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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 meustrus on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:16PM
First, can you explain FANG? Do you mean Lee Fang [wikipedia.org]?
Second, to ratchet things down a little bit, I will point out that the American government was built to move slowly. There are checks and balances in place to make actual subversion of the Bill of Rights nearly impossible.
Granted, the Supreme Court seems intent on changing their scope dramatically to suit political opinions. But various decisions have both reduced and grown the scope of the Bill of Rights. The conflict between the 1st and 14th amendments in particular keeps swinging between one or the other being more powerful.
Third, I take strong issue with your assertion that the DNC is working to "revoke the 2nd amendment". That is and has always been blatant NRA propaganda. It's been a foregone conclusion for many years that the "right to bear arms" does not give people a right to possess military-style equipment of warfare. I personally disagree that banning nuke ownership is allowed under the 2nd amendment, but I am objectively safer as a result. I am also safer because of the Firearms Act of 1934, which effectively banned fully-automatic weapons and has been found to be consistent with the 2nd amendment.
Even if the leftist boogeyman the gun manufacturers running the NRA want you to be afraid of were successful in banning gun ownership entirely, the Supreme Court would find it just as unconstitutional as they find anti-abortion bills that stray too close to outright bans. And abortion isn't even a specifcally-outlined right of the people like guns are.
The question on guns is not whether the government can or should ban certain weapons. They already do. The question is: which ones? The Democrats, backed by increasingly massive public support, want to answer that question by saying: just the ones we already ban, but do it better. That's what comprehensive background checks and waiting periods are for. Only a minority of Democrats want to ban semi-automatic firearms, and the DNC sure as hell isn't getting back into that fight after how badly it wounded them in 1994 with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.
Of course, if gun owners weren't being manipulated by fearmongers trying to sell them guns, Republicans could pass some gun control legislation that would actually fix some things without infringing on anybody's rights. You're right not to trust urban liberals to keep your guns safe. So write the bills yourself before you become irrelevant to the conversation.
Lastly, I do not hate the right wing; I hate corporate speech being treated as deserving of equal protection as individual speech. Your claim about me is exactly the partisanship I am talking about. Just because I think that right wing propaganda is bad, you assume I must think that left wing propaganda is just fine.
For the record, I cannot stand real liberal media (MSNBC and Bill Maher types) unless it's actually funny. Even then, I can't remember the last time I watched The Daily Show. Being pandered to just does not interest me. That's why I get my news here and wander into the political comment sections.
I also want to say that having been around a lot of liberals and progressives, I find the politics of the so-called mainstream media (NYTimes plus CNN and other TV news) unrecognizable. They feel Republican to me in the same way they must feel Democratic to you.
I think the truth is that the mainstream media are just corporatist. It's the part of the RNC I dislike and I think it's the part of the DNC you dislike. I am coming more and more to see them both as mainly corporatist, with their differences existing only to play the democracy game. Those of us who dislike corporatism have found ourselves in various groups depending on the rest of our politics - Occupy, Tea Party, DSA, alt right - but anti-corporatism still has not found its way into mainstream politics.
The anti-corporatists got a "win" by electing Trump. But the win only goes so far as coalescing the anti-corporatists towards a single candidate. He's still an urban billionaire that wants to redistribute the economy towards the wealthy, and by the way also wants to take your guns without due process. He promised to "drain the swamp" because he's a serial liar and his voters don't seem to care.
I did not vote for Trump because he's a liar and a racist. That's it. If there were another candidate making the same promises who wasn't a liar or a racist, I'd be out knocking doors for them. I'm the kind of leftist who wants to kill NAFTA etc., get us out of the world police business (especially in the middle east), make good union jobs be available again to anyone with a high school diploma or GED, and keep the government out of my morality thank you very much. This is more in line with what Trump promised than what Hillary promised, but again, did not vote for Trump because those promises were always lies and he was always the more likely candidate to do stuff like making the federal deficit worse to pay for tax cuts to the rich.
All of that said, I should not have to explain my politics to avoid being called a partisan. My OP was a direct response to what people wrote, not what they are. That you would begin to attack me based on the straw man identity you assume of me is literally the root of the problem I wrote about.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?