2014, Lukoil contacted Alexander Nix to dig about information on getting profiles about US voters. They made up some weird reason to make connections to customers of their petroleum business through microtargeting, but the presentations they received were all about election disruption campaigns (including the now familiar ‘rigged’ claim that we heard both from the Trumpers and the Berners) and psychographic messaging focused on election disruption techniques. Lukoil is run by Vagit Alekperov, and not surprisingly, he’s close to Putin and has assisted Putin on various foreign policy measures in Europe and elsewhere. Lukoil’s story seems similar to the big Russian banks, Rosneft or any other major Russian enterprises that are simply used as an extension of Russian intelligence.
This extensive data dump about Cambridge Analytica demonstrates that Russia took advantage of that relationship to build its model and grab the tools for election disruption. Facebook was, at minimum, grossly negligent with its own users’ data. Alexander Nix was willful in breaking all manner of data privacy laws, anti-bribery and anti-blackmail laws, and I suspect he was conspiring with the Russians against the UK and the US. Whether the Bannons/Mercers were useful fools who identified ideas that could be capitalized, or were witting players is unclear, but Manafort and Kushner, who recommended Cambridge Analytica, are not naïve. They knew. Trump also likely knew (especially if you take Rykov’s statement at face value). They understood the cyber warfare they were waging. All we need is some additional hard evidence that they worked with the Russians to wage that war. I suspect Mueller has this evidence, given how much the British press know. MI-6 must know more and has probably shared it with Mueller’s team.
OT
Thanks for posting that.
Data science and data mining is extremely powerful and very hard for people without a background in statistics to understand. I wonder how much traction this story will get.
People “get” Stormy Daniels. Data mining not so much.
True story: Kogan once legally changed his last name to “Spectre.”
The guardian’s work is really good (I have watched the channel 4 videos yet). What jumped out at me was that CA’s parent company runs “MI-6 for hire” mercenary propaganda campaigns on one side of the house and voter targeting and election advertising on the other. Wylie talked about “information dominance”. Not persuasion. Not even identifying wedge issues. Dominating someone’s information sources so no matter where you turn you find the same propaganda. The other pernicious thing is that you can use totally contradictory propaganda on different tranches of the population and no-one will know. In a traditional tv ad campaign you have to weigh the risk of negative ads turning off some of your supporters against the impact you hope to have on your opponent
Now, confess - aren’t you all starting to actually feel sorry for these numbnuts? I mean, really - Fox can’t run any stories about Stormy, even though they’re dying to, they can’t hold hearing on the IF report about Hillary because, you know, it’ll say there was nothing there, they can’t look into the Cambridge fustercluck, because, you know, there is something there. I mean really, doesn’t it break your heart?
Nah, me neither…