Cambridge Analytica - A British Deep State Tool

[David Guyatt]

Apologies that I don;t have time to provide a commentary at the moment. But the below three links provide much of the story. Again thanks to Tooth for sending me this link. Consequently he, and then I, had the Bella Caledonia stories before Craig Murray...

My working hypothesis is that CA have been outed in revenge for TRump's firing of Feebie McCabe and his attack on the FBI as an institution. This theory could easily change and evolve as it's early days, but there's no way this story would've been allowed to break imo, unless there were powerful sponsors pushing it. Ergo, the US deep state.

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/20/...tish-coup/

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/19/...democracy/

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/...s-surface/

[Lauren Johnson]

This the Beeb so you gotta wonder as David has about CA being outed.

[Peter Lemkin]

How come nobody sends beautiful Ukrainian women in my direction? Damn!

CA is a very spooky company that has been doing spooky things for a lot of strange clients longer than most think...its now just starting to come out now.

HOW CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA PATRONIZED TRUMP VOTERS

Do Americans have the slightest idea of the extent to which they are manipulated? That seems to be the big and so far unexplored question as scandal continues to explode around Facebook and a UK-based data company.
The news is dominated currently by Cambridge Analytica, the data company that helped propel Donald Trump into the White House. It is in hot water this week, following reports that it harvested information from 50 million Facebook users without their consent.
New stunning stories keep coming from the UK's Channel 4. On Tuesday, these revelations resulted in the suspension of the company's chief executive Alexander Nix. Previously, we learned that top Cambridge Analytica officials, including Nix, were caught on hidden cameras discussing dirty and possibly illegal campaign tricks such as using beautiful women or fake businessmen to entrap rival candidates.
The secretly recorded videos, which you can see below, pull back the curtain on modern political campaigns.
More than anything, however, they show that the spread of social media, and the resulting reams of data that users willingly hand to companies like Facebook, allow campaigns to manipulate people into voting a certain way.

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Here are a few striking examples of Cambridge Analytica executives caught by Channel 4 News as they boast about exploiting voters' digital profiles in order to effectively manipulate them:
If you're collecting data on people and you're profiling them, that gives you more insight that you can use to know how to segment the population, to give them messaging about issues that they care about, and language, and imagery that they're likely to engage with. And we use that in America, and we use that in Africa. That's what we do as a company.

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The two fundamental human drivers when it comes to taking information onboard effectively are hopes and fears, and many of those are unspoken and even unconscious. You didn't know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you. And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else, to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. It's no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually it's all about emotion.

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Cambridge Analytica staff also had even more egregious things to say, promising or implying all manner of nefarious undertakings, including the following:
We'll have a wealthy developer come in, somebody posing as a wealthy developer…
[Second exec speaking:] I'm a master of disguise [laughter].
They will offer a large amount of money, to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We'll have the whole thing recorded on cameras. We'll blank out the face of our guy, and then post it on the internet.

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Send some girls around to the candidates house. We have lots of history of things.

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We've just used a different organization to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country where they did a really… no-one even knew they were there. They just drift, they were just ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out and produced, really, really good material. So we have experience in doing this.

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We subcontract to them. We use some British companies, we use some Israeli companies. Very effective in intelligence gathering.

The British government had three contracts in the past with Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL Group but they ended well before the current issues, a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday.

[Michael Barwell]

[Peter Lemkin]

The Mind-Benders: How to Harvest Facebook Data, Brainwash Voters, and Swing Elections

[FONT=&amp]by[/FONT][FONT=&amp]ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ[/FONT][URL="https://www.counterpunch.org/#facebook"]
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Photo by paz.ca | CC BY 2.0

In the days and weeks following the 2016 presidential elections, reports surfaced about how a small British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, might have played a pivotal role in Donald Trump's surprise victory. The company claimed to have formulated algorithms to influence American voters using individually targeted political advertisements. It reportedly generated personality profiles of millions of individual citizens by collecting up to 5000 data points on each person. Then Cambridge Analytica used these "psychographic" tools to send voters carefully crafted online messages about candidates or hot-button political issues.
Although political consultants have long used "microtargeting" techniques for zeroing in on particular ethnic, religious, age, or income groups, Cambridge Analytica's approach is unusual: The company relies upon individuals' personal data that is harvested from social media apps like Facebook. In the US, such activities are entirely legal. Some described Cambridge Analytica's tools as "mind-reading software" and a "weaponized AI [artificial intelligence] propaganda machine." However, corporate media outlets such as CNN and the Wall Street Journal often portrayed the company in glowing terms.
Cambridge Analytica is once again in the headlinesbut under somewhat different circumstances. Late last week, whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public, explaining how he played an instrumental role in collecting millions of Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica. This revelation is significant because until investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr published her exposé in The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica's then-CEO Alexander Nix had adamantly denied using Facebook data. And although Facebook officials knew that Cambridge Analytica had previously gathered data on millions of users, they did not prohibit the company from advertising until last Friday, as the scandal erupted. To make matters worse, the UK's Channel 4 released undercover footage early this week in which Cambridge Analytica executives boast about using dirty tricksbribes, entrapment, and "beautiful girls" to mention a few.
The case of Cambridge Analytica brings into focus a brave new world of electoral politics in an algorithmic agean era in which social media companies like Facebook and Twitter make money by selling ads, but also by selling users' data outright to third parties. Relatively few countries have laws that prevent such practicesand it turns out that the US does not have a comprehensive federal statute protecting individuals' data privacy. This story is significant not only because it demonstrates what can happen when an unorthodox company takes advantage of a lax regulatory environment, but also because it reveals how Internet companies like Facebook have played fast and loose with the personal data of literally billions of users.
From Public Relations to Psychological Warfare
In order to make sense of Cambridge Analytica it is helpful to understand its parent company, SCL Group, which was originally created as the PR firm Strategic Communications Laboratory. It was founded in the early 1990s by Nigel Oakes, a flamboyant UK businessman. By the late 1990s, the company was engaged almost exclusively in political projects. For example, SCL was hired to help burnish the image of Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahidbut Oakes and SCL employees had to shut down their operations center when SCL's cover was blown by the Wall Street Journal .
In July 2005, SCL underwent a dramatic transformation. It very publicly rebranded itself as a psychological warfare company by taking part in the UK's largest military trade show. SCL's exhibit included a mock operations center featuring dramatic crisis scenariosa smallpox outbreak in London, a bloody insurgency in a fictitious South Asian countrywhich were then resolved with the help of the company's psyops techniques. Oakes told a reporter: "We used to be in the business of mindbending for political purposes, but now we are in the business of saving lives." The company's efforts paid off. Over the next ten years, SCL won contracts with the US Defense Department's Combatant Commands, NATO, and Sandia National Labs.
Over the past few years SCLnow known as SCL Grouphas transformed itself yet again. It no longer defines itself as a psyops specialist, nor as a political consultancynow, it calls itself a data analytics company specializing in "behavioral change" programs.
Along the way it created Cambridge Analytica, a subsidiary firm which differs from SCL Group in that it focuses primarily on political campaigns. Its largest investors include billionaire Robert Mercer, co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who is best known for his advocacy of far-right political causes and his financial support of Breitbart News. Steve Bannon briefly sat on Cambridge Analytica's board of directors.
Cambridge Analytica first received significant media attention in November 2015, shortly after the firm was hired by Republican presidential nominee Ted Cruz's campaign. Although Cruz ultimately failed, Cambridge Analytica's CEO, Alexander Nix, claimed that Cruz's popularity grew largely due to the company's skillful use of aggregated voter data and personality profiling methods. In August 2016, the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica as part of a desperate effort to challenge Hillary Clinton's formidable campaign machine. Just a few months later, reports revealed that Cambridge Analytica had also played a role in the UK's successful pro-Brexit "Leave.EU" campaign.
Hacking the Citizenry
Cambridge Analytica relies upon "psychographic" techniques that measure the Big Five personality traits borrowed from social psychology: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
In the US, Cambridge Analytica developed psychological profiles of millions of Americans by hiring a company called Global Science Research (GSR) to plant free personality quizzes. Users were lured by the prospect of obtaining free personality scores, while Cambridge Analytica collected dataand access to users' Facebook profiles. Last week, The Guardian reported that Cambridge Analytica collected data from more than 300,000 Facebook users in this way. By agreeing to the terms and conditions of the app, those users also agreed to grant GSR (and by extension, Cambridge Analytica) access to the profiles of their Facebook "friends"totalling approximately 50 million people.
Psychographics uses algorithms to scour voters' Facebook "likes," retweets and other social media data which are aggregated with commercially available information: land registries, automotive data, shopping preferences, club memberships, magazine subscriptions, and religious affiliation. When combined with public records, electoral rolls, and additional information purchased from data brokers such as Acxiom and Experian, Cambridge Analytica has raw material for shaping personality profiles. Digital footprints can be transformed into real people. This is the essence of psychographics: Using software algorithms to scour individual voters' Facebook "likes," retweets and other bits of data gleaned from social media and then combine them with commercially available personal information. Data mining is relatively easy in the US, since it has relatively weak privacy laws compared to South Korea, Singapore, and many EU countries.
In a 2016 presentation, Nix described how such information might be used to influence voter opinions on gun ownership and gun rights. Individual people can be addressed differently according to their personality profiles: "For a highly neurotic and conscientious audinece, the threat of a burglaryand the insurance policy of a gun. . .Conversely, for a closed and agreeable audience: people who care about tradition, and habits, and family."
Despite the ominous sounding nature of psychographics, it is not at all clear that Cambridge Analytica played a decisive role in the 2016 US presidential election. Some charge that the company and its former CEO Alexander Nix, exaggerated Cambridge Analytica's effect on the election's outcome. In February 2017, investigative journalist Kendall Taggart wrote an exposé claiming that more than a dozen former employees of Cambridge Analytica, Trump campaign staffers, and executives at Republican consulting firms denied that psychographics was used at all by the Trump campaign. Taggart concluded: "Rather than a sinister breakthrough in political technology, the Cambridge Analytica story appears to be part of the traditional contest among consultants on a winning political campaign to get their share of the creditand win future clients." Not a single critic was willing to be identified in the report, apparently fearing retaliation from Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who is also an investor in the firm.
Not-So-Innocents Abroad
By no means has Cambridge Analytica limited its work to the US. In fact, it has conducted "influence operations" in several countries around the world.
For example, Cambridge Analytica played a major role in last year's presidential elections in Kenya, which pitted incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta of the right-wing Jubilee Party against Raila Odinga of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement. The Jubilee Party hired Cambridge Analytica in May 2017. Although the company claims to have limited its activities to data collection, earlier this week Mark Turnbull, a managing director for Cambridge Analytica, told undercover reporters a different story. He admitted that the firm secretly managed Kenyatta's entire campaign: "We have rebranded the party twice, written the manifesto, done research, analysis, messaging. I think we wrote all the speeches and we staged the whole thingso just about every element of this candidate," said Turnbull.
Given the most recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica's planting of fake news stories, it seems likely that the company created persuasive personalized ads based on Kenyans' social media data. Fake Whatsapp and Twitter posts exploded days before the Kenyan elections. It is worth remembering that SCL Group has employed disinformation campaigns for military clients for 25 years, and it seems that Cambridge Analytica has continued this pattern of deception.
The August elections were fraught with accusations of vote tampering, the inclusion of dead people as registered voters, and the murder of Chris Msando, the election commission's technology manager, days before the election. When the dust settled, up to 67 people died in post-election violenceand Kenyatta ultimately emerged victorious. Weeks later, the Kenyan Supreme Court annulled the elections, but when new elections were scheduled for October, Odinga declared that he would boycott.
Given Kenya's recent history of electoral fraud, it is unlikely that Cambridge had much impact on the results. Anthropologist Paul Goldsmith, who has lived in Kenya for 40 years, notes that elections still tend to follow the principle of "who counts the votes," not "who influences the voters."
But the significance of Cambridge Analytica's efforts extends beyond their contribution to electoral outcomes. Kenya is no technological backwater. The world's first mobile money service was launched there in 2007, allowing users to transfer cash and make payments by phone. Homegrown tech firms are creating a "Silicon Savannah" near Nairobi. Two-thirds of Kenya's 48 million people have Internet access. Ten million use Whatsapp; six million use Facebook; two million use Twitter. As Kenyans spend more time in the virtual world, their personal data will become even more widely available since Kenya has no data protection laws.
Goldsmith summarizes the situation nicely:

Cambridge Analytica doesn't need to deliver votes so much as to create the perception that they can produce results. . .Kenya provides an ideal entry point into [Africa]. . .Embedding themselves with ruling elites presents a pivot for exploiting emergent commercial opportunities. . .with an eye on the region's resources and its growing numbers of persuadable youth.

Recent reports reveal that Cambridge Analytica has ongoing operations in Mexico and Brazil (which have general elections scheduled this July and October, respectively). India (which has general elections in about a year) has also been courted by the company, and it is easy to understand why: the country has 400 million smartphone users with more than 250 million on either Facebook or Whatsapp. India's elections are also a potential gold mine. More than half a billion people vote in parliamentary elections, and the expenditures are astonishing: Political parties spent $5 billion in 2014, compared to $6.5 billion in last year's US elections. India also has a massive mandatory ID program based on biometric and demographic data, the largest of its kind in the world.
Cambridge Analytica's global strategy appears focused on expanding its market share in promising markets. Although many people might describe Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, and India as developing countries, each in fact has a rapidly growing high-tech infrastructure, relatively high levels of Internet penetration, and large numbers of social media users. They all have weak or nonexistent Internet privacy laws. Though nominally democratic, each country is politically volatile and has experienced episodic outbursts of extreme political, sectarian, or criminal violence. Finally, these countries have relatively young populations, reflecting perhaps a long-term strategy to normalize a form of political communication that will reap long-term benefits in politically sensitive regions.
The capacity for saturating global voters with charged political messages is growing across much of the world, since the cost of buying Facebook ads, Twitterbots and trolls, bots for Whatsapp and other apps is cheapand since more people than ever are spending time on social media. Such systems can be managed efficiently by remote control. Unlike the CIA's psyops efforts in the mid-20th century, which required extensive on-the-ground effortsdropping leaflets from airplanes, bribing local journalists, broadcasting propaganda on megaphones mounted on carsthe new techniques can be deployed from a distance, with minimal cost. Cambridge Analytica relies upon small ground teams to do business with political parties, and partnerships with local business intelligence firms to scope out the competition or provide marketing advice, but most of the work is done from London and New York.
Weaponizing Big Data?
From its beginnings, Cambridge Analytica has declared itself to be a "data-driven" group of analytics experts practicing an improved form of political microtargeting, but there are indications that the firm has broader ambitions.
In March 2017, reports emerged that top executives from SCL Group met with Pentagon officials, including Hriar Cabayan, head of a branch which conducts DoD research and cultural analysis. A decade ago, Cabayan played an instrumental role in launching the precursor to the Human Terrain System, a US Army counterinsurgency effort which embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with US combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A few months later, in August 2017, the Associated Press reported that retired US Army General Michael Flynn, who briefly served as National Security Director in the Trump administration, had signed a work agreement with Cambridge Analytica in late 2016, though it is unclear whether he actually did any work for the firm. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian operatives in late 2017, when he was working with Trump's transition team. Given his spot in the media limelight, it is easy to forget that he once headed US intelligence operations in Afghanistan, advocating for a big data approach to counterinsurgency that would, among other things, include data collected by Human Terrain Teams.
The connections between Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group and the Pentagon's champions of data-driven counterinsurgency and cyberwarfare may be entirely coincidental, but they do raise several questions: As Cambridge Analytica embarks on its global ventures, is it undertaking projects that are in fact more sinister than its benign-sounding mission of "behavioral change"? And are the company's recent projects in Kenya, India, Mexico, and Brazil simply examples of global market expansion, or are these countries serving as laboratories to test new methods of propaganda dissemination and political polarization for eventual deployment here at home?
Here the lines between military and civilian applications become blurred, not only because ARPANETthe Internet's immediate precursorwas developed by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, but also because the technology can be used for surveillance on a scale that authoritarian regimes of the 20th century could only have dreamed about. As Yasha Levine convincingly argues in his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, the Internet was originally conceived as a counterinsurgency surveillance program.
Neutralizing Facebook's Surveillance Machine
It appears that many people are finally taking note of the digital elephant in the room: Facebook's role in enabling Cambridge Analytica and other propagandists, publicists, and mind-benders to carry out their worklegally and discreetly. As recently noted by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in the online journal Motherboard, Cambridge Analytica's data harvesting practices weren't security breaches, they were "par for the course. . .It was a feature, not a bug. Facebook still collectsand then sellsmassive amounts of data on its users." In other words, every Facebook post or tweet, every g-mail message sent or received, renders citizens vulnerable to forms of digital data collection that can be bought and sold to the highest bidder. The information can be used for all kinds of purposes in an unregulated market: monitoring users' emotional states, manipulating their attitiudes, or disseminating tailor-made propaganda designed to polarize people.
It is telling that Facebook stubbornly refuses to call Cambridge Analytica's actions a "data breach." As Zeynep Tufekci, author of the book Twitter And Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest puts it, the company's defensive posture reveals much about the social costs of social media. She recently wrote:

"If your business is building a massive surveillance machinery, the data will eventually be used and misused. Hacked, breached, leaked, pilfered, conned, targeted, engaged, profiled, sold. There is no informed consent because it's not possible to reasonably inform or consent."

Cambridge Analytica is significant to the extent that it illuminates new technological controlling processes under construction. In a supercharged media environment in which Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) have become the primary means by which literally billions of people consume news, mass producing propaganda has never been easier. With so many people posting so much information about the intimate details of their lives on the Web, coordinated attempts at mass persuasion will almost certainly become more widespread in the future.
In the meantime, there are concrete measures that we can take to rein in Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and other technology giants. Some of the most lucid suggestions have been articulated by Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and early Facebook investor. He recommends a multi-pronged approach: demanding that the social media companies' CEOs testify before congressional and parliamentary committees in open sessions; imposing strict regulations on how Internet platforms are used and commercialized; requiring social media companies to report who is sponsoring political and issues-based advertisements; mandating transparency about algorithms ("users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results," says McNamee); requiring social media apps to offer an "opt out" to users; banning digital "bots" that impersonate humans; and creating rules that allow consumers (not corporations) to own their own data.
In a world of diminishing privacy, our vulnerabilities are easily magnified. Experimental psychologists specializing in what they euphemistically call "behavior design" have largely ignored ethics and morality in order to help Silicon Valley companies create digital devices, apps, and other technologies that are literally irresistible to their users. As the fallout from Cambridge Analytica's activities descends upon the American political landscape, we should take advantage of the opportunity to impose meaningful controls on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other firms that have run roughshod over democratic normsand notions of individual privacyin the relentless pursuit of profit.

[David Guyatt]

The British government lies again. Something to hide.

Lying and deception has become such a way of life in government/political and these times that I suspect speaking the truth is now regarded as an aberration.

From [URL="http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/22/scl-and-the-phantom-contract/"]Bella Caledeonia
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SCL and the Phantom Contract

[LIST=|INDENT=5]by Liam O'Hare 22ND MARCH 20185 COMMENTS
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In the second of our explosive expose of the SCL Group we ask: what is the phantom contract with the MOD from 2010/11 and what did the external training' a previous FOI revealed involve? The MOD is now contradicting previous information it has given out under Freedom of Information laws. As a senior SCL executive admits to us that the company's future is in doubt, Liam O'Hare argues that the government has critical questions to answer.

Theresa May was yesterday forced into addressing the issue of links between the UK Government, the Conservative Party and a company at the centre of a scandal over data harvesting and dirty tricks.
However, instead of clearing up the issue the response has raised urgent questions about the nature of SCL Group's (formerly Strategic Communications Laboratories) relationship to the highest echelons of state power in Britain.
SCL Group is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. They share directors and practise and are for all intents and purposes part of the same organisation. Between them they claim to have influenced more than 200 elections across the world.
In an article for this website, I revealed the extent of the links between SCL Group and the British establishment in particular the Conservative Party. Directors include an array of Etonian educated Tory donors, former government ministers, and high-ranking officers in the British army.
These revelations led to the SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford questioning May about these links at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday.
Her response sidestepped the issue of connections between her own party and the organisation and emphasised that the government has no "current contracts" with SCL Group.

A Downing Street spokesperson later clarified that the government previously had three contracts with SCL Group. One was with the Ministry of Defence between 2014-2015, one with the Home Office in 2009 and one with the Foreign Office in 2008-2009. Here lies a glaring inconsistency.
Last year, the MOD responded to a freedom of information request on its links with SCL Group. In its response it detailed TWO contracts it had with the firm. One of these was in 2014-15, worth £150,000 and involving the "procurement of targeted audience analysis". However, it also notes a second contract (not mentioned by the No 10 spokesperson) , in 2010/11 involving the "provision of external training" and worth £40,000.
I put this major discrepancy to Downing St who insisted that there were only ever three government contracts with the group and suggested I speak to the Ministry of Defence.
Then when I questioned the MOD about the 2010/11 deal, it told me it had "one contract with SCL Group in 2014/15" and are "unable to provide any further information on this."
The response is quite remarkable. The MOD is now contradicting previous information it has given out under Freedom of Information laws. That leaves two options. The first is that the initial information was incorrect and someone imagined a deal with SLC group for external training in 2010/11.
The second is that the MOD and Downing St are providing false information to journalists regarding their dealings with SCL Group. This possibility would open a pandora's box of questions over what the government is seeking to hide and why?
It was revealed yesterday that Mark Turnbull of SCL Group and CA advised the Foreign Office on lessons from Donald Trump's election campaign. The title of his lecture was listed as "examining the application of data in the recent US Presidential election". That raises questions over whether the British government was already aware of the mass harvesting of Facebook data which sparked this scandal.
Details are emerging about the worldwide activities of SCL Group and CA, touching almost every corner of the globe stretching from Brazil, to Nigeria, to Mexico and to India. But it has now emerged that in at least some of these these projects, CA coordinated with the UK MOD.

In Ukraine, SCL were hired to implement a data driven strategy designed to "erode and weaken" anti-government opposition in the country and "win back control of Donetsk". On their website the CA says it produced a project report to the President of Ukraine and intriguingly also "shared with the UK MOD". It begs the questions, why is a private contractor involved in shadowy psyops working hand in glove with the UK MOD on foreign projects?

With a spotlight on the organisation, the group seems to be quickly trying to batten down the hatches. The website for the Behaviour Dynamic Institute (BDI), the behavioural research arm of SCL group has mysteriously gone down.
Remarkably (although perhaps less so regarding how close SCL is to the British establishment) the institute is based at the home of British science and research, the Royal Institute. According to a paper by the SCL director of defence Dr Steve Tatham, this makes it "almost unique in the international contractor community". Quite.
Tatham is another interesting case. He was former head of psyops for British forces in Afghanistan as well as Special Information Operations project officer in the UK Ministry of Defence Operations Directorate.
Tatham went on to set up the training arm of SCL Group called IOTA-Global alongside SCL founder Nigel Oakes and delivered a $1m NATO training course in Latvia aimed at "countering Russian propaganda".
I contacted Tatham to ask if he would continue working with SCL group in light of the revelations, and he responded by saying "I suspect your question is academic as I can't see SCL surviving this".
In further messages, Tatham distanced himself from Cambridge Analytica, the offshoot from SCL Group, and insisted his activities were "ethical" and "truthful".
"I have worked with SCL Defence on defence projects which is well documented, for example the NATO counter propaganda course in Latvia in 2015," Tatham told me.
"In UK and NATO doctrine Psyops is truthful and attributable comms with specific target audiences' not the the appalling stuff CA (Cambridge Analytica) appears to have undertaken,"
"A point about what and who we train. Only NATO and friendly governments. And we only train truthful and attributable techniques. Why? Because our clients work with NATO and that is UK and NATO doctrine… as ex UK military senior officer I have strong personal ethics and that is why we are all so appalled at the revelations about CA".
With founder Alexander Nix being suspended from Cambridge Analytica, a pattern seems to be developing that shifts all blame for the recent scandals onto the subsidiary as opposed to the parent company SCL Group.
However, with the links between the two organisations evident and further revelations emerging every day, it seems clear that this will not wash.
It's now time for the UK government to come completely clean on exactly what ties it had with SCL Group and answer the following questions:
Was it aware of the data harvesting used in the US election?
What is the phantom contract with the MOD in 2010/11 and what did the external training' involve?
What did the other contracts that the government had with SCL Group involve and did it make any other payments to the group, outside of the contracts?
Was there coordination between SCL Group and the MOD in other countries as existed in Ukraine?
Why is taking so long for the Information Commissioner to get a warrant to search databases and servers of Cambridge Analytica?
Until these are answered, we can expect this scandal, which reaches the heart of unaccountable British power, to rumble on and on.
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In regard to the last question posed by Bella Caledonia: "why is it taking so long for the Information Commissioner to get a warrant to search the database servers of Cambridge Analytica", allow me to answer truthfully: CA need more time to shred files and do a thorough in bleaching the hard drives beyond retrieval.

Simples.

[Peter Lemkin]

Pressure grows on PM over Brexit Cambridge Analytica scandal



Campaigners demand Theresa May investigates what Michael Gove and Boris Johnson knew


Kevin Rawlinson
Mon 26 Mar 2018 00.01 BSTLast modified on Mon 26 Mar 2018 11.00 BST[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/26/pressure-grows-on-pm-over-brexit-cambridge-analytica-scandal-theresa-may#img-1"]

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Theresa May attends church near her Maidenhead constituency on Sunday.Photograph: Steve Parsons/PAThe Cambridge Analytica scandal engulfing the official Brexit campaign reached No 10 on Sunday, as campaigners wrote to Theresa May demanding an investigation into what members of her cabinet and her own staff knew.
The letter from the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain came after a whistleblower told the Observer that Vote Leave channelled money through another campaign to a firm linked to the controversial data company Cambridge Analytica in a potential breach of electoral law.
The allegations immediately put pressure on the foreign and environment secretaries, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who were leading members of Vote Leave.
May came under pressure herself over the weekend after Downing Street was accused of outing the whistleblower, Shahmir Sanni, as gay in an official statement released on Friday. It was put out in response to allegations Sanni made about the involvement of one of May's aides, Stephen Parkinson a former senior Vote Leave official in wrongdoing at the campaign group.
Sanni said his family in Pakistan, where homosexuality is criminalised, are now in potential danger.
Sanni had raised questions with the Observer about the validity of a £625,000 donation from Vote Leave to an ostensibly independent campaign group called BeLeave was channelled to the digital services firm, AggregateIQ (AIQ), which has links to Cambridge Analytica.
In its letter, Best for Britain demanded to know:

• What did Michael Gove and Boris Johnson know about the coordination of the Leave campaign and AIQ? Is the prime minister planning to investigate what they knew about the claims?
  
• Will the pair be recused from the Brexit "war cabinet" while these claims are being investigated?
  
• Does the prime minister plan to investigate the staff mentioned in the reports who work for No 10?
  
• Did No 10 directly out Sanni, or have any involvement in his outing?
  
• Were government emails, phones or equipment used?
  

The letter came after the latest in a string of revelations emerged about the work of the leave campaigns and the data firm Cambridge Analytica.

The £625,000 donation was, Sanni alleged, in breach of electoral rules because Vote Leave shared offices with BeLeave and exerted a measure of control over the smaller organisation. The rules require campaign groups that coordinate with each other to have a shared spending limit. Vote Leave has denied any such coordination.
Sanni also alleged that, after the Electoral Commission opened an investigation, senior Vote Leave figures began deleting traces of their presence in files shared by the two groups. The official Brexit campaign's director, Dominic Cummings, described that claim as "factually wrong and libellous". Vote Leave said staff acted "ethically, responsibly and legally in deleting any data".
In a separate interview with Channel 4 News, Sanni said: "I know that Vote Leave cheated ... I know that people have been lied to and that the referendum wasn't legitimate."
He added: "In effect, they used BeLeave to overspend, and not just by a small amount ... Almost two-thirds of a million pounds makes all the difference, and it wasn't legal."

The Brexit whistleblower: 'Not cheating is the core of what it means to be British' videoThe claims were quickly dismissed by senior Vote Leave figures.
On Saturday evening, within hours of the news breaking, Johnson labelled the allegations "utterly ludicrous", saying Vote Leave won the 2016 referendum "fair and square and legally".
The environment secretary, who served as the campaign's co-chair, chose not to address the claims of maladministration, but to recast them as an attack on the electorate's decision.

"I respect the motives and understand the feelings of those who voted to remain in the EU. But 17.4 million opted to leave in a free and fair vote and the result must be respected. It's our job now to work to overcome division," Gove said.

Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the Commons and a prominent Vote Leave campaigner, was more circumspect than the foreign secretary, telling Sky News: "It is, obviously, a matter for the Electoral Commission. It's very important that they do look at these issues. I know that there have been a number of investigations already where there haven't been findings of wrongdoing."
Asked if she felt the legitimacy of the referendum result would be in doubt if the allegations were proven true, she said: "I think we need to wait for the Electoral Commission to have its investigation."
The claims were also dismissed by Parkinson, in a personal statement released by No 10. In it, he called Sanni's allegations "factually incorrect and misleading".
Downing Street refused to say on Sunday whether May continued to have full confidence in Parkinson. A No 10 source said the question would have to wait until Monday.
Parkinson is one of a number of key figures likely to be considered by the commission's investigation who now hold senior posts in May's government. He could also face pressure to step aside voluntarily while the investigation is carried out.
On Sunday, Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, told BBC One's The Andrew Marr Show: "Theresa May needs to make sure the Electoral Commission has the resources to fully investigate the allegations made that there was criminal collusion.

"Because, let's remember, the people that led these campaigns are now senior cabinet members, and I think we need to make sure that they were not aware of what was going on, and that's why I think the resources are needed, and if needs be, the police should be resourced to investigate as well."
An Electoral Commission spokeswoman said: "The commission has a number of investigations open in relation to campaigners at the EU referendum; it does not comment on live investigations."

[Peter Lemkin]

CA was also involved in a recent Nigerian election.....what else were they involved in? Are they some deep state entity to leverage elections as their deep state masters desire?

[James Lateer]

What is needed is a professional statistician or professional pollster to post some scientific information about the potential for such a "hacking" program to actually influence an election.

The question should be asked "how many votes can be swung by these hacking activities by comparison by percentage to the votes being swung by people like George Soros and/or the Koch Brothers.?"

Bad actors like CNN etc are spreading the idea that some very small amount of advertising is all that important in the election outcome. Cambridge spent $6 Million. But the total spent was at least a $Billion start to finish. If an election comes down to a 10,000 vote margin, then it's basically a crap-shoot anyway. You can look for any number of micro-details. Maybe somebody is paying the Weather Channel to falsely predict the weather on election day. Maybe somebody is paying a reporter to delay some news reports or paying newspapers to add an extra story the day before the election, etc. etc.

It just doesn't make any sense to me to blame micro-influences for swinging the election. After all, the Prime Minister of Israel and the Pope both came over and addressed the Congress a couple of weeks before the election. The former certified that "Trump is not an anti-Semite". That's an endorsement and much more significant than this made-up stuff.

If this is ok, then this type of open influence by Israel and the Pope dwarfs whatever made-up trivial "pop ups" or "bots" that may have been out there. And it is also dwarfed by what was done by Comey and the FBI. Even if the Pope did not endorse a candidate, then you could point to the difference in turnout brought about by the Pope's appearance. That's an influence, too. You can go around and around and around about all this "junk."

And besides, nobody is saying precisely what happened regarding the hacking. It's all just blowing smoke as far as I can determine. It's a convenient excuse to get the politicians off the hook from having to discuss real issues and problems. Why enable them?

James Lateer