Category Archives: privacy

The Great Hack

David Carroll(American) vs Cambridge Analytica (legal challenge in Britain asking force the court to turn in all the data they harvested on him

Demands:  full disclosure, where they get the data, how they process it, who they share with and do we have the right to opt out?

Analytica claims they have 5,000 point on every American.

"When people see the extent of the surveillance. I think they are going to be shocked"

Analytica: we don't use Facebook data, they use Facebook as a platform to advertise.

[News] Mr. Alexander Nix, did you mislead the Parliament with data from Facebook?

Mr. Nix: absolutely not.

Facebook knew about the data collection but didn't do anything until the news came out.

Christopher Wylie and Paul-Oliver Dehaye inquiry into disinformation and fake news at UK Parliament.

Brittany Kaiser key player to Analytica, former director of Business Development for Cambridge Analytica

"Brittany Kaiser is not a whistler blower", Christopher Wylie

Paul Hider, Writer/Political Technologist advices her to share her material.

Kaiser worked for the republican party in USA, Ted Cruz and Brexit in UK.

First meeting in the Trump Towel: November 2015 she met with Alexander Nix and Corey Lewandowski, who was the campaign manager.

"Persuadables"

The Observer

Carole Cadwalladr

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

Julian Wheatland, Former COO/CFO, Cambridge Analytica/SCL: Chris Wyle set out to kill Analytica. He worked for 9 months in 2014 then he went to pitch for the campaign and lost to them.

Who we are

We are a behavior change

Case:

Trinidad and Tobago: blacks and Indians. Analytica worked for the Indians. We went to the client and we said, "We want to target the youth." And we try to increase apathy. It was non political because the kids don't care about politics. It had to be reactive, because they're lazy.  So we came up with this campaign, which was all about: Be part of the gang. Do something cool. Be part of a movement. And it was called the "Do So!" campaign. 

[Kaiser] It means "I am not going to vote."

[Nix] "Do So!" "Don't vote!"

The Salute of Resistance that is know to all across Trinidad and Tobago. It is a sign of resistance against, not the government, against politics and voting. They are making youtube videos, graffitied the prime minister's house. "It was carnage." We knew that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they Do So! But all the Indian Kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. They had lots of fun doing this but they're not gonna go against their parents' will. And the difference in 18 - to 35 year-old turnout was like 40%. And that swung the election about 6%, which all we needed in an election that's very close. 

They work on national campaigns. Kaiser was in all of it enjoying it and laughing aware of "oops we should talk about that" referring about Brexit.

[Brittany] "... these are classified as weapons-grade technology and it is actually illegal to use them without the permission of the British government. "

[Cadwalladr] It is psyOps. Psyops is psychological operations. Ant it's a term that the military uses to describe what you do in warfare which isn't warfare... SCL started out as a military contractor. SCL Defense. 

We ave fairly substantial defense business. We actually train the British Army, the British Navy, the US Army, US Special Forces. We train NATO, the CIA, State Department, Pentagon. It is using research to influence behavior of hostile audiences. You know, how do you persuade 14- to 30-year-old Muslim boys not to join Al-Qaeda? Essentially communication warfare. 

Cambridge Analytica was shut down but there are other companies.