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The last week has been pretty tough for Cambridge Analytica founded by Steve-Bannon and Robert Mercer and used Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale for the Trump campaign’s data operation.

There is also the video of Alexander Nix boasting on tape about using honeypots to entrap politicians. 

“Sitting in a hotel bar, Alexander Nix, who runs the political data firm Cambridge Analytica, had a few ideas for a prospective client looking for help in a foreign election. The firm could send an attractive woman to seduce a rival candidate and secretly videotape the encounter, Mr. Nix said, or send someone posing as a wealthy land developer to pass a bribe.

“We have a long history of working behind the scenes,” Mr. Nix said.

“The prospective client, though, was actually a reporter from Channel 4 News in Britain, and the encounter was secretly filmed as part of a month slong investigation into Cambridge Analytica, the data firm with ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign.”

“The results of Channel 4’s work were broadcast in Britain on Monday, days after reports in The New York Times and The Observer of London that the firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual American voters.”

At this point it’s becoming very difficult to believe that CA is this innocent, misunderstood company doing harmless ‘psychographic profiling’ that isn’t effective anyway as Brad Parscale has insisted. 

Britain is now taking Cambridge Analytica very seriously too after that shocking interview.

Back to the NY Times:

“Now, the Channel 4 broadcast appears likely to cast an even harsher spotlight on the company, which was founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, a wealthy Republican donor who has put at least $15 million into Cambridge Analytica.”

“The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned their effectiveness.”

“Less noticed has been the work that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, the SCL Group, have done outside the United States. The operations of the two companies were set up with a convoluted corporate structure and are deeply intertwined.”

“Mr. Nix, for instance, holds dual appointments at the two companies. Cambridge Analytica is registered in Delaware and almost wholly owned by the Mercer family, but it is effectively a shell — it holds intellectual property rights to its so-called psychographic modeling tools, yet its clients are served by the staff at London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, who is a British citizen.”

“SCL Elections has clients around the world, and it has experimented with data-driven microtargeting techniques in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules are lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL have been happy to provide government-held data, according to former employees.”

However, what we see in that video goes way beyond data harvesting:

“Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company,” he told the Channel 4 reporter, who was not identified. “We can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists. There’s so many options we can look at.”

“The Channel 4 reporter posed as a “fixer” for a wealthy Sri Lankan family that wanted to help politicians they favored. In a series of meetings at London hotels between November and January, all of which were secretly filmed, Mr. Nix and other executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica employs front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients.”

The information that is uncovered through such clandestine work is then put “into the bloodstream to the internet,” said Mark Turnbull, another Cambridge executive, in an encounter in December 2017 at the Berkeley hotel in London.

“Then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again, over time, to watch it take shape,” he added. “It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘That’s propaganda.’ Because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘Who’s put that out?’”

But it’s even worse than that-it keeps getting worse. CA also does ‘honey traps’-the move that the GOP used to bring down Anthony Weiner-and eventually used Weiner to bring down Hillary Clinton.

FN: Certainly Weiner was honeytrapped though there’s no evidence either way on CA in that particular episode. We do know of the role played by Sydney Leathers and Chuck Johnson as documented in Chapter A

“The most damning footage, though, was of Mr. Nix’s suggestion that the company could entrap political rivals through seduction or bribery.”

“At a meeting in January, also at the Berkeley hotel, Mr. Nix was direct about the techniques SCL could use to aid a client.”

“I mean, deep digging is interesting,” he said. “But you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true, and make sure that that’s video-recorded, you know. These sorts of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption, putting it on the internet, these sorts of things.”

In other words you could simply offer something to someone that’s too good to be true and get that on camera-wether they even took your offer-the audience wouldn’t need to know that.

Mr. Nix then suggested they could have someone pose as a wealthy developer. “They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance,” he said. “We’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras.”

Or, Mr. Nix said, they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house — we have lots of history of things.”

The reporter asked what kind of girls, and Mr. Nix said they could find some Ukrainian women. “I’m just saying, we could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us you know,” Mr. Nix replied. “You know what I’m saying.”

“They are very beautiful,” he said. “I find that works very well.”

To be sure, though, Mr. Nix said that he was speaking only in hypotheticals. “Please don’t pay too much attention to what I’m saying because I’m just giving you examples of what can be done and what, what has been done,” he said.

It can be done, it has been done why would you pay attention?

In still more Cambridge Analytica news, a whistleblower who worked at the company just revealed that Corey Lewandowski approached the company for the Trump campaign in 2015. 

“A former Cambridge Analytica employee said Monday that the data firm met with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in 2015, before President Trump declared his candidacy.

“Christopher Wylie, a self-described whistleblower on the company’s data harvesting practices, told NBC’s “Today” that he left Cambridge Analytica before it formally teamed up with the Trump campaign.”

“However, he said the company had been in talks with the campaign before Trump announced his candidacy, including a meeting with Lewandowski.”

Lewandowski was in the news a lot yesterday as Olivia Nuzzi’s huge piece on Hope Hicks also had some interesting insights into Lewandowski. 

Like it may have been Lewandowski who outed Hope’s relationship with Rob Porter though political espionage-if true Lewandowski brought down a lot of people-as this not only started the chain of events that took out Porter but also put the Trump WH’s entire clearance process under the microscope.

Which may be of interest in the Russia investigation as well; Lewandowki may well have had a hand in bringing down Paul Manafort when he was Trump’s campaign manager.

UPDATE: What subsequent CA info do we now have that can be added?

 

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