The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Mon, May 8, 2017 at 9:40 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy
was hijacked
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend Robert Berger.  DLH]

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump
and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the
EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral
process still fit for purpose?
By Carole Cadwalladr
May 7 2017
<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
>

“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by
states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are
profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.”
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016

“It’s not MI6’s job to warn of internal threats. It was a very strange
speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a shot
across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa May’s government?
Does she know something she’s not telling us?”
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017

In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing
through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously
interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert
Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica,
and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a
role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come.
London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain
had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.

“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the
world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul
tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare
firm.”

Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare?
“Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same
methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they
mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections
in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask
him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only
it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian
and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were
working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like
election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”

On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief executive,
Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. “She said, ‘You really
need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she
suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through
her father.”

Who’s her father?

“Eric Schmidt.”

Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google?

“Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company called Palantir.”

I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months
and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking
moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now
a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all
over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the
billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s
first vocal supporter of Trump.

In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an introduction to
Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever
researched.

A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story
of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our
time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber.
And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley –
Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of
the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in
Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in
Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump
administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge
Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these
relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we
hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that
is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an
authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British
democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination
enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land
grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently
amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a
late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a
wormhole of Google autocompletesuggestions that ended with “did the
holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan
Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina,
who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person
to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and
he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”,
a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign
and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring
Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and
information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key
Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence
suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media
and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and
rightwing propaganda.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170508094130:08BD1C8A-33F4-11E7-AADF-D6D82418F108
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com