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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: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:24AM (3 children)
This is absolutely correct, but the Nazis had the honesty to call their Propaganda Ministry The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. [wikipedia.org]
The US government has outsourced their propaganda to the private sector, who have taken the job up with enthusiasm.
Have you ever wondered why the NFL have their "Salute to Service" round, and who pays for it?
Turns out you do [sbnation.com] if you're a US taxpayer. If you're an NFL fan from outside the US, you tend to look at "Salute to Service" as a weird sort of Nuremberg Rally. That's just one example of the propaganda you're subjected to every day.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:56AM (1 child)
Huh, never saw that (I never watched the NFL (ex CFL fan here (Ottawa Roughriders of old (George Brancato, Tony Gabriel) fan here).
America is BIG on propaganda: USA! USA! USA!: That WW2 movie where the Americans took that enigma machine from the sub even though it was really the British who did it, etc etc. Rewrite history.
Yeah, to say propaganda is worthless or useless is kind of dumb when the US is second only to the Nazis.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:50AM
In my view the biggest lesson the US military took out of Vietnam was that they needed to prevent anti-war feeling at home.
They seem to have done a great job of deifying military people to such a degree that any criticism of anything they do seems to fall under the "disrespecting the troops" umbrella and gets shouted down.
It's weird how some US people can't see it, but it seems to have given them a license to wage Forever Wars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:18AM
I just looked at Salute to Service (never seen it before), and you're right, it is a bit like that. The Cathedral of Light was done better though, and I don't quite get the flag dicksize war the different groups seem to be engaging in ("it's half the size of the stadium" / "it fills the stadium" / "it overflows the stadium" / "it covers the city" / "it's coming for us, run, run!").