Monday, March 19, 2018

Mind Games With the PSYOP Crews

At Midnight all the Spambots
And the Facebook crew
Come out and analyze everyone
That knows more than they do
-- Bob Dylan, updated Desolation Row

Today - building off of a weekend's worth of news reports regarding a data-mining corporation Cambridge Analytica taking too much private info out of Facebook to use as campaign data for Russia and trump to abuse - there's been more revelations that CA was using more than just data to manipulate the political landscape. Via Adam Silverman at Balloon-Juice who starts off linking to the British Channel 4 reporting:

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said: “We’ll 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, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”
Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.
The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.

Um, let's start off with HOLY SHIT and work from there.

Silverman gives much-needed clarification:

What Nix and Turnbull are caught describing as their standard operating practice is separate from whatever program Christopher Wylie built for Cambridge Analytica. Rather, they’re describing a hybrid of privatized human intelligence and what are sometimes referred to as black psychological operations (black PSYOP), which is a misuse of the term. Initially black PSYOP was used as short hand for the highly compartmented covert form of PSYOP necessary to support special operations. This is not surprising as Cambridge Analytica is subsidiary business development unit of SCL Group, which claims to provide these services to the British Ministry of Defense and the US DOD. Several boutique companies were created to do this type of work in support of coalition operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and people eventually left these companies and started their own boutique shops. All they’re really doing is creating propaganda and then trying to insert it into the news and social media space without it seeming to come from non-natives...

For my understanding, just on this report alone, I'm thinking Cambridge Analytica are a bunch of hyped-up pimps looking to fuck up other peoples' governments for their own gain and profit. Not to cast any aspersions or anything...

The bribery issue itself is a huge concern. As Channel 4 noted, that tends to be illegal. But the thing catching my eye is the part where they bring in Ukrainian sex workers to tempt/blackmail pols. This begs the question "How did they have access to THAT particular resource?"

'Cause the first thing I think of when I hear something crooked related to Ukraine, my first thought is "Manafort." Considering how that guy was playing on the political global stage, I wonder how tied to CA he could be.

All that thinking aside, this brings up a serious problem about our Social Media world, and how tied into our networks we've become. I've been a user on Facebook for ages, since 2006 or so. I've used it to make and keep track of friends from high school, college, work, and shared interests. To find out - no to have my fears confirmed - that all my social activity and postings can be used against me by foreign agencies looking to disrupt my nation's political arena is horrifying.

I am tempted to cut off Facebook right now. I can't because of work-related reasons - we use Facebook to let other users know about my library's programs and events - but I am seriously looking into other Social Media apps to replace our Facebook page.

Just not Snapchat. Those sons-of-bitches disrespected Rihanna. What the hell were they thinking?

To everyone else I know on Facebook. We need to find a safer way to stay in touch.

And we need to shut those Cambridge Analytica crooks down.

2 comments:

dinthebeast said...

Never been on Facebook. And they send me emails about it every day, trying to lure me in with people they have found from my past.
Did I mention that I've never been on Facebook?
The email I get the most says "A lot has happened on Facebook since you last logged in." Which is at least true, since everything that has ever happened has happened since I last logged in because I HAVE NEVER LOGGED IN to Facebook.
And Facebook? Those references to my sister, or the bass player I played with in 1979, are creepy as fuck and not only do not entice me to join Facebook, but cause me to have to remind myself that driving across the Bay Bridge to perform some amusing horribleness on Facebook HQ is really a very bad idea that I have absolutely no interest in having anything to do with.
So color me unsurprised that Facebook is up to its neck in slimy, creepy, underhanded intrusions into its users' data that were used to damage the country, and apparently other countries also. (See also: Russia's use of Facebook during the invasion of Ukraine.)

-Doug in Oakland

Denny in Ohio said...

Cambridge Analytica is a front for Wikileaks.