Everyone, Brit or not, who cares about democracy, should read this Guardian article. It links Brexit w/players in Trump's campaign and private data-mining co's owned and funded by billionaires like Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel that are using Big Data and military psyops to swing elections in the West and elsewhere. (And yes, the Russians, piggybacking on the Brits and Brexit, are in there too, even before Trump 2016. ) These private data mining co's are becoming a part of the military-industrial complex of nations, and our electoral laws are woefully inadequate to cover this kind of coordination.
My takeaway from all this is that awareness, awareness of how we leave digital tracks, awareness of Big Data and its uses, awareness of how we can be used and our thinking influenced, is ultimately the disinfectant here. The more ignorant the target of disinformation, the more likely they are to do the bidding of shadowy corporate billionaires seeking to turn Government from representing us ‘meat-people’ into representing the new ‘corporate-person’.
And Steve Bannon?
He’s in there too, providing the kindling, with his tropes on ‘cultural threats’ to moral values, and how ‘democracy is the vehicle’ for such ‘cultural destruction’. It’s psychological warfare, and it starts with finding the right trigger-words. And from there, the data-mining begins…
Oh, and parenthetically, this week Trump signed another executive order...for religious groups to be able to raise money endorse political candidates — in church — without fear of FEC/IRS retribution. More to come on this from the DHS and Treasury, which have been ‘directed to study’ ways of expanding the scope of the order.