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posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the legal-but-immoral dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:16AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:16AM (#659336)

    And spreading truth, such as Hilary Clinton emails, is patriotic even if the patriot is an alien.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:00AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:00AM (#659400)

    This is one nice recent example of frugal use of truth as a propaganda : where are the trump emails?

    That's why some oath requires telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:27PM (#659486)

      Is this some of that whadaboutism I constantly hearing the left complain about?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @03:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @03:42AM (#659841)

    I hope you meant DNC emails, where real conspiracy to commit fraud was found, and what mass media is still trying to cover up with Russia! Russia! Russia! Hillary's emails are a bullshit issue. And both factions of the corrupt party are still getting full public support. We are not making any progress on this issue, in fact, we are falling backwards, badly.

    If you want an honest media you can use your government to create a public channel. It will be as honest as you demand it to be, just like everything about about your government. When it is run by crooks, it is because you vote for and reelect crooks. don't try to blame 'propaganda'. You believe because you want to believe.