Cambridge Analytica Bomb Shells
USA Today, 20 March 2018, Cambridge Analytica board suspends CEO pending probe into misuse of Facebook user data
Extract: The board of Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm that allegedly exploited information from 50 million Facebook users to help Donald Trump’s campaign, suspended CEO Alexander Nix on Tuesday for his comments secretly recorded by a British broadcaster.
In a series of broadcasts by Britain’s Channel 4, Nix was filmed making controversial statements about his firm’s work on elections.
Nix, in the video shown Tuesday, also claimed credit for Cambridge Analytica’s work with data and research that he said allowed Trump to win the election with a narrow margin of “40,000 votes” in three swing states, giving Trump an electoral college victory, despite losing the popular vote.
Channel 4’s broadcast came a day after the network showed surreptitiously obtained video of Nix saying his company could entrap politicians in compromising situations.
Monday night’s broadcast in Britain showed one exchange in which Nix said the company could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house.” Ukrainian girls, he said, “are very beautiful. I find that works very well.”
In addition to Nix, other senior Cambridge Analytica executives, including Mark Turnbull, the firm’s managing director, attended the meetings.
In videos of the meetings broadcast by Channel 4, Cambridge Analytica executives boasted that it and its parent, Strategic Communications Laboratories, had worked in more than 200 elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.
In another exchange, Turnbull described how Cambridge Analytica can discreetly publicize damaging material about a political opponent on social media and the Internet.
“We just put information into the bloodstream of the Internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again … like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘Who’s put that out?'” For more, please see the hyperlink below:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica/442250002/
Wired, 19 March 2018, CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA EXECS CAUGHT DISCUSSING EXTORTION AND FAKE NEWS
Extract: In a series of five meetings and phone calls beginning in December 2017, a Channel 4 reporter posed as a fixer for a client they said was working to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka. They met with Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix; Mark Turnbull, managing director of CA Political Global; and Alex Tayler, chief data officer for Cambridge. They probed them on all manner of underhanded tactics.
Nix appears to outline a potential plan to send operatives to bribe the candidate’s political opponents and capture it on video. “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 we post it on the internet,” Nix said in the video. The Channel 4 video also shows Nix suggesting that they could send “some girls around to the candidate’s house.”
The Channel 4 video also shows Nix expressing a willingness to help the “client” disseminate lies. “These are things that, I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed,” he said.
In a separate November 2017 meeting filmed by Channel 4, Turnbull appears to admit that the company is in the business of preying on people’s fears. “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,” he says in the video. “It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about emotion.” For more, please see the hyperlink below:
https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-execs-caught-discussing-extortion-and-fake-news/
Daily Beast, 19 March 2018, Rebekah Mercer Standing by Cambridge Analytica After Blackmail Scandal —A source close to the family says that she intends to remain on the company’s board, and is ‘working to be part of the solution.’
Extract: Billionaire heiress Rebekah Mercer is standing by embattled data firm Cambridge Analytica—at least for now. A person close to Mercer, who sits on the firm’s board, told The Daily Beast she has no immediate plans to leave her post there, despite a bombshell report alleging the company used Ukrainian sex workers to try to get compromising material about its clients’ political opponents.
“She is working to be part of the solution,” said the source, of one of American conservatism’s most powerful mega-donors.
Steve Bannon has long been close to the firm, and once owned a stake in it, per McClatchy. Note: Jared Kushner and Mike Flynn also had links to Cambridge Analytica. Kushner was in charge of data analytics for the Trump campaign. Flynn received a salary as a consultant to Cambridge Analytica.
The firm drew the attention of Congressional investigators looking into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. And its head, Alexander Nix, once reached out to Julian Assange to offer the firm’s services in releasing emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s email account.
The Mercers were among Trump’s most generous supporters, spending millions to support his campaign. For more, please see the hyperlink below:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/rebekah-mercer-stands-by-cambridge-analytica
Foreign Policy & Domestic Politics 