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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: 2) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:49PM
1. No.
Both are regulated by laws. Local laws vary - free speech in North Korea is not a fundamental right. In the USA, an extension to the country's constitution happens to say something about free speech. That does not make it a fundamental right - except, perhaps, in the USA.
Then again: the USA is the only country I know that has free speech zones [wikipedia.org], so I very much doubt that free speech is a fundamental right in the USA.
2. As pointed out already: The right to put whatever you like into your body - food, poisons, lead, bullets - seems at least as fundamental as the right to say whatever you like.
There are legal restrictions on polluting the pool of fresh air or the pool of potable water. The argument here is that there equally should be restrictions on polluting the news-pool.