It reads like an episode from Homeland's latest season. What Christopher Wiley, the whistleblower, who used to work for Cambridge Analytica, revealed has been stunning. This is what we know so far:
Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a privately owned company, with offices in London, New York and Washington, that provided data for 'strategic communication' during electoral processes by utilising data mining and data analysis. A shareholder of the company is the Robert Mercer family of the US and a well-known supporter of conservative causes. CA has actively participated in numerous US political races in 2014. It supported the Ted Cruz campaign in 2015 until the Cruz campaign petered out. Next, it went on to support the Trump campaign in 2016. It also turns out that CA was behind the disinformation campaign behind the 'Leave EU Campaign' on the UK's exit from the European Union.
Source: WikipediaChristopher Wiley, a 28 year old former employee of Cambridge Analytica, let the cat out of the bag on CA's Facebook data scraping operation. In his own words, he describes himself as a gay Canadian vegan who ended up building “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”. Steve Bannon, the Executive Chairman of Breitbart Network, was Chris' boss in 2014. In summary, he claims that their tactics 'broke' Facebook and subverted the platform.
Facebook unwittingly was used by Cambridge Analytica (CA) to extract the personal information of over 50 million users via a data-harvesting personality quiz app presumably for academic purposes. Lawmakers from the US and the UK are calling on Facebook (FB) to respond to their concerns about FB's lax user data protection. The scandal just shows again that FB cannot be trusted to protect the security of their users' data. FB knew about CA's data policy violations since August 2016, but did nothing but compel CA to delete the information. It failed to confirm that the data was deleted and only recently suspended the FB accounts of CA and their employees.
Apparently, the data scraping and analysis of social media content and user profiles has been ongoing for a while by private and academic institutions. The key issue today is that firms can be hired to sway the opinion of targeted citizens by selected advertising messages and salacious content. FB lets advertisers target their users on just about any attribute that is available. The extracted data of the 50 million users was used to prepare a 'training data set' for machine learning algorithms to build models to predict expected behaviours based on specific demographic data. This is the essence of information warfare that was undertaken to subvert the political outcomes of liberal Western societies like the US and the UK.
CA contacted Wikileaks in 2016 for help to distribute Clinton's stolen emails. The nefarious connections between Steven Bannon, then Trump's chief strategist, CA, Wikileaks and Russia have built up over time.
The details that are emerging offer Robert Mueller's team, additional details into the information warfare that has been waged on the US political process by a variety of actors.
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