Cambridge Analytica and Next Color Revolutions India

[ashish raval]

In lighter view why not buy a improve Nokia 3g series launched sometimes back

[suryag]

The only reason I have my FB account is to access tejaslca page

[panduranghari]

SuryaG ji

Please check this out? https://mewe.com

[Neshant]

It's all about controlling you with fake democracy and the illusion that you live in a free society when in fact banksters and corporate crooks are mounting a takeover to make you their slave.
________

Silencing of Assange Sparks Historic Ten-Hour Online Vigil To #ReconnectJulian

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03- ... nectjulian

The Ecuadorian Government’s decision to silence Julian Assange by cutting off his internet access, phone communications and ability to receive visitors represents a saddening turnabout by a country that has long protected the publisher’s human and journalistic rights. The move took place at the behest of Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno, who took office in May last year. Since that time Moreno has continued to provide Assange with asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and his government conferred citizenship and diplomatic immunity on the arbitrarily confined journalist last December.

[Singha]

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/sh ... ction.html

the last act of the skripal drama...julia has risen!

[Mukesh.Kumar]

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/sh ... ction.html

the last act of the skripal drama...julia has risen!

Nice touch of moon dust to this. Julia, the Russian Orthodox девушка is resurrected on Catholic Easter Sunday.

[chetak]

The Network Problem: Lessons From the Facebook Scandal

The Network Problem: Lessons From the Facebook Scandal

Rajeev Srinivasan

Rajeev Srinivasan worked at Bell Labs and in Silicon Valley for many years. He has taught innovation at several IIMs and writes widely on the impact of technology on society

Mind control by machines is a serious threat to democracy

THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA episode is significant on at least three or four levels: concern that democracy as we know it may be in danger; the fear that personal and private information about us is exposed to unsavoury characters; the possibility that Facebook, Google and other tech giants may be in serious trouble; and the concern that we may soon be unable to differentiate between objective and subjective ‘truth’.



Unlike the outrage in the West over the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook fiasco, there has been little to no commentary in India about it. One reason may be that Indian commentators underestimate the danger of personal data being used for unforeseen purposes. Second, perhaps we do not value privacy quite as much as others do. Third, maybe some pundits are compromised by the self-same psy-ops Cambridge Analytica is accused of running.

In summary, what the current furore is all about is the allegation that, legally or ethically or not, Cambridge Analytica targeted up to 50 million individual consumers, figured out what kinds of political messages would work on them, and, using this knowledge, was able to manipulate their actions—including their voting patterns—useful to its clients. There is circumstantial evidence suggesting that they were able to influence the 2016 US presidential election and Britain’s Brexit vote.

There is real concern about the impact of this episode on democracy. The Western mantra of spreading democracy and so-called ‘liberal’ values around the world (by force if necessary if you ask Americans) now has a counterpoint: the Confucian Grand Narrative which saw its apogee in the appointment of Xi Jinping as China’s president-for-life. The US is roiled by suggestions of Russian mischief in Donald Trump’s election. Former French President Nicholas Sarkozy has been arrested for accepting funds some years ago from the former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

At this delicate point, the idea that your vote may have been compromised because you were subjected to mind-control strikes at the very root of the idea of free will. Can democracy survive such a direct hit? In India, we have endured booth-capturing, theft of ballot boxes, possible Electronic Voting Machine hacking; and now this? Will democracy ever be seen as safe if it’s so easy to manipulate the voter?

Perhaps Indians are blasé about this because we have few illusions about the purity of our elections: therefore one more way of subverting a Potemkin edifice (form but not substance) may not exercise us as much as it does the self-righteous Americans.

The concern about data privacy and protection is not off the mark. There is the idea mooted by a British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, of the Panopticon: a prison in which a single guard can observe a large number of prisoners. Since none of them knows if the guard is looking at them at any given time, they are forced to behave as required all the time.

Today, with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so forth, you are in a digital Panopticon. In fact, all of us can be monitored all the time because the watchers are machines. A practical example is China’s ‘social credit’ system for reputation management, which is backed by 750 million CCTV cameras. Big Brother is indeed watching you, and if you misbehave, you will be denied jobs, admissions, and even the right to board planes. Vindictive states can target certain groups of people: it is reported that those first under surveillance are restive Uighurs in East Turkestan (Xinjiang).

Europeans have been more worried about personal privacy than Americans (and certainly more than Indians). Their General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes law in May, and requires that customer data be stored in Europe. Besides, customers get greater control over their personal data (‘informed consent’); the regulation also has teeth: companies that violate it may be fined up to 4 per cent of global turnover.

India, which is already worrying about Aadhaar and data protection, needs to come up with at least two things immediately: one, like the Europeans and the Chinese, insist that Indian data be held on Indian servers; two, that explicit informed consent is a must before data is revealed to anyone

India has been lax in protecting its citizens’ data. This is a shame because India produces an enormous trove. Unfortunately, much of that is probably already in Chinese hands (example: Alibaba is the majority owner of PayTM) or in American hands (TransUnion owns CIBIL). There is no requirement that the data be stored on Indian soil, nor punitive penalties. The data has commercial value (Alibaba and Tencent have become global tech powers by using Chinese data behind protectionist walls) as well as national security value (as seen in the Cambridge Analytica case).

A professor friend of mine from Europe told me about the deep penetration of social media by intelligence agencies for surveillance activities. As hidden-camera footage of the CEO of Cambridge Analytica confirmed, shadowy organisations that have seamlessly integrated themselves into social media are not averse to also using traditional techniques such as honeypots (he singled out Ukrainian women), bribery, blackmail, etcetera. For India, whose elites have a chequered history of anti- national behaviour for a pittance, this is alarming.

So far, the only thing India has done is to formally demand that Cambridge Analytica respond to a list of six questions about the alleged data breach. There is no provision for hefty fines, unlike, say in the US, where a consent decree on privacy provides that Facebook may have to pay up to $40,000 per user if that user’s data has been accessed without consent.

Even if you are not a shareholder, and have not created your own digital social circle, the fate of these technology platforms is of interest. In particular, for India, which has the second largest group of active Facebook users, is addicted to WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), and is a major consumer of Google Android phones, the business models of these companies, as well as Amazon, Apple, Twitter, etcetera, are important. At least Amazon and Apple sell actual physical goods, but what do Google and Facebook sell? The answer, of course, is that you, the consumer of their free offerings, are the ‘product’ they sell. They make their money through advertisements aimed at finely diced-and-sliced groups of customers. That has been their business model of every single ad-revenue-based social network from day one. They cannot make their superlative profits without continuing to do exactly what they have done so far.

Critics have been pointing out for a long time that this model has downsides, and the current fiasco exposes those fault-lines. It is not that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are particular villains, even though the latter has been accused of interfering directly (to devastating effect) in Kenyan and Nigerian elections. It is almost certain that they have been partnering with Indian political parties too.

The general backlash against Silicon Valley’s tech giants has been brewing for a while, and is reminiscent of action against Microsoft a few years ago by the European Union’s competition commissioner. Then, worried that Microsoft’s act of bundling the browser Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system would strengthen the company’s monopoly, the EU ordered it to give equal opportunity to competing browsers as well. Google was hit with similar charges recently, and a massive fine, accused of favouring its own shopping service. Such restrictions will almost certainly be imposed.

The other possibility, although remote, is a breakup of companies like Facebook and Google into their constituent businesses as an anti-trust move, much like the breakup of AT&T in the US led to vigorous competition. Of course, this will be resisted by the companies concerned, and may take five or more years, in which time the whole issue will be rendered moot, as technology would have moved on. And even if there is a consent decree, it may not be cross-border, thus reducing redressal chances for a consumer outside the home turf of the companies concerned.

The reputational damage that Facebook has been subjected to may well act as a corrective. As users move away, application developers too may drift away. Correspondingly, advertising revenue may dry up and that is the lifeblood of the company

Moreover, the reputational damage that Facebook has been subjected to may well act as a corrective. As users move away (#deleteFacebook is a popular hashtag), application developers too may drift away. Correspondingly, advertising revenue may dry up and that is the lifeblood of the company. There is a chance that Facebook will diminish in importance on its own.

WE ARE LIVING in an era where ‘fake news’ is everywhere; Facebook is anyway facing complaints on that front and both Facebook and Twitter have been accused of censoring certain political views or individuals, violating freedom of speech principles. Besides, as Artificial Intelligence advances, we will be subjected to fake video (‘deepfakes’) that is essentially indistinguishable from the real thing. (A new technology, ‘adversarial generative networks’, where two duelling AI systems compete with each other, is behind this advance, and it will be mature in a year or two.)

When we live in an echo chamber where we tend to only hear views that fit our prejudices (as the algorithms learn our preferences and modify our newsfeeds), it will become easier to drive us into a frenzy through fake atrocity news or tidbits calculated to hit our hot buttons. Nations may go to war, for example. There is a precedent: media magnates allegedly pushed the US into the Spanish-American War of 1898 mostly to sell more newspapers.

The situation may be so far out of control that we need to fall back upon science fiction. In Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series, an inventor named Hari Seldon comes up with the concept of ‘psychohistory’, whereby he is able to accurately predict the future of a civilisation using statistical means. Seldon emphasises that he is not able to identify the actions of individuals, but only of very large masses of individuals, and the masses must be unaware that they are being observed.

What Cambridge Analytica is accused of, the use of ‘psychographic’ markers (such as Facebook ‘likes’) to predict people’s personalities, does even better than psychohistory: it can micro- target individuals with ads, news, calls to action, fundraisers, etcetera, that will predictably appeal to them. The whistleblower Chris Wylie who broke the story has suggested that he created ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’.

According to a Guardian report , they used military psychological warfare tactics to influence not only Facebook users but their friends as well. This is clever, because we trust our friends. Wylie says the psy-ops aimed for ‘informational dominance’, which includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.

Whether all this works or not is not immediately clear, but it should prod politicians, and thus regulators, to try and minimise the impact on society. India, which is already worrying about Aadhaar and data protection, needs to come up with at least two things immediately: one, like the Europeans and the Chinese, insist that Indian data be held on Indian servers; two, that explicit informed consent is a must before data is revealed to anyone. The default must give absolute ownership of the data to the individual, and reveal none of it.

Apart from the privacy issues, there is also a sobering link to a meme from Hermann Hesse’s Nobel-Prize-winning The Glass Bead Game. In a post-apocalyptic future, he imagines the Age of the Feuilleton (a light pamphlet), an age of frivolity where there is no serious intellectual pursuit, and all are engaged in trivialities. Hesse suggests there would be ‘self-persiflage’ articles such as ‘Friedrich Nietszche and Womens’ Fashions of 1870’ or ‘The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of the Great Courtesans’. The irony is that this is almost exactly what Facebook has come to represent: ‘modernity’, or the dumbing-down of society in the early 21st century. Maybe the eclipse of social media is not something to be mourned, after all.

[chetak]

Cambridge Analytica: The Foreign Hand

Cambridge Analytica: The Foreign Hand

30 March 2018

The Foreign Hand

The CA proposal for Congress highlights its claimed role in Donald Trump's victory
The proposal goes into fine details of the Party's upcoming electoral challenges
It outlines the Infotech configuration needed for a strategy using real-time information
An operations Centre layout is proposed, modelled on one built for Trump
A mobile App would be designed to work in sync with CA’s research and operational services







The document has a breakdown of target audiences to be addressed for Assembly Polls

Rahul Gandhi at the Congress party’s 84th Plenary Session in Delhi on March 18

Referring to Karnataka, CA says ‘a smartphone battle using big data and social media was fought in UP, and it will be even more decisive in a state that is the technological capital of India’

PR Ramesh And Ullekh NP


A proposal by the tainted Cambridge Analytica details how it can revive the Congress

ON MARCH 27TH, Christopher Wylie dropped a bombshell. The former employee of Cambridge Analytica (CA) who blew the whistle on this UK-based firm that’s now in the eye of a storm over the harvesting of 50 million Facebook profiles to help politicians alter poll and survey outcomes told a parliamentary panel in London that India’s Congress party could be among CA’s clients. Wylie, a 28-year-old Canadian whose Twitter handle says ‘I make things with data’, was deposing before the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. His statement comes amidst an escalating political row in India over data leaks and profile thefts to influence voter preferences. Congress leaders have dismissed what he said as a piece of fiction even as the ruling BJP has used it to sharpen its attack on Rahul Gandhi, the party president whose social-media engagement has risen dramatically in recent months.

Founded in 2013 by Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) Group, CA has been accused of using the Facebook data of individuals to influence elections as significant as the 2016 US presidential poll that saw Donald Trump emerge the winner and Britain’s Brexit referendum that went in favour of snapping away from the European Union. American security experts suspect that CA could have been the crucial link in Russia’s reported interference in the White House election.

In India, Wylie’s revelation of his former employer’s association with the Congress has put the party in a bad spot. As pointed out by Paul Farrelly, a Labour party member of the British parliamentary committee, the “opportunity for destabilisation” is extremely high in India, which is home to more than 11 per cent of Facebook’s active users worldwide. The country is the social media giant’s biggest market, even bigger than the US, and the subscriber count here has been rising at a faster clip than anywhere else. “They worked extensively in India,” Wylie told the panel, referring to CA, “They have an office in India ... I believe their client was Congress, but I know that they have done all kinds of projects. I don’t remember a national project, but I know regionally… India’s so big that one state can be as big as Britain. But they do have offices there, they do have staff there.”

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala maintains that the party “has had no truck with CA [and] never hired its services”. Congressmen also point at CA’s website to hit out at the JD-U, an NDA ally, which has been listed by CA as an associate. Referring to projects handled by its parent SCL, a statement on this website says: ‘CA was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010. The core challenge was to identify the floating/swing voters for each of the parties and to measure their levels electoral apathy, a result of the poor and unchanging condition of the state after 15 years of incumbent rule. In addition to the research phase, CA was tasked to organise the party base at the village level by creating a communication hierarchy to increase supporter motivation. Our client achieved a landslide victory, with over 90% of total seats targeted by CA being won.’ However, pundits aver that most such projects in the past didn’t involve large-scale tactics that could be considered cyber crimes. There was negligible if any theft, for example, of personal data from Facebook, whose penetration of the country was much lower back then and especially low in backward states like Bihar.

In the wake of Wylie’s disclosures, it is Rahul Gandhi who finds himself cornered, as a new document emerges to suggest that his party might have been in parleys with the disgraced British company to steer its campaign in upcoming state polls of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, besides the General Election of 2019. Open is in possession of a detailed proposal prepared by CA that outlines what the firm could do to help revive the dwindling electoral fortunes of the Congress, which it says is confronted with an ‘existential dilemma’. When Open contacted CA’s office in London, an executive promised to respond to an email sent to it about its ‘proposal’ to the Congress, but has not yet done so despite having had sufficient time.

Having accused CA of gathering the details of 50 million Facebook users through foul means in 2014, Wylie had offered to provide the British panel with ‘documentation’ on the firm’s India-specific activities. Wylie also criticised his former employer for running campaigns in “struggling democracies”, which he termed “an example of what modern-day colonialism looks like”.

According to reports, CA executives were caught on camera boasting they (along with SCL) had worked on more than 200 elections around the world, including polls in Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic and Argentina, apart from India. It is this scandal that forced Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to tender an unconditional public apology and carry full-page ads in multiple newspapers globally. ‘You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014,’ Zuckerberg says in one, ‘This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again.’ For Facebook, the CA revelations are turning out to be its toughest moment in 15 years of existence. But it is the fallout in India that has political observers agog.

The CA proposal to offer Congress operational and technological support for 2019, ‘constantly fed by research, informed by data science, and delivered through targeted digital marketing’

The proposal CA appears to have made to the Congress is ambitious. In the words of the aforesaid document, it is ‘designed to disrupt the BJP’s current monopoly on India’s ‘smartphone voters’ by building a world-class data and digital capacity for the INC in similar vein to what we did for the Trump campaign in 2016’. The papers also state that the firm’s help will prove critical ‘when the INC faces its first existential challenge at the 2019 Lok Sabha and competes with the incumbent BJP’. Once India’s dominant political party, the Congress was reduced to its lowest tally ever in the last General Election and has under 50 Lok Sabha seats now.

In a chapter titled ‘Executive Summary’, CA divides its proposal for the party into the following components: national situational analysis; a national data infrastructure project; a data-driven campaign for 2019 Lok Sabha; and state assembly elections. The first section outlines ‘CA’s plan to conduct a comprehensive review of INC’s existing communications activity and capability in order to build a clearer picture of the factors that will determine the success in the pan-Indian context’; for CA, this is also the ‘discovery’ phase aimed at extracting ‘maximum value from’ the party’s ‘existing data assets, third-party data’ and so on.

The second section on the national data infrastructure project delves into ‘how CA will apply its extensive experience to design and build an Operations Centre, equipped with a robust technical and data infrastructure that can facilitate coordinated team planning, strategy execution and seamless campaign communications to provide the INC with the ability to mount, powerful, efficient national campaigns’. A key aspect of CA’s proposal is the idea of an Operations Centre, which it claims played a pivotal role in Trump’s triumph in the US.

The third section offers what only companies with access to the personal preferences of people can offer. The data-driven campaign that CA envisages for the Congress will use ‘a combination of data analytics, behavioral science and targeted communications’. Behavioural science is a tricky field today in the context of poll or advertising campaigns following leaks of confidential information on individuals and considering the sine qua non for such exercises: the knowledge of individual choices as gleaned from their online behaviour. Putting such a data trove together invariably demands intrusion into the privacy of citizens.

The document notes that the rise of the BJP, which won in 2014, is both a cause and a consequence of congress’ demise and almost every poll shows the BJP is the clear favourite to win in 2019

Even in the past, the Congress party has come under attack for snooping on people. In the 1980s, long before the advent of the internet, Rajiv Gandhi brought in a bill that was to give the Government the power to sift the contents of letters sent through Indian Post. Thankfully, his bid was thwarted at the top level. President Zail Singh, with whom the Prime Minister had strained ties, simply sat on the bill without signing it, thus letting it lapse. But the regime’s intent, as evident from numerous cases of rival politicians’ phones being tapped, was inescapable: the unwarranted surveillance of citizens.

The fourth section of the CA proposal focuses on the forthcoming elections in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. ‘All phases are intrinsically connected, ultimately leading to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections,’ says the CA document.

The papers also dwell at length on its cutting-edge data analytics to ‘model, segment and micro-target the population with personalized messaging’. Its strengths, CA contends, include ‘psychographic profiling of entire populations by acquiring and modeling ‘big data’’; finely targeted ‘tailored advertising and content to groups and individuals with unprecedented accuracy’; and research to ‘understand and influence the underlying motivations and drivers of human behaviour’. Its psychographic profiling involves the creation of profiles of voters based on online data, most of it private information.

In its introduction to the meticulously drafted proposal, CA talks about the vibrant nature of Indian democracy and the historical role in it of the Congress, before it highlights the party’s current predicament. ‘Winning 44 of a possible 545 seats in the lower house, it fell short of gaining opposition status and holds power in just five of the 36 Indian states and unions,’ it says, adding that ‘repeated charges of corruption, disunity, sycophancy and nepotism plague the party and calls for a change to the leadership and organizational structure persist’. The document notes that the ‘rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won a historic landslide in 2014, is both a cause and a consequence of the INC’s demise. Narendra Modi’s populist narrative resonates strongly with millions of disenchanted Indians, and according to almost every poll, the BJP is the clear favourite to win again in 2019’.

It elaborates the strengths of the BJP’s digital campaign and then suggests that the Congress make radical changes to its ‘campaign methodology and infrastructure’ if it is to reverse the formidable political current running against it. A ‘business as usual’ approach or ‘even a substantial increase in campaign spend using the same traditional methods’, will simply not suffice, the proposal makes plain. The party needs ‘emphatic wins’ in the crucial states going to polls over the next year to boost its confidence and send out signals of change to the rest of India that would lend it the momentum it needs for 2019, CA reckons. For achieving those goals, CA prescribes, among other things, setting up a ‘highly targeted communications capability’.

The firm proposes to offer Congress operational and technological support for the 2019 polls equivalent to the data infrastructure that was at the heart of the Trump campaign, ‘constantly fed by research, informed by data science, and delivered through targeted digital marketing’. The proposal also aims to identify what it calls data gaps in the party’s campaigns. ‘The reality is that most governments or parties suffer from data ‘silos’, with data assets spread over multiple locations and systems, making it difficult to use the data effectively,’ the document says, emphasising that ‘CA’s behavioral and data scientists are experts in collecting, interpreting and using data to and develop a successful analytics-informed strategy’. Put simply, CA proposes to bridge the party’s gap between extant and required data inputs.

Under the plan, at the heart of the Operations Centre will be a central repository of information on the electorate and the party’s nationwide supporters. This, it says, would be a ‘digital framework capable of holding huge quantities of data, flexible in size and structure so that it can meet the INC’s needs long into the future’. This database ‘will be enriched with third-party data and constantly updated with new research results and behavioral insights, feeding the predictive models which enable us to design micro-targeted communications strategies’. The document also alludes to the advantage in terms of data that the ruling coalition would have, thanks to its having been in power for the past four years.

Referring to Karnataka, CA says ‘a smartphone battle using big data and social media was fought in UP, and it will be even more decisive in a state that is the technological capital of India’

The domestic headquarters of SCL/CA is in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, a short distance from Delhi, and the group has ten regional offices across the country. It maintains a database of over 600 districts and 700,000 villages, according to its website. By its claim, the list of its previous projects in India is long. Besides the 2010 Bihar assignment, the website mentions a caste census in 2012 done on behalf of a ‘national party’; a 2010 survey of castes by household in UP; a 2007 survey of politically active individuals of UP, also for a ‘national party’; a study the same year of jihadist trends in Kerala, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Assam and other states; a 2003 study in Rajasthan for a ‘major state party’; and a set of psephological studies and behavioural polling in Delhi and Chhattisgarh. While the list suggests a wide client base, the heat is on Rahul Gandhi because apart from the JD-U and his party, the names of others who may have used the group’s services aren’t out yet.

Referring specifically to Karnataka, CA says that ‘a smartphone battle using big data and social media was fought in UP, and it will be even more decisive in a state that is the technological capital of India’. The firm wants the Congress to ‘regain the initiative by ensuring its campaign in fully data-driven and its communications digitally focused’. On Madhya Pradesh, which the BJP has dominated since 2003, CA thinks that the Congress has a ‘real chance’ in this year’s Assembly polls. The BJP currently holds 165 of the 230 seats in the state and the Congress, 56; CA wants the Congress to ‘conduct a thorough target audience analysis to better understand the grievances, attitudes and motivations of the electorate in MP and then plan and implement a campaign based on behavioral micro-targeting to mobilise the people of rural MP’. Similar is the strategy that CA offers for Chhattisgarh, which the BJP has been winning since 2003. The BJP won 49 of 90 seats in its Assembly the last time round, and the Congress, 39. ‘The INC must show that it can win emphatically in a 93% Hindu, BJP- controlled state in order to alter the attitudes of voters in the run-up to the Lok Sabha [polls] just a few months later,’ the proposal states.

Contacted by Open, Divya Spandana, head of the Congress social media and digital communications team, says, “[CA] could have made a proposal, but they never sent it to us. I’ve never met nor spoken to anybody. Neither has my boss.”

In its role as a political consultancy, the company extols the virtues of the so-called four Vs of Big Data in its proposal: Volume, Variety, Velocity and Veracity. By setting up large-scale digital infrastructure, CA argues, the INC ‘will have a web-based data reservoir that can be updated and accessed at any time to help plan strategy, direct local campaigning, and plan interactions with supporters’. It has also offered an internal layout plan for an Operations Centre. Throughout the proposal, CA places emphasis on the party’s need to ‘map the drivers and dynamics of popular sentiment’. Persuasive messages individualised for enhanced appeal is a crucial component of the plan.

As for research on voter behaviour, CA recommends starting off with face-to-face or online tools, apart from telephone interviews. ‘CA will conduct a series of focus groups to ensure accurate representation across age, gender, income/education, geographic location and political partisanship,’ the document promises; ‘The result of this phase will be a detailed assessment of the key dimensions that are likely to influence support of the INC across India, the real impact of the candidates, and ideas/expectations for the future.’ Surveys by CA are expected to provide the data needed to divide the population into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, views and motivators, the document states. The idea of this approach is to gauge the relative importance of local and national issues, support levels for candidates, voter perceptions, and key influencers among assorted population segments. According to the proposal, ‘CA’s data scientists will transform data into insight by analysing and visualising the cleaned and enriched data to identify patters and build and understanding of influencing factors.’

In sum, the company would prepare a complete data set on the Indian electorate, and all the information required to develop a strategic communications plan for engaging voters, tailored to the issues and concerns of each target audience. The principal aim, the document reiterates, is to enable the Congress to get the appropriate message across to voters in the most effective way.

The overall plan, in CA’s view, would be to replicate for the Congress the strategies that won Trump the White House. That the US president’s former aide Steve Bannon once served as a vice- president of CA lends credence to its claim of credit for that victory. The document says that for the US election, the firm polled 180,000 individuals across 17 battleground states, online and by telephone: ‘This information allowed us to speak to voters in a way they would understand and respond strongly to.’ The firm promises to apply data science to not only predict how voters think and behave ‘so that you [the Congress] can target the right people and convert them to supporters’, it hopes to identify those who are likely to vote for the party across villages. CA also proposes to put in place a digital platform to analyse feedback from party workers at the grassroots.

Hiring a data analytics company is par for the course in any modern election anywhere in the world, and India is no exception. The current ruling party, for example, had employed young data scientists and others to its advantage in 2014. What has drawn CA under a cloud is its use of unethical means that has come to light. While this has had its repercussions, the details of its proposal do suggest hard work having gone into it.

More than once in the document, CA refers to the Congress’ ‘existential challenge’ and the need for leadership change. The challenge, as they say, is to change the system more than it changes you.

[ramana]

chetak, Is the CA trumpet blower really exposing Congress Pidis or is it something bigger?
Like a Damocles sword on India for 2019 elections?

I think we are missing the big picture.

Karnataka elections have many factors of which Congress image hardly is endearing.
- Regional demographics
- Anti-incumbency
- Shifting alliances
- Known back and front stabbing leaders

So what will SMS campaign do?
Take it away from these folks/factors?
That's a laugh!

[ramana]

And also the CA claims are untenable as its a H4 guy who went through data and gave key phrases from DT to use in his stump speeches.
CA was no where in the picture.
180K survey hardly dents the big picture.
So lots of bogus claims.

[chetak]

I don't think that a profit driven company like facebook would have given away it's data for free. Some financial hocus pocus has taken place for sure.

A suitably contrite zukerberg may be putting on a public facade to head off a deeper inquiry into the shenanigans of the CA-Facebook combo.

Financial Times Verified account @FinancialTimes

Payments would compensate us for use of our property and would provide proper incentives to ensure data are shared for the common good, says a former director at Cambridge Analytica

Facebook should pay its 2bn users for their personal data

The big tech companies are evolving into digital kleptocracies

BRITTANY KAISER

Citizens are waking up to the carelessness with which Facebook and others have handled their data

Brittany Kaiser

The data wars began in earnest last month, with revelations that my former company Cambridge Analytica had access to the data of 87m Facebook users without their permission. This breach was far from exceptional: the social network’s policies have allowed thousands of companies, apps and data brokers to collect and use similar data for years.

We learn more about their irresponsible practices every day: last week the platform casually acknowledged that all 2.2bn users might have had their public profiles compromised.

As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify to US Congress about the breaches, citizens are waking up to the carelessness with which his company has handled our personal data. The conversation about forcing the “free” platforms to adopt responsible practices is starting. This is long overdue.

Last year data were proclaimed to have surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable asset. Companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon have built data-rich monopolies that remorselessly mine the digital assets and behaviours of their users — us. They use their privileged access to our data to sell to us, taking an increasing slice of the economic cake, and accumulating disproportionate power and wealth.

Facebook is now the world’s biggest data broker. Its business model is based solely on extracting value from our personal digital assets. If the “Republic of Facebookistan”, as some have called it, were a country, it would be the world’s most populous. But when a digital government fails its citizens and betrays their trust, it risks losing its mandate.

These companies may be evolving into the internet age version of authoritarian kleptocrats: seizing the people’s assets for themselves, amassing wealth, and doing all they can to keep this system of exploitation strong and their power unconstrained.

Some argue that antitrust regulators should break up the internet groups. But this might not maximise benefits for users. I believe these platforms should be kept whole — but we must radically change the social contract and terms of service on which they are based.

Facebook has the chance to chart a better course. It should switch to a different, innovative business model that returns some of the benefits of this new digital oil back to the owners and producers of the personal data on which Mr Zuckerberg’s empire is built.

If the ‘Republic of Facebookistan’, as some have called it, were a country, it would be the world’s most populous. But when a digital government fails its citizens and betrays their trust, it risks losing its mandate

Users must recognise that their data are their property, just like their houses. If Google or Facebook want to use your data, they should seek full and informed consent, explain all the ways the information will be used, compensate you fairly, and give you the ability to opt out. Airbnb has allowed people everywhere to unlock the hidden value in their homes — but guests who use the platform ask permission, and a price is agreed and paid before the owner hands over the keys.

I am calling for a change in Facebook’s terms of service to recognise our fundamental human rights and property rights over our data. It must be frank and fair about how it collects, uses and monetises our digital assets.

The company needs to act fast. Half measures will not be enough to ward off user disengagement, the rise of new competitors, increasingly aggressive regulators, and further slumps in the stock price.

I hope Facebook becomes a beacon, not a scapegoat. It has the opportunity to secure continued growth while simultaneously empowering its users with a growing income stream, a new kind of universal basic income. Rather than being handouts, these payments would compensate us for use of our property. Only this way, will the proper incentives be in place to ensure data are shared for the common good.

The writer, a former director at Cambridge Analytica, is co-founder of the Digital Asset Trade Association

[chetak]

chetak, Is the CA trumpet blower really exposing Congress Pidis or is it something bigger?
Like a Damocles sword on India for 2019 elections?

I think we are missing the big picture.

Karnataka elections have many factors of which Congress image hardly is endearing.
- Regional demographics
- Anti-incumbency
- Shifting alliances
- Known back and front stabbing leaders

So what will SMS campaign do?
Take it away from these folks/factors?
That's a laugh!

Yes, indeed, lets look at the big picture.

KAR is only the trailer and 2019 is the main show. For the main show to be a hit, the trailer has to capture, package and showcase the essence of the main show so that folks remember the trailer and flock to spend money to see the main show which is the payoff for the producers and the director.

The voters are like the distributors and exhibitors. If they don't like the trailer, they will not buy main show and thus they will not allow the producers to collect the big payoff.

That said, there seems to be an all around involvement of diverse players, disparate and disjointed at the first look but maybe they are all connected somehow??.

Why did the four judges hold a press conference and what were their primary and secondary objectives?? Who and what were the targets?? Would it impact the 2019 elections?? Why did sibal officially ask for a postponement of the Ram temple case till after the 2019 elections?? Are these two disparate events connected or unconnected?? Is it somewhere, maybe CA driven/inspired or not??

CA's principles of "data use", the same "data" which has been analysed to identify, quantify and localize trends and common threads so as to enable the tailoring and targeting of weaponized specific messaging payloads so as to maximize the desired conditioned responses in a voting process or opinion poll to obtain a specific result which some one has paid to influence in their favor, is now being internalised by motivated "interest" groups and they are useing it to identify likely causes and coordinate the targeting of various caste groupings nation wide to build up a rising wave of opposition through thought leading to sink a particulat party's chances in 2019.

The patidar and mewani "agitations" in the GJ elections were trial runs of this concept and that almost upset the applecart.

The currently running "dalit agitations" is a refinement and validation of the same process to target a specific party despite the action which precipitated the agitation being owned and needlessly fanned by the SC when it refused to rethink it. The scale is however very different now suggesting that some central authority is now refining, iterating as well as coordinating the process

If the SC was actually so concerned and protective of the rights of the citizens, It would have targeted and struck down the RTE legislation a long long time ago as being discriminatory of the fundamental rights of a specific community. Instead, it aided and abetted the same by allowing the amendment of the constitution to institutionalize such a gross misuse of the parliamentary process brought about by the concerted actions of motivated FFNGOs.

An alpha predator has thus been created in a vital ecosystem like education using the permanently and constitutionally corralled prey base of another hapless community. Has macaulay taken rebirth in another avatar?? Do you really think that one entity in India has the brains to do all this?? or is this simply CA timelined phase of project joshua moving ahead?? opportunely actioned by interested offshore groups??

Earlier the brahmins were specifically targeted and now a consolidated community has been targeted and made subservient to a minority gang just like the brits themselves were a minority gang in the form of an apex predator during the colonial era??

If such assaults on freedom do not exercise the tender protective feelings of a vital pillar of democracy, then why should the sudden urge push it to intervene in a long standing provision of an established act of parliament concerning SC/STs stir it now??

The battle lines are being drawn now for 2019 and this only proves that the Indian exertions of CA are very much broader and much more widespread, very deeply rooted, both in time and in space than what it is assumed. CA has been in India for a very long time now and that is not a mere coincidence. It was specifically brought in by FFNGOs and the deep states of the UK+EU to target one specific individual and organization, the RSS, both have repeatedly demonstrated the staying power as well as an inspired and awesome capacity for mass mobilization and nationwide organization against the sustained opposition.

I would hark back to the dilli elections and the completely unexpected and inexplicable rise of the aap party and the khujliwal menace. In hindsight, many things in that election can be explained using the CA methodologies.

The separate and specific targeting of the slum dwellers, jhuggi jhopadi colonies, minority groupings right down to the disgruntled but numerous and significant baboo(n) population, the promised freebies of water, electricity and wifi and the mobilisation of hard untraceable cash from anonymous sources has all the hallmarks of a CA operation as does the sudden apology spree of khujliwal to free himself of the personal damage of the numerous defamation cases filed against him and his equally rabid pals, well before the 2019 run.

I remember being totally floored and completely taken aback by the sheer marketing abilities and the nimble electoral strategy, implementation methodology and political acumen and tactics of the AAP and wondering who was the architect of this flawless campaign.

I really really racked my brains but could not identify the specific leadership that conceived, planned out, laid down and ran such an inspired political expedition, almost military in the marshaling of its resources, the breadth of its reach and its laser focussed execution to achieve its objectives.

Looking at the aap today and after observing it for a long period of time, I know for sure that no such leadership existed/exists in the aap and it was CA/SCL all the way. CA was founded in 2013 and the aap rose in 2015.

The parent of CA is the SCL Group, which calls itself a "global election management agency" FFNGOs would have been aware and they would have spotted the critical utility of such an organization to their own shady needs as would deep state entities in the UK, EU as well as the USA and they all would have been early movers in the use of such techniques as well as technologies. khujliwal is a magsaysay award winner, ford foundation funded operator and he has been used as the trojan horse.

Such CA pioneered techniques could easily be used by the intelligence agencies of deep state entities in the UK, EU as well as the USA (or even the paki ISI !!) to target regime changes in some countries and remove politically inexpedient presence and usher in "friendly" regimes by headed by more "cooperative" entities amenable to "suggestions" and the willingness to enact laws more friendly towards extra territorial powers and other offshore interests.

No one in India had the ability to do what the aap did in dilli. If they had, a particular party would not have done as well as it is doing even today because the opposition would have butchered them at the hustings using the very same tactics that the aap used.

If others have adapted using the techniques pioneered by the CA, so has another particular party adapted itself too.

How did people like aatishi marlena acquire such prominence in the app?? because she has a commie background and is a "rhodes scholar"?? or simply a CA plant??

The Indian state is also hitting back. The slowly spreading agitations and opposition to the non payment of RTE funding to majority run schools is not a mere coincidence.

The withholding of RTE funds and/or the tardy payment of the same is a planned strategy, to agitate the middle class, spread resentment and anger in them, culminating in public outcries which the govt will finally "recognize" as a matter to be urgently reviewed and addressed before 2019.

Many schools in many states have already mobilized such public opposition to nonpayment of RTE funds and are refusing to make admissions under the RTE, inconveniencing many aspirants. I think that something will happen soon.

SM is full of angry tweets against the RTE and that very real anger is only growing by the day. Do you think that the various state govts as well as the GoI do not know this?? How many states does one particular party control now??


Here is what CA claims that it does. How can anyone say that CA did not do it in India, especially when the aap elections in dilli may not have been a simple and straightforward kosher operation but (CT hat on!!) some sort of intelligence services or FFNGO led localized regime change experiment??

per wiki

The company claims to use "data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques" providing "psychographic analysis" for a "deeper knowledge of the target audience". The company uses the OCEAN scale of personality traits.[10][9] Using what it calls "behavioral microtargeting" the company indicates that it can predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences." According to Sasha Issenberg, CA indicates that it can tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.[7][36]

CA derives much of its personality data on online surveys which it conducts on an ongoing basis. For each political client, the firm narrows voter segments from 32 different personality styles it attributes to every adult in the United States. The personality data informs the tone of the language used in ad messages or voter contact scripts, while additional data is used to determine voters' stances on particular issues.[37]

The data gets updated with monthly surveys, asking about political preferences and how people get the information they use to make decisions. It also covers consumer topics about different brands and preferred products, building up an image of how someone shops as much as how they vote.[38]

Channel 4 News investigation

Channel 4 News, a news programme broadcast by the British public service Channel 4, conducted a four-month investigation into Cambridge Analytica starting in November 2017. An undercover reporter posed as a potential customer for Cambridge Analytica, hoping to help Sri Lankan candidates get elected. Video footage from this operation was published on 19 March 2018.[39] From the footage, Cambridge Analytica executives say they worked on over 200 elections across the world.

Alexander Nix was recorded in this investigation, talking "unguardedly about the company's practices".[41] Nix said that his company uses honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, for opposition research.[42] For example, Nix offered to discredit political opponents in Sri Lanka with suggestive videos using "beautiful Ukrainian girls" and offers of bribes, even if the opponents did not accept the offers.[43] Cambridge Analytica said that the video footage was "edited and scripted to grossly misrepresent" the recorded conversations and company's business practices. Nix said that he had "entertained a series of ludicrous hypothetical scenarios", but insisted his company does not engage in entrapment or bribery.[44

[chetak]

The manipulations of elections in India is a farfetched CT and we should all go back to our peaceful slumbers.

It is impossible for such things to happen in India, no??

The deep and abiding interest of intelligence agencies in regime change manipulations using weaponized data as a tool just cannot happen in our democracy.

We should be looking at the aap in dilli.

How a dishonest no hoper was picked out of the gutter and installed as the head of the state govt and that too in the capital of India. Had the GoI backed off from its responsibilities and allowed the dilli govt to run riot as they wanted, imagine what would have been the resulting anarchy in the capital city of India.


The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

Tamsin Shaw

March 21, 2018,


Apparently, the age of the old-fashioned spook is in decline. What is emerging instead is an obscure world of mysterious boutique companies specializing in data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies. As they say about hedge funds, if the general public has heard their names that’s probably not a good sign. But there is now one data analysis company that anyone who pays attention to the US and UK press has heard of: Cambridge Analytica. Representatives have boasted that their list of past and current clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NATO. Nevertheless, they became recognized for just one influence campaign: the one that helped Donald Trump get elected president of the United States. The kind of help the company offered has since been the subject of much unwelcome legal and journalistic scrutiny.

Carole Cadwalladr’s recent exposé of the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica shows that the company, along with its partner, SCL Group, should rightly be as a cautionary tale about the part private companies play in developing and deploying government-funded behavioral technologies. Her source, former employee Christopher Wylie, has described the development of influence techniques for psychological warfare by SCL Defense, the refinement of similar techniques by SCL Elections through its use across the developing world (for example, a “rumor campaign” deployed to spread fear during the 2007 election in Nigeria), and the purchase of this cyber-arsenal by Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica, and who, with the help of Wylie, Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix, deployed it on the American electorate in 2016.

But the revelations should also prompt us to ask deeper questions about the kind of behavioral science research that enables both governments and private companies to assume these powers. Two young psychologists are central to the Cambridge Analytica story. One is Michal Kosinski, who devised an app with a Cambridge University colleague, David Stillwell, that measures personality traits by analyzing Facebook “likes.” It was then used in collaboration with the World Well-Being Project, a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center that specializes in the use of big data to measure health and happiness in order to improve well-being. The other is Aleksandr Kogan, who also works in the field of positive psychology and has written papers on happiness, kindness, and love (according to his résumé, an early paper was called “Down the Rabbit Hole: A Unified Theory of Love”). He ran the Prosociality and Well-being Laboratory, under the auspices of Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute.

Despite its prominence in research on well-being, Kosinski’s work, Cadwalladr points out, drew a great deal of interest from British and American intelligence agencies and defense contractors, including overtures from the private company running an intelligence project nicknamed “Operation KitKat” because a correlation had been found between anti-Israeli sentiments and liking Nikes and KitKats. Several of Kosinski’s co-authored papers list the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, as a funding source. His résumé boasts of meetings with senior figures at two of the world’s largest defense contractors, Boeing and Microsoft, both companies that have sponsored his research. He ran a workshop on digital footprints and psychological assessment for the Singaporean Ministry of Defense.

For his part, Aleksandr Kogan established a company, Global Science Research, that contracted with SCL, using Facebook data to map personality traits for its work in elections (Kosinski claims that Kogan essentially reverse-engineered the app that he and Stillwell had developed). Kogan’s app harvested data on Facebook users who agreed to take a personality test for the purposes of academic research (though it was, in fact, to be used by SCL for non-academic ends). But according to Wylie, the app also collected data on their entire—and nonconsenting—network of friends. Once Cambridge Analytica and SCL had won contracts with the State Department and were pitching to the Pentagon, Wylie became alarmed that this illegally-obtained data had ended up at the heart of government, along with the contractors who might abuse it.

This apparently bizarre intersection of research on topics like love and kindness with defense and intelligence interests is not, in fact, particularly unusual. It is typical of the kind of dual-use research that has shaped the field of social psychology in the US since World War II. Much of the classic, foundational research on personality, conformity, obedience, group polarization, and other such determinants of social dynamics—while ostensibly civilian—was funded during the cold war by the military and the CIA. The cold war was an ideological battle, so, naturally, research on techniques for controlling belief was considered a national security priority. This psychological research laid the groundwork for propaganda wars and for experiments in individual “mind control.” The pioneering figures from this era—for example, Gordon Allport on personality and Solomon Asch on belief conformity—are still cited in NATO psy-ops literature to this day.

The recent revival of this cold war approach has taken place in the setting of the war on terror, which began in 1998 with Bill Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 62, making terrorism America’s national security priority. Martin Seligman, the psychologist who has bridged the military and civilian worlds more successfully than any other with his work on helplessness and resilience, was at the forefront of the new dual-use initiative. His research began as a part of a cold war program of electroshock experiments in the 1960s. He subjected dogs to electric shocks, rendering them passive to the point that they no longer even tried to avoid the pain, a state he called “learned helplessness.” This concept then became the basis of a theory of depression, along with associated ideas about how to foster psychological resilience.

In 1998, Seligman founded the positive psychology movement, dedicated to the study of psychological traits and habits that foster authentic happiness and well-being, spawning an enormous industry of popular self-help books. At the same time, his work attracted interest and funding from the military as a central part of its soldier-resilience initiative. Seligman had previously worked with the CIA and even before September 11, 2001, his new movement was in tune with America’s shifting national security priorities, hosting in its inaugural year a conference in Northern Ireland on “ethno-political conflict.”

But it was after the September 11 attacks that terrorism became Seligman’s absolute priority. In 2003, he said that the war with jihadis must take precedence over all other academic research, saying of his colleagues: “If we lose the war, the laudable, but pet projects they endorse, will not be issues… If we win this war, we can go on to pursue the normal goals of science.” Money poured into the discipline for these purposes. The Department of Homeland Security established Centers of Excellence in universities for interdisciplinary research into the social and psychological roots of terrorism. Elsewhere, scholars worked more obliquely on relevant behavioral technologies.

Some of the psychological projects cultivated under the banner of the war on terror will be familiar to many readers. Psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, and their colleagues in other disciplines (most prominently, the Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein) rehabilitated the cold war research on “group polarization” as a way of understanding not, this time, the radicalism that feeds “totalitarianism,” but the equally amorphous notion of “extremism.” They sought to combat extremism domestically by promoting “viewpoint diversity” both on campus (through organizations such as the Heterodox Academy, run by Haidt and funded by libertarian billionaire Paul Singer) and online, suggesting ways in which websites might employ techniques from social psychology to combat phenomena such as “confirmation bias.” Their notion of “appropriate heterogeneity” (Sunstein) in moral and political views remains controversial.

Seligman himself saw the potential for using the Internet to bring his research on personality together with new ways of gathering data. This project began shortly after the September 11 attacks, with a paper on “Character Strengths Before and After September 11,” which focused on variations in traits such as trust, love, teamwork, and leadership. It ultimately evolved into the innovative World Well-Being Project at Penn. Seligman also fostered links with Cambridge University, where he is on the board of the Well-Being Institute that employs the same kind of psychometric techniques. The aim of these programs is not simply to analyze our subjective states of mind but to discover means by which we can be “nudged” in the direction of our true well-being as positive psychologists understand it, which includes attributes like resilience and optimism. Seligman’s projects are almost all funded by the Templeton Foundation and may have been employed for entirely civilian purposes. But in bringing together the personality research and the behavioral technologies that social psychologists had for decades been refining with the new tool of big data (via the astonishing resources provided by social media), it has created an important template for what is now the cutting-edge work of America’s intelligence community.

In 2008, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates commissioned the Minerva Initiative, funded by the DoD, which brought researchers in the social sciences together to study culture and terrorism, and specifically supported initiatives involving the analysis of social media. One of the Cornell scientists involved also participated in the famous and controversial Facebook study of emotional contagion. Less well known is the Open Source Indicators program at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA (a body under the Director of National Intelligence), which has aimed to analyze social media in order to predict social unrest and political crises.

In a 2014 interview, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, speaking then as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that such open-source data initiatives, and in particular the study of social media such as Facebook, had entirely transformed intelligence-gathering. He reported that traditional signals intelligence and human intelligence were increasingly being replaced by this open-source work and that the way in which intelligence agents are trained had been modified to accommodate the shift. A growing portion of the military’s $50 billion budget would be spent on this data analytics work, he claimed, creating a “gold rush” for contractors. A few weeks after this interview, Flynn left the DIA to establish the Flynn Intel Group Inc. He later acted as a consultant to the SCL Group.

Carole Cadwalladr reported in The Observer last year that it was Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Alphabet founder Eric Schmidt, who made SCL aware of this gold rush, telling Alexander Nix, then head of SCL Elections, that the company should emulate Palantir, the company set up by Peter Thiel and funded with CIA venture capital that has now won important national security contracts. Schmidt threatened to sue Cadwalladr for reporting this information. But Nix recently admitted before a parliamentary select committee in London that Schmidt had interned for Cambridge Analytica, though he denied that she had introduced him to Peter Thiel. Aleksandr Kogan and Christopher Wylie allowed Cambridge Analytica to evolve into an extremely competitive operator in this arena.

It was by no means inevitable that dual-use research at the intersection of psychology and data science would be employed along with illegally-obtained caches of data to manipulate elections. But dual-use research in psychology does seem to present a specific set of dangers. Many areas of scientific research have benefited from dual-use initiatives. The National Cancer Institute began its life in the early 1970s as part of a coordinated program examining the effects of tumor agents developed as bio-weapons at Fort Detrick. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, similarly, researched the effects of militarily manufactured hazardous viruses. This was the foundation of a biotechnology industry that has become a paradigm case of dual use and has led, in spite of its more sinister side, to invaluable medical breakthroughs. But the development of behavioral technologies intended for military-grade persuasion in cyber-operations is rooted in a specific perspective on human beings, one that is at odds with the way they should be viewed in democratic societies.

I’ve written previously about the way in which a great deal of contemporary behavioral science aims to exploit our irrationalities rather than overcome them. A science that is oriented toward the development of behavioral technologies is bound to view us narrowly as manipulable subjects rather than rational agents. If these technologies are becoming the core of America’s military and intelligence cyber-operations, it looks as though we will have to work harder to keep these trends from affecting the everyday life of our democratic society. That will mean paying closer attention to the military and civilian boundaries being crossed by the private companies that undertake such cyber-operations.

In the academic world, it should entail a refusal to apply the perspective of propaganda research more generally to social problems. From social media we should demand, at a minimum, much greater protection of our data. Over time, we might also see a lower tolerance for platforms whose business model relies on the collection and commercial exploitation of that data. As for politics, rather than elected officials’ perfecting technologies that give them access to personal information about the electorate, their focus should be on informing voters about their policies and actions, and making themselves accountable.

[chetak]

In cricketing terms, the NM govt has already bowled an easy full toss for shady agencies like CA, facebook etc to hit right out of the stadium. This mistake is going to come back to bite the Modi govt in the ass.

This is what zuckerberg meant when he said that he would ensure "free" elections in India. At the time, lots of folks must have wondered exactly who zuckerberg was to ensure such "free" elections in India.

Well, now we know. He is sitting on a massive ammunition pile of voter's data, already tailor made and weaponized, ready for use during elections in India. This goldmine may already be with CA or its equally shady associates in India.

The only defence now left may be to quickly enact a really, really bad ass privacy law with very stringent provisions upto and including imprisonment for life.




At loggerheads now, govt once used Facebook, Google for digital push

At loggerheads now, govt once used Facebook, Google for digital push

The Indian government is now worried about Indian users data being used by Facebook to influence elections

Karan Choudhury | New Delhi,

March 26, 2018


Prime Minister Modi launched 'Digital India’ in 2014 after which Facebook and Google started meeting with the Prime Minister’s Office

The Indian government may have ‘unfriended’ Facebook last week after it warned the social media giant from interfering and influencing next year’s elections. However, not so long ago, it used Mark Zuckerberg’s firm as well as Google for its magnum opus Digital India initiative.

Since the launch of the programme in 2014, these two US technology giants have played an integral role in almost every aspect of the initiative. From educating people about the internet, connecting far-flung areas with a high-speed net, promoting entrepreneurship, building start-up incubators, women empowerment, to even running a voter registration campaign, cybersecurity and counter-terrorism, Facebook and Google have done it all for the government.

How it all began?

It all started after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the 'Digital India’ campaign in 2014 after which companies such as Facebook and Google started having meetings with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) and Niti Aayog.

Around the time of the announcement of the Digital India initiative, Google came out with its biggest programme ‘Next Billion User’ to catch hold of the next generation of users. Facebook also started floating the idea of the internet for all ‘Internet.org’.

In 2015 when the PM went to the US for the first time, he visited all the major tech firms in the valley including Facebook, Google and Microsoft, where he spoke at length about the Digital India. Facebook went a step ahead and equated the programme and Internet.org, a faux pas it apologised for later.

Apart from those hiccups, Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had numerous meetings with the PM whenever they visited India on official tours. The talks were all centered around the Digital India initiative.

How deeply involved are Facebook and Google in Digital India?

According to Google, in alignment with its global efforts of getting the next billion people online — many of whom are in India — it has outlined its focus and commitment to bring the internet alive everyone in India.

“We are very focused on solving the needs of the next billion users who’re not online. This mission aligns very well, with Indian government's vision of Digital India. A connected India with access to the whole web will help businesses grow, power education for the next generation and create growth for the Indian economy. We aim to create access to the internet with initiatives, products, features and services that are unique and relevant to India,” the company said in reply to a questionnaire.

From bringing fast, high-quality internet access, building products that perform even when there is low connectivity, making the web more accessible and useful for Indian language speakers, increasing the internet usage amongst women in rural India and skill development for developers and small and medium businesses (SMBs) to enable a safe and secure digital payments experience are some of the key initiatives Google has been working on.

On the other hand Facebook, after the failure of its Internet.org campaign in India, launched Express Wi-Fi, which is now commercially available through hotspots across the four Indian states of Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Meghalaya.

In partnership with Bharti Airtel, Facebook will launch an additional 20,000 hotspots as announced in May 2017— allowing Express Wi-Fi to reach more Indians who need super-fast and affordable connectivity.

While the Indian government is now worried about Indian users data being used by Facebook to influence elections, some time back, Facebook collaborated with the Election Commission of India (ECI) and launched a nationwide voter registration campaign.

In 2017-18, Facebook also collaborated with the Chief Electoral Officer of Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland to increase engagement and participation in the state elections. As a part of this collaboration, Facebook promoted a reminder in people’s News Feed on the polling days to help educate people on the state elections and encourage them to take part.

Google has been working with Indian Railways and RailTel on providing high speed Wi-Fi at 400 train stations. The company has already deployed it at over 300 stations, with monthly users of around 7.7 million.

Its other programme ‘Internet Saathi’ launched in partnership with Tata Trusts is operational in 13 states. “Around 13.5 million women have already benefitted from the programme and it is now active across 140,000 villages,” Google said.

There are hundreds of other initiatives on which two firms have been working closely with the government under the Digital India programme.

Why did the government tie-up with these players?

According to industry experts, it was the easiest thing for the government to do — to use the resources, reach and data that these companies possess — to kickstart its own programme.

“It is very safe to use a Google or Facebook. Why would they tie-up with small company? They have a lot of data which is updated,” said Asoke K Laha President and CEO, Interra Information Technologies, also the former National President of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC).

Facebook and Google keep their India investment figures under wraps and it runs into billions of dollars, which includes the infrastructure and manpower they have setup in India.

Did government factor in the risk?

Experts believe that in the rush to create a Digital India, the government did not anticipate the risk that the data intermediaries pose to a nation.

“We have to understand these are all data intermediaries. It is but natural that they will use data in every manner. The government did not anticipate this, but the incident shows that India is very much at risk. The digital India programme was primarily aimed to transform India into a digital society. That is why the government in the thought process tried to rely on these intermediaries. With these kinds of incidents, it clearly shows that we are not prepared to deal with them. The IT Act is silent and India does not have a privacy law and a data protection law. We need to revisit intermediary liability and put them in far more rigorous compliances,” said Pavan Duggal, cyber law expert and Supreme Court advocate.

[csaurabh]

Just posting this rave-and-rant..

Leftist narrative about lynchings, communalism, rape and caste violence has become very strong.

There is no doubt that some bad incidents like brutal rapes, murder, etc. have happened motivated by caste or religious agenda.
This has been used to defame entire communities and country. A lot of people have become very anti-Modi and by extension anti-Hindu/anti-India.

I see it all the time in various forms.

At the same time, on the cultural front nothing much has happened. Yes, some things have cracked through the left wing propaganda in recent years
-yoga and spirituality is promoted more
-aryan invasion theory being seriously questioned and swadeshi indology
-better history is becoming known, eg. about Shivaji

yet it is very far from creating a strong 'grand narrative' and overall Indian pride and nationalism still remains weak.

Economically not too much has happened either
-GST and Demonetization caused massive disruptions for small benefit
-not enough job creation, made even more problematic by rising automation coming in West.

The left wants to cause a major civil war in India, breaking it into several pieces ( Bharat tukde tukde ). There is sense of despair among youth.
I don't feel good about this in the coming years. I hate to say this but Modi has not turned out to be such a visionary leader as we had hoped for.

[Atulya P]

At loggerheads now, govt once used Facebook, Google for digital push

This is a crazy farticle, using the companies for Digital India etc. cannot be equated to election rigging. It's like saying you bought our missiles and now you cannot cry if we use it to bomb your cities.

We have to understand these are all data intermediaries. It is but natural that they will use data in every manner.

[chetak]

At loggerheads now, govt once used Facebook, Google for digital push

This is a crazy farticle, using the companies for Digital India etc. cannot be equated to election rigging. It's like saying you bought our missiles and now you cannot cry if we use it to bomb your cities.

We have to understand these are all data intermediaries. It is but natural that they will use data in every manner.

So, per you, its OK for them to use the data acquired through Govt of India contracts for one specific purpose and manipulate, doctor, rejig and recast the very same data to rig or sabotage democratic elections in India??

In which universe is this justified?? for some shitty little white skinned foreigner to to manipulate data, steer specific agendas and outcomes, to precipitate elections results in India, as desired by them or their masters, junking all democratic rights and aspirations of her peoples??

What if someone claims that CA is also a "data intermediary" as its data derived products are used by motivated political parties for nefarious purposes?? and CA is not at all responsible for for the damage that such use of "derived data" causes to whole communities as well as countries??

What about colonialism v2.0?? that has been insidiously and cancerously ushered in by entities like CA??

Is that OK too??

It may help to read up on CA's "business" model. Its very enterprising and it has a "start up" feel to its rollout and deployment in some very helpless countries, not to mention the widely held premise of CA rigging the brexit vote and precipitating a needless crisis of gigantic proportions and extremely far reaching consequences.

[vijayk]

Indian Govt. Needs a rapid response team. The global mafia network is starting 1000 fires and Govt. Is clueless on how to deal. The fact that they paid 500-1000 for Dalit riots and were able to get away is very dangerous. All the videos on what's app and FB are very well funded campaigns.

[chetak]

https://youtu.be/hZbS9W-8dnU


Episode 1 | On Point with Nupur Sharma | Jamie Bartlett Interview

[rgosain]

Cambridge Analytics has undergone several iterations and its origins in the UK establishment that involves GCHQ, numerous think thanks and institutions, not all of them based in Cambridge or the Fenlands. The recent furore of its involvement in the Brexit referendum of 2016 has exposed some of their activities but there are plenty of others in the UK who are associated with CA and do many of the same things both in the Uk and abroad with the full knowledge of the Uk gov.
It is not coincidental that CA and their associates are from the UK. Britain is the pioneer in data interception, harvesting and data exploitation going back to WW2 at Bletchley Pk when Gordon Welchman and Alan Turing together with a number of brilliant mathematicians and engineers broke the Enigma code, but most importantly,demonstrated the critical importance of meta-data in analysing traffic analysis. The data provided provided military information, but more importantly could be used to exploit behavior patterns or steer an adversary's decision making processes.
In many respects, very similar to the Ford Foundation efforts to map India's demographics and bio-data that came later
It has never been established who facilitated Rahul Gandhi Cambridge 'degree' in Development Studies and to what end in 1995-96, but he is clever enough to be steered by them, even if he is not intelligent enough to get a real Cantab MA in a serious subject. DeV Degrees are dished out to actors, and sports people to burnish their credentials, so perhaps RG was being anointed for some future role

[chetak]

Cambridge Analytics has undergone several iterations and its origins in the UK establishment that involves GCHQ, numerous think thanks and institutions, not all of them based in Cambridge or the Fenlands. The recent furore of its involvement in the Brexit referendum of 2016 has exposed some of their activities but there are plenty of others in the UK who are associated with CA and do many of the same things both in the Uk and abroad with the full knowledge of the Uk gov.
It is not coincidental that CA and their associates are from the UK. Britain is the pioneer in data interception, harvesting and data exploitation going back to WW2 at Bletchley Pk when Gordon Welchman and Alan Turing together with a number of brilliant mathematicians and engineers broke the Enigma code, but most importantly,demonstrated the critical importance of meta-data in analysing traffic analysis. The data provided provided military information, but more importantly could be used to exploit behavior patterns or steer an adversary's decision making processes.
In many respects, very similar to the Ford Foundation efforts to map India's demographics and bio-data that came later
It has never been established who facilitated Rahul Gandhi Cambridge 'degree' in Development Studies and to what end in 1995-96, but he is clever enough to be steered by them, even if he is not intelligent enough to get a real Cantab MA in a serious subject. DeV Degrees are dished out to actors, and sports people to burnish their credentials, so perhaps RG was being anointed for some future role

Yes, the compulsion to dice and slice Indians is a lesson well learned and appreciated by the goras since the colonial days.

It is but natural that they continue the very same tried and tested ways to push their agendas.

These are well planned, entrenched and strategised deep state campaigns, where just like the james bond villians, their goal is world domination.

[Pathik]

As far as data mining on Indian populace is concerned Project Joshua had their act sorted out way back when UPA was in power. Their DB on Indian mainstream, tribals and sub castes is worrying, all for selective programmed targetting.

[Atulya P]

This is a crazy farticle, using the companies for Digital India etc. cannot be equated to election rigging. It's like saying you bought our missiles and now you cannot cry if we use it to bomb your cities.

So, per you, its OK for them to use the data acquired through Govt of India contracts for one specific purpose and manipulate, doctor, rejig and recast the very same data to rig or sabotage democratic elections in India??

Before ranting, read carefully. Where did I say this? Infact, the opposite.

[chetak]

As far as data mining on Indian populace is concerned Project Joshua had their act sorted out way back when UPA was in power. Their DB on Indian mainstream, tribals and sub castes is worrying, all for selective programmed targetting.

There are many who follow FCRA regulations but still go down the same dirty trail.

joshua has just slowed a bit, still pressing on, while waiting for the right helmsperson to clamber on to the bridge.

[ramana]

Cambridge Analytica files for bankruptcy to protect itself.
The principals should be hunted down.
The evil is in them.

Next India should ban Facebook two months before General Elections 2019 as a safety precaution.

[chetak]

^^^^^^^
I wouldn't bet on it

twitter

Whether it is born or not they have shown the IDEA! Anyone who wants it can do it. You should go after the place where it gets created and how it moves from there. For ex: @Twitter

3:33 PM - 3 May 2018

They already started a new entity called Emerdata, they got a Chinese and one Middle eastern investor. Also Erik Prince is a part of the new entity.

5:15 AM - 3 May 2018

So Cambridge Analytica following in Hafiz Saeed's footsteps, shutting down one entity & restarting another with a new name

[Karthik S]

As far as data mining on Indian populace is concerned Project Joshua had their act sorted out way back when UPA was in power. Their DB on Indian mainstream, tribals and sub castes is worrying, all for selective programmed targetting.

There are many who follow FCRA regulations but still go down the same dirty trail.

joshua has just slowed a bit, still pressing on, while waiting for the right helmsperson to clamber on to the bridge.

Why isn't the government making these things public? Whole world and mainly Indian citizens need to know what powers are acting against them and why. I bet 99.9% of even highly educated Indian wouldn't have heard of joshua project.

[Pathik]

There are many who follow FCRA regulations but still go down the same dirty trail.

joshua has just slowed a bit, still pressing on, while waiting for the right helmsperson to clamber on to the bridge.

Why isn't the government making these things public? Whole world and mainly Indian citizens need to know what powers are acting against them and why. I bet 99.9% of even highly educated Indian wouldn't have heard of joshua project.

Sonia Maino's blessings I guess. I am sure Joshua would be in the cross hairs of the NIA, after FCRA NGO and Madrats funding crack down the online sources can be the next targets. Whats appalling is that this information is publicly available on the WWW with the agenda clearly mentioned. Imagine what information they would be mining beyond public view.

[Pathik]

A casual search on the project joshua site (https://joshuaproject.net/search) for the caste 'maratha' gave startling results. These people have been at it since ages and know what can burn India. Problem is we still don't know who our enemies are despite having swords at our necks

[Rudradev]

Must-Read Article.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/fut ... n-warfare/


Memes That Kill: The Future Of Information Warfare

DARPA has been researching the use of Memes, and other tools of Digital Information Warfare, since at least 2011.

[Rudradev]

Look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

Just about any words or expressions can be made to come out from the mouth of any person. And it will be on video!

[chetak]

A casual search on the project joshua site (https://joshuaproject.net/search) for the caste 'maratha' gave startling results. These people have been at it since ages and know what can burn India. Problem is we still don't know who our enemies are despite having swords at our necks

we certainly know who our enemies are and it is us.

the joshua types have burrowed deep into the body politic and have their hooks firmly embedded into the very heart of India. Our own people have enabled them and still continue to do so.

Do you really think that stuff like the RTE, the so called but now (temporarily !!) aborted "communal violence bill", the in your face "inculturation" that no one talks about, the open misappropriation and stealing of Hindu religious memes and the shrill presstitute screeching for the protection of minority "rights" and the aggressive "legal" interference in the performance of age old Hindu rituals under the guise of gender equality or animal cruelty is merely happenstance??

What about the permanently embedded bollywood psyops of "paki is good and Hindus are bad" slant to almost every movie?? why are Hindu girls creaming their panties for muslim heroes??

joshua is truly alive, well and thriving, aided, abetted and supported by our own "sickular liberals and free thinkers ", naxals like kanhiya kumar and his traitorous gang using tax payers money and resources to spread lies and continuously denigrate and attack the Hindus is also a co-opted part of josuha.

The continuous targeting of Modi, the RSS and Amit Shah by all political parties, sickulars and organized bodies like the church and the madrassa set is there for all to see.

Have you ever seen such a diverse bunch of opposition grandees all focussed on a common target?? It is coordinated collusion.

[chetak]

Why isn't the government making these things public? Whole world and mainly Indian citizens need to know what powers are acting against them and why. I bet 99.9% of even highly educated Indian wouldn't have heard of joshua project.

Sonia Maino's blessings I guess. I am sure Joshua would be in the cross hairs of the NIA, after FCRA NGO and Madrats funding crack down the online sources can be the next targets. Whats appalling is that this information is publicly available on the WWW with the agenda clearly mentioned. Imagine what information they would be mining beyond public view.

What about the people in the NIA itself??

After all, what happened to Col Purohit is no secret.

Almost everyone from the MH ATS who was deeply complicit in "fixing" him was a Hindu, no?? Not one of those jokers had a second thought. A pox on all their houses.

It would have been a nightmarish situation for India, had kasab not been taken alive.

Colonial britain and the techniques that they used to divide and rule India for centuries with an embedded white skin component of a mere 100,000 or so brits, give or take, actually resident in country, was the rudimentary forerunner of the techniques adapted, refined, weaponized and deployed by the likes of cambridge analytica. After all the brits are the past masters at behavior modification on an industrial scale.

Among the very first organizations to show interest in CA and its methods were the military, intelligence agencies and of course, the ubiquitous and ever present FFNGOs who immediately visualized the effective use of these techniques and devised very innovative methods to deploy them in the field.

[UlanBatori]

up as in Mau, UP.