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US Politics: The Ides of Mueller


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7 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

There's nothing special about Steve Bannon. In fact, he's such a goddamn slob that he blew his shot at consolidating puppetmaster powers for decades to come.

This isn't about Bannon being special. It's about Wylie going on the record to talk about how Cambridge Analytica got access to 50m users worth of information from Facebook in a potentially illegal way. 

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2 minutes ago, Mexal said:

This isn't about Bannon being special. It's about Wylie going on the record to talk about how Cambridge Analytica got access to 50m users worth of information from Facebook in a potentially illegal way. 

Oh, well carry on.

:P

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16 minutes ago, Mexal said:

This isn't about Bannon being special. It's about Wylie going on the record to talk about how Cambridge Analytica got access to 50m users worth of information from Facebook in a potentially illegal way. 

Quote

Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica, the data firm used by the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, citing policy violations.

Facebook deputy general counsel and Vice President Paul Grewal wrote in a post Friday night that the decision was made after reports that the firm did not fully delete data given to them by a University of Cambridge professor in violation of Facebook policies.

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/technology/378892-facebook-suspends-trump-linked-firm-cambridge-analytica

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15 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Oh, well carry on.

:P

From the article...

Quote

Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.

Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer.

 

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13 minutes ago, Mexal said:

From the article...

 

I've been reading. It's what we've suspected and even known, but now there is more than a smoking gun, there's a whole massive paper superhighway of evidence.

FB has so much to answer for -- and maybe even all the users who knew every bit of their data was being harvested but stayed anyway?  So FB stops working with Cambridge Analytica but that's like locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.  The orange soda jerk is potus and he and his ilks are destroying the universe as fast they can, and Britain is stuck with the massive economic and red tape wreckage of leaving the European Union.

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More from that article...

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There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”

Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with “consumers”. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a “rumour campaign” spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election – in which the company worked – by spreading the idea that the “election would be rigged”. The final slide, branded with Lukoil’s logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its “deliverables”: “psychographic messaging”.

 

Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.

When I asked Bill Browder – an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals – what he made of it, he said: “Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities.”

Last month, Nix told MPs on the parliamentary committee investigating fake news: “We have never worked with a Russian organisation in Russia or any other company. We do not have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption.

 

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The story's spreading like fire in a turpentine factory;

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html?


It's all here, in this Guardian series, all the threads wind and unwind and roll around in a great big tangled ball.

Quote

 

What are the Cambridge Analytica Files?

Working with a whistleblower who helped set up Cambridge Analytica, the Observer and Guardian have seen documents and gathered eyewitness reports that lift the lid on the data analytics firm that helped Donald Trump to victory. The company is currently being investigated on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a key subject in two inquiries in the UK - by the Electoral Commission, into the firm's possible role in the EU referendum and the Information Commissioner's Office, into data analytics for political purposes - and one in the US, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Trump-Russia collusion.

Read more from this series

 

 

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26 minutes ago, Hereward said:

Yes, though sometimes they get released early because they’re suffering from Alzheimer’s and then miraculously recover. There should be a study.

One would think that prisoners suffering from Alzheimers might be interested in medical trials.

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11 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

No, this argument says that when your boss is on a public crusade against an institution

But this was my point.  In reality, has Sessions been compromised due to Trump's threats on the entire DOJ, let alone FBI?  Yeah, I think so.  But legally setting a precedent that renders the head of a department incompetent due to the president's threats and criticisms would be concerning.  Anyway, the point is moot, as McCabe has provided a far better and specific reason for why he's being singled out - "I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey."

5 hours ago, Shryke said:

Sessions and Trump have poisoned the well at this point. It all depends on the specifics of US law but generally you can have the authority to fire someone and might even have reason to fire someone but that doesn't mean you can fire them for any reason. You tell someone "I'm firing you because you are black" and it doesn't matter afaik if they were stealing from the company. You articulated your reason for the termination and it was unlawful. The OPR report doesn't mean it's open season on McCabe.

Again, the point is the DOJ has a solid defense because Sessions' articulated reason for the firing was accepting the recommendation of the OPR and the IG report.  I don't think he's ever made any statement on McCabe resembling Trump's statements.

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11 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

But this was my point.  In reality, has Sessions been compromised due to Trump's threats on the entire DOJ, let alone FBI?  Yeah, I think so.  But legally setting a precedent that renders the head of a department incompetent due to the president's threats and criticisms would be concerning.  Anyway, the point is moot, as McCabe has provided a far better and specific reason for why he's being singled out - "I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey."

Again, the point is the DOJ has a solid defense because Sessions' articulated reason for the firing was accepting the recommendation of the OPR and the IG report.  I don't think he's ever made any statement on McCabe resembling Trump's statements.

But we have a system to deal with this kind of stuff. Recusal.

Which Sessions already did with Russia. And it's not hard to make the case that Russia is linked to McCabe (which is McCabe's case).

It's actually NOT hard to determine whether the head of a department should abdicate responsibility to a deputy due to a conflict of interest. And if the President is creating a conflict of interest that calls the ENTIRETY of a department to have suspect judgement then I argue that the problem is clear.

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4 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

It's actually NOT hard to determine whether the head of a department should abdicate responsibility to a deputy due to a conflict of interest. And if the President is creating a conflict of interest that calls the ENTIRETY of a department to have suspect judgement then I argue that the problem is clear.

You're making my point.  It is indeed a problem - when doesn't Sessions have a conflict of interest, when shouldn't he recuse himself?

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Just now, dmc515 said:

You're making my point.  It is indeed a problem - when doesn't Sessions have a conflict of interest, when shouldn't he recuse himself?

When the goddamn President isn't a fascist.

What are you arguing?

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20 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

But this was my point.  In reality, has Sessions been compromised due to Trump's threats on the entire DOJ, let alone FBI?  Yeah, I think so.  But legally setting a precedent that renders the head of a department incompetent due to the president's threats and criticisms would be concerning.  Anyway, the point is moot, as McCabe has provided a far better and specific reason for why he's being singled out - "I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey."

Again, the point is the DOJ has a solid defense because Sessions' articulated reason for the firing was accepting the recommendation of the OPR and the IG report.  I don't think he's ever made any statement on McCabe resembling Trump's statements.

We'll see. I still want to see what the IG's report says. It doesn't sound like any of this is normal process. Even if OPR does make a recommendation, there is normally a lengthy period to determine proper punishment with enough time for the person to respond to the accusations. I don't believe they ever speed up an IG report, make a recommendation and then fire the person literally the same week. This was clearly done to try to stop McCabe from getting his pension as a way to discredit him as a witness. If he's fired for "lying" then he's "lying" about everything having to do with Comey.

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5 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

What are you arguing?

 

26 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

But legally setting a precedent that renders the head of a department incompetent due to the president's threats and criticisms would be concerning.

 

4 minutes ago, Mexal said:

This was clearly done to try to stop McCabe from getting his pension as a way to discredit him as a witness. If he's fired for "lying" then he's "lying" about everything having to do with Comey.

Of course.  And did they speed up the IG report?  Pretty sure they've been working on it for quite awhile.  

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