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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:35PM (3 children)
How many people took the tide pod challenge or feasted on the cotton candy in the attic? You cannot legislate against outright stupidity without infringing on the freedom of the majority.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:47AM (2 children)
Nobody ate a tide pod thinking it was something else. People weren't fooled into eating a tide pod. They knew what they were doing.
People ARE misled by the crapflood of fake hysterical news; and there's so much of it that not only does confuse and confound people, but it crowds out real news. So that even if people ARE making the effort to filter out garbage, their still less informed due to the opportunity cost of filtering out that garbage; leaving less time and energy to spend on what is real.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:46AM (1 child)
If that is the case, you've disproven your own argument.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday March 29 2018, @02:08AM
Despite it going viral, the number of people who have actually eaten tide pods is pretty small. And the majority of them were still kids (teens yes, but still kids), and not old enough to vote.