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Companies learning to flip elections perfected their tactics in smaller or emerging countries, such as Latvia, Trinidad, or Nigeria, before turning to markets involving elections in developed nations. Paul Mason suggests that while at the moment there is a lot of angst from people being reminded of how their harvested data is used, it is really the union of private espionage, cracking, and "black ops" capabilities that should be setting off alarms.
Disturbingly, both CA and SCL have high-level contracts with governments, giving them access to secret intelligence both in the US and the UK. SCL is on List X, which allows it to hold British secret intelligence at its facilities.
It now appears that techniques they used in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to counteract Russian influence, and against Islamist terrorism in the Middle East, were then used to influence elections in the heart of Western democracy itself.
Let's be clear about what we're facing. A mixture of free market dogmatism plus constraints imposed by the rule of law has led, over the past decades, to the creation of an alternative, private, secret state.
When it was only focused on the enemies and rivals of the West, or hapless politicians in the global south, nobody minded. Now it is being used as a weapon to tear apart democracy in Britain and the US we care — and rightly so.
From New Statesman: We need to destroy the election-rigging industry before it destroys us
(Score: 4, Interesting) by slinches on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:12PM (2 children)
I wish we could go back to the days when the assumption that you weren't being tracked 24/7 was valid, but that can't happen. The amount of authoritarian control required to cure it would be worse than the disease.
I don't like the situation at all, but we have to accept that the use of data aggregation and analysis to influence society is not going to be stopped. It's far too powerful of a tool and too easy to build to just take away. A reactionary ban will only result in driving the use (further) underground where access will be limited to those who are willing to break the law to benefit from it. Instead, open it up. Embrace the technology and make anonymized data publicly available. Allow enough people with competing ideologies to attempt to influence the public and their efforts will mostly cancel each other. It probably won't help ramp down the divisiveness in the short term, but hopefully by making it transparent that people are trying to manipulate each other we can eventually find a way to get past that.
I don't know what to do about international influence other than to try to out-spend them. That's something that we have almost no control over anyway, short of going to war.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:40PM (1 child)
No, all we need are some decent privacy laws. If governments and corporations were forbidden from conducting mass surveillance on the populace, that would be a boon, not "authoritarian control". Good luck getting it to happen, but it's not a bad idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:15AM
That's exactly the point. You have no enforcement mechanism.