Keep the Heat on Cambridge Analytica

Investigative journalism takes time and resources. The British state and the political elite is reeling from the deluge of revelations about the connections between private firms, political parties and electoral deception and manipulation. We are trying to give the space and profile to Liam O Hare to continue investigations.

Liam writes: “Journalism at its core should be about holding power to account. That’s why I am determined to investigate this story further. With a catalogue of elections interfered in from Nigeria to Bulgaria, Brexit to Trump, rarely have we seen such unaccountable power wielded as shown by Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group. What’s really concerning is that they appear to have close ties to our own state institutions.”

With your support, I will investigate:

  • The worldwide activities of SCL Group and which governments and organisations they have collaborated with
  • The background and political links of SLC Group’s board, directors and shareholders
  • How closely has the British government worked with Cambridge Analytica/SLC Group to interfere in elections and democracies globally?
  • If SLC Group is really just a private arm of the British Ministry of Defence?
  • How big a role did SLC Group/Cambridge Analytica/Aggregate IQ play in Brexit?
  • How closely is SLC Group tied to the US state department?
  • What other elections or referendum were they involved in? For instance was there any involvement in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014?
  • What was the cause of Dan Muresan (Christopher Wylie’s predecessor) mysterious death in Kenya?

Please support Liam O Hare’s work here and allow us to keep digging …

Comments (10)

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  1. Dougie Blackwood says:

    This company is just the one that was caught. The world is now full of similar organisations the seek to influence opinion and actions.

    Another one of many examples is The Fraser of Allander team. They are routinely trotted out by our friends in the BBC as an independent think tank but their aim is to maintain the multi-national hegemony over what happens in this little part of these islands. Tory good, SNP bad, Labour hopeless is their mantra and our Westminster government delights in getting their message across to the lieges with the willing assistance of the London Broadcasting Corporation.

  2. Wul says:

    A part of me did wonder, on reading about the C.A. revelations, if it raises the possibility for “the many” to crowdsource funding for a similar company to move elections and consensus towards a better outcome for ourselves?

    After all, there’s many millions more poor people than rich (one lucky side effect of inequality?) and “many a mickle maks a muckle” as my granny would say.

    This creates a rather bleak scenario where democracy bends to the highest bidder and it’s simply a matter of who has the most cash and the better psyops gurus.

    I would not wish to live in a society like that. But then again, isn’t that exactly where we are at now, except only one side is playing?

    It seems a healthier choice to help fund the exposure of this rotten game than to join in with it.

    So I’ll chip in to help Liam.

  3. Abulhaq says:

    The feeling that anything and everything online cannot be trusted is, for me, growing. Face to face you can generally spot a ‘fake’. Online not so easy. Malicious and malevalent ‘trolling’ has become normative.
    What impact on the National Movement?
    A tour d’horizon of nationalist sites is, with some exceptions, depressing. No fresh ideas, no serious discussion, little indepth questioning of ‘the system’, just pavlovian reaction, mutual antipathy, abuse and intellectual stasis. Zilch revolutionary.
    The UK is one the world’s biggest users of the internet.
    It is fast becoming one of the least actively political.
    Time to ditch the device, stand up and go meet some other humans, real ones who don’t shapeshift.

  4. w.b.robertson says:

    At the end of the day, it is about votes in the ballot boxes. Many decades ago, in the infancy of “market research, a newpaper group of which I was involved, doled out some money on a survey. It found, to our astonishment, that only 8 per cent of our tabloid readers were interested in “politics”. (Much to the chagrin of our leader writer, political staff, and many of the editorial bodies). Are there any figures to suggest, in today`s world, that this percentage has changed much?

  5. Willie says:

    It’s not just data collection and targeted messaging that these companies do.

    In the US, companies like Ntrepid based in Virginia have the technology to let agents act as bloggers on foreign websites.

    With the technology being able to translate into multiple languages, operators can be simultaneously given multiple false IP addresses and akiases suitable to the town, city or country the blogs are being made in

    Imbedded as part of the US military as part of hearts and minds campaign it is more than probable that similar tactics have been used here.

  6. SleepingDog says:

    I am halfway through Helen Fry’s new book The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain’s World War II Interrogation Centre, and it is remarkable how interested the Ministry of Defence were (and presumably still are) in mind control, disinformation, deception and the whole range of psychological operations and information warfare.

    Many of the files from that time are apparently still classified secret. One reason for that, I guess, is that the work continued on directly into the cold war, just like the surveillance state that emerged from the military communication intercept complex. So the real story could start many decades ago.

    And another reason, I guess, is that some of the methods would be presumed to be abhorrent to the general public. As in that case, so in this: investigating the methods (peeling back layers of personal accounts, manuals, messages to the actual practice) will possibly make the biggest impact on the story (like the secret political police in the UK forming romantic liaisons with protestors or using dead babies’ names).

    If contractors are working with the Ministry of Defence, they might have signed the Official Secrets Act. The shape of this secrecy may, I suppose, provide more clues about what is being covered up. As will recent government moves to preserve official secrecy.
    https://www.theguardian.com/law/official-secrets-act
    Perhaps it is not surprising that the security services are exempted from the relevant public interest information acts.
    http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7422
    But there may be a legal way of, for example, finding out whether individuals were contractors or agents. From my limited understanding, agents may be able to break UK law with impunity which contractors might not have that protection.

  7. Jo says:

    It is difficult to have faith in any sort of journalism now wherever you look. People speak about misinformation online but the print and broadcasting media are themselves in a dreadful state with facts absent and made up facts/speculation presented as truth instead.

    I’ve stopped watching BBC news altogether and Channel 4 is getting just as bad. The biggest worry is BBC is publicly funded when all it’s about is propaganda.

    The state of journalism currently is not just depressing, it’s terrifying. Add to that the lies that spew from the mouths of politicians and the failure of journalists to challenge and it is difficult to imagine how much more horror the lies will lead us into.

  8. Hatuey says:

    In the US they have pilotless glider planes that circle above cities for up to 60 days without having to come down and refuel; they mount a thousand ultra hd cameras on them and video record everything that happens in just about every street of the city below, allowing them to effectively go back in time and see what happened anywhere at a given time and place.

    As we all through shopping centres our phones are secretly communicating with robots, logging everything we do, what shops we go to, what we buy, and accessing email and other personal data.

    Online everything is recorded and always has been. Offline computers record keystrokes too, in a secret file accessible to high level engineers.

    Thanks to Snowden, we now know that our computers and mobile devices can be accessed by security services with ease, giving them microphones and cameras in just about every house in the land. Before computers they used to use ordinary phones as bugs and listen in even when the phone was on the hook.

    Spy satellites in the early 1980s were able to read car registration plates from space. We know this through declassified papers on the subject but since then everything has been classified. It is rumoured though that they have worked out how to accurately recognise people from above using advanced profile tracking and facial recognition software developed by Israel.

    Israel of course needs facial recognition because it wasn’t enough that they took the Palestinians’ land, they needed (and still need) the Palestinians to provide cheap labour on that land too; hence the requirement for border check points and security cameras that could robotically identify potential security risks though facial recognition.

    Mobil phones, even non-smart, phones are continually pinging local servers and recording where we are and where we were – this is an intrinsic part of the hand-shaking system and protocol used on mobile networks.

    Similarly, local CCTV cameras throughout the U.K., most of which are relatively poor quality in terms of video, since 2005 have been systematically integrated into a centralised command network that monitors and logs traffic flow using car registration plates, allowing them to accurately trace the whereabouts of over 75% of vehicles as of right now.

    Of course, there’s much more that we do not know about.

    1. Jo says:

      H
      You would think our so called investigative journalists would want to get right into issues like that. Too bad they’re more interested in trawling random FB pages to beat Corbyn about the head with or writing articles about Salmond working for the Kremlin!

  9. Thanks to everyone for supporting this – we can now proceed and keep digging on this over the next few weeks! Superb – thanks!

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