A long but important article about CA and SLC Elections, from The Guardian:

[tblue37]

Emphasis added:

snip

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.

This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”

snip

Much more at link:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

[backtoblue]

1. Rec and bookmarking ty nt

[tblue37]

2. There are some real dinosaurs in the military industrial complex. nt

[lapfog_1]

3. A few years ago

I was part of a Technical Evaluation Team for a large Silicon Valley firm that was looking to acquire startups or just past startup phase companies.

One of the weird meetings I had was down in Hollywood.

Some folks down there created a script writing software... but then realized they could "reverse engineer" a script given a set of "results". So they changed their script writing software into a "situation analysis" software.

They got some funding from the CIA.

Because they were doing "Big Data Analytics" my company became interested.

They would then "code in" stuff like 9/11 results and see if the software could pinpoint the originators of the plot... as a sort of AI training dataset.

I didn't really understand everything they were trying to explain, but it was interesting.

Ultimately we didn't move forward with an acquisition.

[herding cats]

4. Marking to read later.

[tblue37]

5. It is long, but very much worth reading! nt

[tblue37]

6. This paragraph is also scary, since so many of these plutocrats are fascists at heart:

Emphasis added.

This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

[blake2012]

7. Ease and fun of internet. Chickens coming home to roost

Most all of us have fallen prey to their evil designs on anti-democratic power grab.

Maybe this is where some of those missing pentagon billions went.

[tblue37]

8. Autocorrect (i.e., autocorrupt) changed "missing" to "issuing" in your post. nt

[blake2012]

9. Argghh. Thanks. Ill go proofread and edit. I see another one too