We've been had

Not sure how many of you may have been following the recent news about the digital data firm Cambridge Analytica, so first, a brief round-up: Cambridge Analytica (CA) is owned by Donald Trump’s biggest backer—well, no, that would be Russia; let’s say, then, his biggest American backer—Robert Mercer, who founded CA with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former guru and campaign manager. Mercer made a fortune as a pioneer in artificial intelligence and is the major financial supporter of Breitbart.com, the online outlet stoking right-wing conspiracy theories. For example he’s on the record as saying the civil rights movement was a mistake, and that there’s no longer such a thing as white racists in America, only black racists.

In a strict legal sense, Cambridge Analytica barely exists; it has no employees and almost no assets—it’s a front company owned by the SCL Group in England, which describes itself as a “global election management agency” specializing in voter targeting and manipulation, often through social media. It’s also the digital operation widely credited with engineering Trump’s shocking victory, by a margin of just a few thousand votes scattered around a few key states in the upper Midwest.

Still with me? OK. So a very prominent new organization in England, Channel 4 (think of Channel 4 as akin to CBS or NBC), recently aired a months-in-the-works exposé regarding CA, or SCL. Their reporter posed as a potential client asking for assistance with promoting a candidate in an election, secretly filming meetings with various senior management of CA, including their CEO, Alexander Nix.

Nix and other senior management at CA admitted to secretly campaigning and fixing elections more than 200 times around the world, using a complex system of invisible and untraceable front companies. They told the prospective client—the undercover reporter—that one of the ways they work elections is by sending, say, a beautiful Ukrainian sex worker to a politician’s home, making sure that the encounter is recorded for blackmail. They mentioned another tactic: Having someone show up for a secret meeting with the candidate with an enormous cash bribe; when the candidate accepts the money, they’ve got the whole thing on tape and can then blackmail him to do whatever the prospective client wants.

“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign,” Nix said, referring to the Trump campaign.

Inside the Trump campaign, the digital operation was overseen by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who soaked up praise for his revolutionary miracle strategy, and managed by Brad Parscale, who Trump has already tapped as his campaign director for his 2020 reelection campaign.

But how did CA manage to manipulate voters—to feed them entirely invented stories that preyed on their fears and stoked their prejudices and encouraged them to vote the way the people paying the bills wanted them to? Easy: They were given the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users. They know what you “liked”, what you commented on, what you forwarded to friends, who your friends are, what their beliefs are, how much you (and they) make, where you live, how likely you were to vote, who you were likely to vote for and how you might be convinced to change your mind.

“We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, and it’s unattributable, untrackable.” Remember Trump’s campaign catchphrases—“Lock her up!” “Crooked Hillary!” “Drain the swamp!” Blame it on “the deep state!”? Yeah. They were all cooked up by Cambridge Analytica—before Trump even publicly announced his campaign.

Democrats in Congress are stepping up and pressing for answers. Republicans, mysteriously, seem to still be unable to locate their backbones. Trump, meanwhile, just keeps typing “NO COLLUSION” into his phone. Robert Mueller, meanwhile, simply prepares more indictments.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?