A new article up on the The Guardian deserves to be widely read, IMO. It details connections between Cambridge Analytica, a company owned by reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer (and in which Steve Bannon served as a VP), and shadowy affiliated companies that were paid large sums to use sophisticated, military-type “psyops” technology to tilt the EU referendum in Britain in favor of the “Leave” campaign.
A Canadian company, Aggregate IQ, is the key link. It apparently provided IT services and key intellectual property to Cambridge Analytica. It barely even had a website. But:
It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750.
This may have been illegal, because U.K. law prohibits coordination between these campaigns, but more likely it appears that it was a successful attempt to circumvent U.K. election laws, which were not designed to cover this situation. Effectively they were coordinating, by employing the same firm.
What did AggregateIQ do? It used data mining to build deep, intrusive profiles of potential voters (or non-voters) and identify how to influence them. Cambridge Analytica used this technology to sell consulting services to political parties in developing countries, which used them to sway elections. An interview with a former employee had this section:
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.”
But they didn’t stop with developing countries. They were involved both in the Brexit campaign and in the U.S. Presidential campaign. It is a scary thing:
Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. … “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.
Mercer’s fingers are all over this, despite trying very hard to hide it. He doesn’t own AggregateIQ, exactly. But AggregateIQ sold off its intellectual property. The buyer, now the owner of this technology? Robert Mercer.