Well, this is another shoe dropping that isn’t that much of a surprise. It appears that as part of the UK’s analysis into Russian interference in their Brexit vote investigators have discovered the personal data of 87 Million Americans that was illegally gathered from Facebook using a program developed by professor Aleksandr Kogan for Cambridge Analytica was apparently accessed somehow by computers located in Russia. And apparently, no one knows exactly who, why or how.
Damian Collins, the Conservative MP leading a British parliamentary investigation into online disinformation, told CNN that a British investigation found evidence that the data, collected by Professor Aleksandr Kogan on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, had been accessed from Russia and other countries. The discovery was made by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Britain's data protection authority, Collins said.
"I think what we want to know now is who were those people and what access did they have, and were they actually able to take some of that data themselves and use it for whatever things they wanted," Collins said.
Kogan, a psychology professor at Cambridge University, started working with Cambridge Analytica in 2014, building a personality app on Facebook that gathered data from its users, and all the users' friends as well. Data on tens of millions of Americans was gathered.
Data on 87 Million American voters just happened to somehow find it’s way to Russia just before the 2016 election? Geez, now exactly how could that have gone horribly wrong?
In December of 2016, Jared Kushner did an interview with Forbes magazine where he bragged about how the Trump campaign used data models from Cambridge Analytica to micro-target voters across the nation.
No resources at the beginning, perhaps. Underfunded throughout, for sure. But by running the Trump campaign--notably, its secret data operation--like a Silicon Valley startup, Kushner eventually tipped the states that swung the election. And he did so in manner that will change the way future elections will be won and lost. President Obama had unprecedented success in targeting, organizing and motivating voters. But a lot has changed in eight years. Specifically social media. Clinton did borrow from Obama's playbook but also leaned on traditional media. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning. The traditional campaign is dead, another victim of the unfiltered democracy of the Web--and Kushner, more than anyone not named Donald Trump, killed it.
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"I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff," Kushner says. "They gave me their subcontractors."
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Kushner structured the operation with a focus on maximizing the return for every dollar spent. "We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote," Kushner says. "I asked, How can we get Trump's message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?" FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did.
Television and online advertising? Small and smaller. Twitter and Facebook would fuel the campaign, as key tools for not only spreading Trump's message but also targeting potential supporters, scraping massive amounts of constituent data and sensing shifts in sentiment in real time.
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This wasn't a completely raw startup. Kushner's crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee's data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions--say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.
Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations--even the topics of the speeches. "He put all the different pieces together," Parscale says. "And what's funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn't pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well."
Let me stop to reiterate that what Kushner was so massively proud of here was his being about to manipulate and bamboozle voters using microtargeted psychographic data that was stolen from 87 Million Americans in order to find those that were the most, vulnerable and susceptible to that manipulation. Every time someone offered the Trump campaign someone elses stolen information — either from Facebook , the DNC servers, or John Podesta’s emails — they were ALL IN no hesitation and no qualms. That’s who they are.
From the very first time I read that report back in 2016, I wondered what could have happened if at the same time that Kushner was running his data operation out of San Antonio to promote the Trump message to his potential voters the Russian Troll Farm in St. Petersburg was running a counter campaign to shut down and suppress the Clinton campaign by casting doubt and sowing division between Democrats who may have been more partial to Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein?
I bring that question up because Putin backed Think-tank in Russia stated that their goal was to do exactly that in order to help Trump win
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.
They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [en.riss.ru/], after the election.
It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.
And because of this:
For actual data from the Guide to the 21016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, 16% of those who voted for Sanders in the PA primary voted for Trump in the general. In WI and MI, it was 9% and 8% respectively. To put this into raw numbers, Sanders-to-Trump voters ultimately gave Trump the margin he needed to win in each of those states:
- In Wisconsin, roughly 51K Sanders voters backed Trump in a state he won by just 22K votes.
- In Michigan, roughly 47K Sanders voters backed Trump in a state he won by just 10K votes.
- In Pennsylvania, roughly 116K Sanders voters backed Trump in a state he won by just 44K votes.
Keep in mind that a Sanders-to-Trump vote is doubly painful because it likely represents a net +2 for Trump (absolute +1 vote for Trump and likely -1 vote for Clinton). Also, the above analysis in these three states is before you even get to Sanders voters who protest voted for Stein/other or didn't vote at all. And these folks were not Rs. They were generally ideologically progressive and voted for Dems in the past.
All they would need is a copy of the CA data models to figure out which voters to micro-target then develop adds on Twitter and Facebook intended to push those voters toward Sanders, or Stein or not to vote at all.
So now it seems it’s possible that that exact CA data did find it’s way to Russia, somehow. Particularly since Prof Kogan is a Russian born U.S. Citizen who also teaches and maintains an office in St. Petersburg Russia. Or it could be nothing, maybe.
Kogan denies handing over the Facebook data he gathered for Cambridge Analytica to any Russian entity, saying it is possible that someone in Russia could have accessed data from his computer without his knowledge. "On my side, I am not aware of any Russian entity with access to my data," he added. He didn't rule out that he may have inadvertently exposed the data while in Russia.
Kogan said he would need to see more information before commenting further, adding, "This could be really innocuous, it could be as simple as an SCL (Cambridge Analytica's British parent company) representative was in Russia and they remotely access the server to see some of the files."
"It could have nothing to do with the Russian authorities, it could just be someone checking their mailbox."
Collins couldn't say specifically how the data was accessed, what was in it, and how it may have been used, if at all, saying, "...there will be a lot of interest now to see to what extent were people in Russia benefiting from the work Kogan was doing with his colleagues in Cambridge in the U.K.," Collins said.
Adding, "So is it possible, indirectly, that the Russians learned from Cambridge Analytica, and used that knowledge to run ads in America during the presidential election as well."
So it could be someone who (illegally) accessed his terminal in St. Petersburg, or else someone who works for SCL, the parent company of Cambridge, who just might have been traveling through Russia while accessing the personal data of Millions of Americans?
This means either HE. WAS. HACKED. by someone in the hacking capital of the world or else someone from Cambridge’s parent company just happened to decide to open up the world of American voters while traveling through Russia for no apparent reason. Why exactly would someone at SCL do that?
Well, maybe it's could have been because the contractor who was paying for the development of the data modeling was a Russian Oil company called Lukoil based in Moscow.
Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with – which funded the project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon – also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin.
Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections.
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Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, emailed colleagues after initial contacts to say that Lukoil wanted a clearer explanation of “how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business”.
“They understand behavioural micro-targeting in the context of elections (as per your excellent document/white paper) but they are failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers,” he wrote in an email seen by the Observer.
A slide presentation prepared for the Lukoil pitch focuses first on election disruption strategies used by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, in Nigeria. They are presented under the heading “Election: Inoculation”, a military term used in “psychological operations” and disinformation campaigns. Other SCL documents show that the material shared with Lukoil included posters and videos apparently aimed at alarming or demoralising voters, including warnings of violence and fraud.
So if someone from SCL pulled up the data from Russia — could they have been displaying and downloading it for Lukoil?
Maybe, at this point who knows.
And Lukoil also — just coincidentally — happens to have a cooperative agreement with the FSB.
First Deputy Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation - Head of the FSB Border Guard Service Vladimir Kulishov and President of LUKOIL Vagit Alekperov signed an agreement on cooperation, in Moscow today.
The agreement provides for increased efficiency of coordinated measures taken to ensure security at border areas, guard territorial waters, exclusive economic zones and continental shelf areas of the Russian Federation in regions where LUKOIL Group operates. The agreement also establishes a framework required to counter acts of terror.
So, yeah, nothing could possibly have gone wrong with that setup, right?