More than 100,000 documents related to operations in 68 countries will be published in the coming months, and these documents will reveal a global infrastructure network that manipulates voters on an “industrial scale”.
Editor’s note: This article comes from Tencent Technology .
On November 18, 2015, Brittany Kaiser, then project development director of Cambridge Analytica, attended a press conference in London
From the news on January 6, according to foreign media reports, as many as 100,000 documents from British data analysis company Cambridge Analytica will be released one after another, which will expose the company’s internal operations. The disclosure broke after the theft of 87 million Facebook profiles.
More than 100,000 documents related to operations in 68 countries will be published in the coming months, and these documents will expose a global infrastructure network that manipulates voters on an “industrial scale”.
At the same time, Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russian Department of the MI6 and the intelligence expert behind Trump ’s so-called “Steel Archives,” said that although Cambridge The analysis company has failed, but failing to properly punish its bad behavior means that this year’s manipulation of the US elections will be even worse.
The release of these files began on New Year’s Day with an anonymous Twitter account @HindsightFiles, with links to election materials in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to come from Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytical employee who later became a leaker, the same conclusion as Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election .
Kaiser has appeared in a shortlist for the Oscar Netflix documentary The Great Hack, and she decided to make those files public after a British election last month. She said: “Obviously, our electoral systemIt is easy to be abused. I am very worried about what will happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways to protect myself is to get as much information as possible. “
The documents were retrieved from Kaiser’s email account and hard drive, although she submitted some materials to Parliament in April 2018. But she said that there are thousands of pages of documents showing Cambridge Analytica’s “breadth and depth of data collection work”, “far beyond what people think they know about the Cambridge Analytic Scandal.”
Steel rarely publicly intervened to comment on the leak. He said that although he doesn’t know what’s in the file, the relevant background is very important because “on our current track, these issues may get worse, not better, as the United States and elsewhere 2020 The crucial elections are approaching, and this is a very scary prospect. Some radical measures need to be taken, and it must be fast. “
Still also said that Western governments have failed to punish those who manipulate social and other media, “the result will be that while Cambridge Analytica may be exposed and eventually shut down, other more sophisticated similar actors will have Courage continues to interfere in our elections and sow the seeds of social division. ”
Kaiser believes that the Facebook data scandal is part of a larger global operation that works with governments, intelligence agencies, business companies, and political organizations to manipulate and influence people, which has caused a huge national security impact.
The unpublished documents contain material that indicates that Cambridge Analytica worked for a political party in Ukraine in 2017, although it is under investigation as part of a Mueller investigation. Kaiser said the emails describe how the company helped develop a “complex infrastructure network designed to inject black money into political shell companies.”
Christopher Steele, a former British MI6 agent, said the failure to properly punish bad behavior means the prospect of manipulating elections this year is even worse
Kaiser said: “These major donors to Trump have email links to discuss ways to mask the source of donations through a series of different financial instruments. These documents expose the entire black money mechanism behind US politics.” At the same time, the same mechanism has been deployed in other countries where Cambridge Analytica has worked, including the UK.
Emma Briant, a scholar at Bard College in New York who specializes in investigating campaign propaganda, has been exposed to a number of Cambridge Analytica documents used for research and said she has been disclosed The message is just the “tip of the iceberg.”
Bryant pointed out: “These documents give us a clearer picture of the reality of the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge impact on what will happen in 2020. As far as we know, Those involved are using the same technology. There is evidence that they have conducted very disturbing experiments on U.S. voters, manipulating them through fear-based information, and targeting the most vulnerable groups seems to be continuing . This is an industry that has been completely out of control globally, but it shows what a company has done. “(Tencent Technology Review / Golden Deer)