Trump-Russia investigators probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation

[octoberlib]

BY PETER STONE AND GREG GORDON
McClatchy Washington Bureau

Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.

Also under scrutiny is the question of whether Trump associates or campaign aides had any role in assisting the Russians in publicly releasing thousands of emails, hacked from the accounts of top Democrats, at turning points in the presidential race, mainly through the London-based transparency web site WikiLeaks, .

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told McClatchy he wants to know whether Russia’s “fake or damaging news stories” were “coordinated in any way in terms of targeting or in terms of timing or in terms of any other measure … with the (Trump) campaign.By Election Day, an automated Kremlin cyberattack of unprecedented scale and sophistication had delivered critical and phony news about the Democratic presidential nominee to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of millions of voters, many in swing states, even in key precincts.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html

[njhoneybadger]

1. Looks like Mercer and Bannon set up Fredo and baby face Kushner

to take the fall if anything went wrong.

[OnDoutside]

5. If that were true, how did Mercer/Bannon get hold of their emails to pass on to NYT ?

I don't buy that angle.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

16. Russian probably playing all three sides against each other. Disfunction is their goal. . . nt

[OnDoutside]

19. That's certainly more likely than Bannon.

[Achilleaze]

2. Deep, deep, deep is

the republican treason against America.

Disgusting.

[Johnny2X2X]

3. Been saying this from the start

The sophisticated target marketing of fake Hillary stories to voters on Facebook could not have been done by Russia alone. They needed guidance and voter lists from the campaign. And these type of marketing campaigns are so dynamic that communication and guidance would have been daily, if not hourly. And to pull this off there would have been multiple people from the campaign meeting with the Russians daily.

The investigation is going to find hundreds of communications.

[The_jackalope]

4. One strong suspicion

There is strong suspicion that the purpose of the Spectrum Health /Trump Tower/Alfa Bank server communication was to transmit databases of voter information (correlated with email addresses from Spectrum) to Russia in order to effectively target the propaganda.

Deep, deep treason.

[Johnny2X2X]

6. Individual targets

The public doesn't understand how in depth these profiles go. They know exactly what buttons to press. Military background? Fake stories about Hillary and Benghazi. Law enforcement background? Hillary had an FBI agent killed. NRA member? Hillary is taking your guns. And it goes even deeper than that.

Every piece of information they can gather about a voter is taken and put into a database where it is processed and the perfect stories were crafted for each person to touch just the right buttons. They even go so far as to group stories to play off from one another and build to a consensus. Sometimes it's not even a story they read, it's just a phrase or a group of words they see that get them in the right mindset.

People have no idea how marketing works. Internet marketing borders on brain washing right now even outside of politics. And most of the people who were targeted still think they weren't. They might even see that other people were targeted, "but not them, they are too astute and too informed, it couldn't have happened to them." It's like they were playing a game of chess and the people not only weren't aware that they were playing chess, but they weren't even aware that there is such a game called chess.

We still don't even know what hit us.

[Raster]

10. I have a VERY STRONG suspicion that Bannon* and Robert Mercer* are...

...in the thick of this. Bannon* was the "messenger" to tRump* world from Mercer*, who used his Cambridge Analytica to supply the database research for Russia to target certain voters.

[The_jackalope]

13. Such targeting is a multi-step process.

It starts with voter rolls, either public or hacked. The names and street addresses from the rolls are correlated with email addresses through Spectrum Health. This info is used to identify individuals on social media. Their accounts are "scraped" to get as much information about their interests and values as possible. This raw information is used by Cambridge to Analytica to generate psychological profiles of the users. These profiles are then used to target the FB/Twitter bots with psychologically tailored propaganda.

You don't need to hack the vote if you can hack the voters.

[Johnny2X2X]

15. Normal advertising is so complex

They will change the names of people ion fake articles to correspond to names that the individual reader will identify with. Maybe the reader comes from a town with a ton of families named McShay, well Smith gets changed to McShaw or McShen for the article they are reading so they are more likely to identify with that name. It goes as deep as you can imagine.

[Hestia]

20. Interesting article about how it is collated

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

...

How dangerous is big data?

Anyone who has not spent the last five years living on another planet will be familiar with the term Big Data. Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces. Every purchase we make with our cards, every search we type into Google, every movement we make when our mobile phone is in our pocket, every "like" is stored. Especially every "like." For a long time, it was not entirely clear what use this data could have—except, perhaps, that we might find ads for high blood pressure remedies just after we've Googled "reduce blood pressure."

On November 9, it became clear that maybe much more is possible. The company behind Drumpf's online campaign—the same company that had worked for Leave.EU in the very early stages of its "Brexit" campaign—was a Big Data company: Cambridge Analytica.

To understand the outcome of the election—and how political communication might work in the future—we need to begin with a strange incident at Cambridge University in 2014, at Kosinski's Psychometrics Center.

much much more at link

[Raster]

21. Totally agree: "You don't need to hack the vote if you can hack the voters."

I wonder: How complicit is social media in this, ESPECIALLY Farcebook?

[yardwork]

14. Yes, and there were fake positive stories about Trump, too.

A few weeks before the election I heard about a video being targeted to certain Facebook users, in which Trump was portrayed as an angel paying for children's cancer treatments. The story was that Trump was saving the lives of sick children by paying millions of his own money - all done quietly and modestly - for their care.

I remember being disgusted because Trump actually did the opposite. Far from donating money to sick children, he literally stole from his own foundation.

I think that these fake positive stories were targeted to people likely to care about sick children, and influenced them to believe that Trump was a rough but kind man.

[octoberlib]

18. Thanks for the info!

[Docreed2003]

7. Hillary actually pointed this out a few weeks ago

During the sit down interview at the tech convention. She actually pointed out the Mercer's data mining company had worked in conjunction with the Trump campaign to target voters, the Russian interaction was via similar approaches. You can't tell me there wasn't coordination between those groups! But some were too busy encouraging Hillary to go back into seclusion to hear the message. As more is revealed, it becomes ever more clear that she was spot on!

[Raster]

11. !!! YES !!!

The Mercer* family and their data mining are smack-dab in the middle of things. Bannon* is just their proxy/messenger, along with Kellyann Conjob*.

[Ellipsis]

8. Finally some meat on the bone

I'd guess this is how it played out.

[mopinko]

9. how much of their "data" was stolen?

that's what i want to know.

[rainbow4321]

12. Kushner's Project Alamo...Pascale was at Trump Tower June 8, 2016

Pascale's San Antonio's based data office....Trump had sent a team of Cambridge Analytica workers down to San Antonio to work with PA. Kushner never admitted it in his Forbes interview but Pascale did in public interviews post election.

I googled Project Alamo and the date June 9 2016 yesterday to see if anyone from PA was around when Jr's Russian meeting happened in TT given that PA was the data/digital arm of the campaign.
Pascale has a picture of himself and Trump, Sr at TT on June 8, 2016 on his Twitter feed.

Another article said PA ramped up their digital work for the campaign in June 2016.

[octoberlib]

17. That's very interesting.

I've read that Cambridge Analytica also has Russian investors. I hope they get taken down , too.