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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: 2) by turgid on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:14PM (2 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:14PM (#659457) Journal

    Ah, there's that magic word again: elitist.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:29PM (#659522)

    Ah, there's that magic word again: elitist.

    Get used to it. When the politicians think they know whats better for the people that elected them than those same people, you're going to hear that word.

    adjective

    1. (of a person or class of persons) considered superior by others or by themselves, as in intellect, talent, power, wealth, or position in society:

    • Emphasis added