UK Authorities Order Cambridge Analytica to Give a US Voter All the Data It Has on Him

UK authorities have ordered Cambridge Analytica, the sketchy election firm at the center of a data scandal involving at least 87 million Facebook users, to hand over all of the information it acquired on a US voter in a move that could potentially open the floodgates for others to know what information the firm stockpiled on them.

gizmodo.com|Tom McKay

The test case was taken to the ICO by David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York. As a US citizen, he had no means of obtaining this information under US law, but in January 2016 he discovered Cambridge Analytica had processed US voter data in the UK and that this gave him rights under British laws. Cambridge Analytica had refused to accept this and told the ICO that Carroll was no more entitled to make a so-called “subject access request” under the UK Data Protection Act “than a member of the Taliban sitting in a cave in the remotest corner of Afghanistan”.

“The data commissioner has said that data crimes are real crimes and she is now putting this into action,” data expert Paul-Olivier Dehaye, who helped Carroll with the process, told the paper. “This would have been unimaginable a year ago. It’s a real landmark. The ICO is showing that they are real consequences to not complying with UK data laws ... Cambridge Analytica has been able to evade journalists’ questions and mislead both parliament and Congress, but now if they don’t answer these questions, it shows they’re criminally liable.”

“This should solve a lot of mysteries about what the company did with data and where it got it from. I hope that it will help the ongoing investigations in my country and yours, and other places like Canada. There’s a lot of questions that no one has been able to answer until now so hopefully this will be a major breakthrough in our understanding of what it did.”,  David Carroll

Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata

Shock shutdown – THE TRUTH

www.theregister.co.uk

• How many of Cambridge employees will join Emerdata? Or have they already been doing work for Emerdata? Transition work?
• Is Emerdata using Cambridge’s software and IT infrastructure?

It even describes itself as a "data processing, hosting and related activities" organization.

For instance, Dr Alexander Taylor was appointed a director of Emerdata on March 28. That's Cambridge Analytica's acting CEO and data wizard Dr Alexander Taylor. Julian Wheatland is an Emerdata director who is also a director within the SCL network of organizations.

Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer are directors of Emerdata, and are the daughters of ultra-wealthy businessman Robert Mercer who created and bankrolled Cambridge Analytica. Billionaire Bob has given tens of millions of dollars to rightwing political efforts. Jennifer and Rebekah also had a hand in Cambridge Anal.

Emerdata was founded in mid-2017, but has been rather active since Cambridge Analytica hit the headlines earlier this year, including official filings as recent as yesterday.

In recent months, executives at Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group, along with the Mercer family, have moved to created a new firm, Emerdata, based in Britain, according to British records. The new company’s directors include Johnson Ko Chun Shun, a Hong Kong financier and business partner of Erik Prince. 

Mr. Prince founded the private security firm Blackwater, which was renamed Xe Services after Blackwater contractors were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians.

Cambridge and SCL officials privately raised the possibility that Emerdata could be used for a Blackwater-style rebranding of Cambridge Analytica and the SCL Group, according two people with knowledge of the companies, who asked for anonymity to describe confidential conversations. One plan under consideration was to sell off the combined company’s data and intellectual property.

An executive and a part owner of SCL Group, Nigel Oakes, has publicly described Emerdata as a way of rolling up the two companies under one new banner. Efforts to reach him by phone on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

1. Julian Wheatland, Chairman of SCL Group is a director
2. Alexander Nix, Cambridge CEO is a director
3. Robert Mercer’s daughters Rebekah and Jennifer were appointed directors of Emerdata Limited on March 16, 2018

The company said it decided to close its doors because it was losing clients and facing mounting legal fees in the Facebook investigation. 

SCL Group and SCL Elections, which are affiliated with Cambridge Analytica, also are shutting down in the U.S. and the U.K.

Since the 2016 campaign, Cambridge hadn’t notched a single U.S. federal political client; it lost several commercial clients in recent months, according to FEC records and people familiar with the matter.

The company lost one longstanding client, the John Bolton Super PAC, when Mr. Bolton became the White House national security adviser and the super PAC suspended its operations last month. Mr. Bolton’s super PAC had paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1.2 million between 2014 and 2016, according to FEC records.

Far more than 87m Facebook users had data compromised, MPs told

Former Cambridge Analytica employee gives evidence before parliamentary committee

www.theguardian.com|Alex Hern

Far more than 87 million people may have had their Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, according to evidence from former employee Brittany Kaiser.

“The Kogan/GSR datasets and questionnaires were not the only Facebook-connected questionnaires and datasets which Cambridge Analytica used. I am aware in a general sense of a wide range of surveys which were done by CA or its partners, usually with a Facebook login – for example, the ‘sex compass’ quiz.“

“When I first joined the company, our creative and psychology teams, and data science teams, would work together to design some of these questionnaires.”

“Secondly, I have evidence from my own eyes of possible breaches of the Data Protection Act concerning the usage of personal and commercial data of individuals in the Eldon Insurance database and possibly the Ukip database, being used for the benefit of the Leave.EU campaign,”

• United States: 70,632,350
• Philippines: 1,175,870
• Indonesia: 1,096,666
• UK: 1,079,031
• Mexico: 789,880
• Canada: 622,161
• India: 562,455
• Brazil: 443,117
• Vietnam: 427,447
• Australia: 311,127

"It really made me reflect on the impact that Cambridge Analytica has had.”

"I reflected on it... I said to myself that I need to speak out now because I have seen the impact that this company has had and I think people should know about how it works."

"I am accepting my share of responsibility in what happens with Cambridge Analytica,"

"I think that Facebook should also accept some share of responsibility as to what happened."

U.K. Investigators Raid Cambridge Analytica Offices In London

British investigators are reported to be looking at whether personal data was obtained in an unauthorized manner.

www.npr.org

• #AlexanderNix
• #AleksandrKogan
• #RobertMercer
• #RebekahMercer
• #SteveBannon
• #JaredKushner

Investigators with Britain's information commissioner searched the London headquarters of Cambridge Analytica on Friday amid reports that the firm harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users as part of a campaign to influence the U.S. 2016 presidential elections.

The move comes after a British High Court judge granted a warrant to the data watchdog Information Commissioner's Office, allowing its investigators to search the firm's offices.

The search is reported to be part of a broader investigation into possible ties between Cambridge Analytica and the campaign for the U.K. Brexit referendum.

"Kaiser's revelations will reignite a fierce argument about the tactics used to try to influence voters in the Brexit campaign – and will add to the pressure on Alexander Nix, the [suspended] CEO of Cambridge Analytica.

The company is already under investigation by the Electoral Commission over what role, if any, it played in the EU referendum campaign."

Russia used 150,000 Twitter accounts to meddle in Brexit

A London Times investigation revealed that Russia employed a large army of Twitter accounts to “sow discord” before the Brexit vote. And it appears to have been quite successful, as new…

boingboing.net

Russian Twitter accounts posted more than 45,000 messages about Brexit in 48 hours during last year’s referendum in an apparently co-ordinated attempt to sow discord, The Times can reveal.

More than 150,000 accounts based in Russia, which had previously confined their posts to subjects such as the Ukrainian conflict, switched attention to Brexit in the days leading up to last year’s vote, according to research for an upcoming paper by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley.

One of the accounts run from the Kremlin-linked operation attempted to stir anti-Islamic sentiment during the Westminster Bridge terror attack in March in a bogus post claiming a Muslim woman ignored victims – a claim that was highlighted by mainstream media outlets including Mail Online and the Sun.

• Revealed: how US billionaire [Robert Mercer] helped to back Brexit, The Guardian
• The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked, The Guardian

In one case, an EU project officer recommended that a lead investigator drop all UK partners from a consortium because Britain’s share of funding could not be guaranteed. The note implied that if UK organisations remained on the project, which is due to start in January 2017, the contract signing would be delayed until Britain had agreed a fresh deal with Europe.

The backlash against UK researchers began immediately after the June referendum when the failure to plan for a post-Brexit Britain cast serious doubts over the chances of British organisations winning future EU funding. British researchers receive about £1bn a year from EU finding programmes such as Horizon 2020, but access to the money must be completely renegotiated under Brexit.

Speaking at Oxford’s Wolfson College last Friday, the university’s chancellor, Chris Patten, said Oxford received perhaps more research income than any European university, with about 40% coming from government. “Our research income will of course fall significantly after we have left the EU unless a Brexit government guarantees to cover the shortfall,” Lord Patten said.

Jo Johnson has asked a team at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to gather evidence for discrimination and urged organisations to report any incidents. Until the UK left the EU, he said the situation was “business as usual”.

British organisations will not have a clue they have lost out. “If you don’t get invited to the party, you don’t even know there is a party,” he said.

“I strongly suspect that UK politicians simply don’t understand this, and think it is ‘business as usual’, at least until negotiations have been completed. They are wrong, the problems start right now,” he added. As a former European commission official, Gorman oversaw research projects and now advises universities and companies on how to succeed in EU-funded research programmes.