Our data is in the hands of the few. With that data they can control the world.
The Guardian has an outstanding extensive article written by Carole Cadwalladr titled “The great British Brexit robbery: how our was hijacked” that outlines in great detail an intricate web of right wing billionaires (like Mercer and Thiel), UK’s right wing and former military complex, latest tech in analytics and data mining, Trump/Bannon, Russia and myriad of other players that worked together to hijack democracy in the UK, the US and other parts of the world. You absolutely have to read this article — honestly, it is such an eye opener that not taking the time to inform yourself about what had happened and continues to happen would be equivalent to robbing yourself of critical information we must all come to grip with if we want to preserve what is left of our democracy.
“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.”
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016
Admitting that this had happened is the first step in order to do our part in protecting ourselves and fighting back against this authoritarian system that is taking place in the world.
In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.
“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”
Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”
There is so much that I could share from the article but it is so detailed and extensive that I just don’t have the capacity to do so effectively. I urge you to read this — you owe it to yourself to know what’s been taking place.
