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1/ This article written by Shoshana Zuboff for the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Feb 2014 talks about the Military-Information Complex. faz.net/aktuell/feuill… In light of the Snowden revelations, her focus was on the NSA and its cooperation with Facebook, Google, and other social
2/ media companies to collect individual data from our devices in the search for terrorists. We rightly felt threatened by that amount of government surveillance. But, reading it from four years in the future, it suggests we got it backwards. The NSA was trying to get data from
3/ our phones, computers, email etc. Obviously, encryption thwarted that collection effort; thus, the cooperation with the social media companies and the FISA warrants to telephone and other companies to acquire their compliance. But, apps like Angry Birds and Shadow Cities were
4/ drawing enormous location and other data from cell phones. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, etc were collecting data; websites had tracking cookies. Ghostery blocks well over 1,700 tracking cookies. Zuboff wonders whether "Google and Facebook learned surveillance tactics
5/ from the NSA in the first place...Or was it the other way around?" She noted that Angry Birds "provides information on political affiliation, sexual orientation, and other personal behavioral data along with the more common demographics." It was not the NSA and GCHQ that
6/ weaponized the data against their own populations, but the social media companies working with Intelligence-based companies like Cambridge Analytica, Psy Group, Black Cube, and who knows how many other Information Warfare companies that gained their expertise and weapons from
7/ defense contracts with the DOD, UK MOD, and IDF. Cambridge Analytica's Information Warfare technology, licensed from its parent SCL, had been export controlled by the UK until the ban was lifted. Zuboff's main point in her Frankfurter Allgemeine articles, her scholarly article
8/ on "Surveillance Capitalism" and her new book of the same name is that we need to bring these technologies under strong regulatory controls to protect our privacy and democracy. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… If you read the testimonies about Cambridge Analytica and Brexit/Trump, you
9/ you realize that CA combined psychological profiling, voting behavior, consumer purchasing data, and probably game app data to individually tailor very specific messages to very specific emotional or psychological states in order to produce a wanted behavior. Against African
10/ Americans, to suppress their vote; against Greens and Sanders supporters, to suppress the vote. And, to conservatives and Christians, to create create, exploit, and magnify menace, uncertainty, and mistrust, with the aim to increase the probability of voting. If you then map
11/ out these inputs into John Boyd's OODA Loop, you really see the weaponization cycle with feedback loops. This diagram of the OODA Loop is taken from COL Dr Frans Osinga's Sept 2007 briefing on Boyd's "A Discourse on Winning and Losing." On the left side there is Observations
12/ and input from "Outside Information." Picture a stream of carefully crafted messages tailored to your deepest fears or psychological vulnerability with these messages coming from your social network and consistent with your Cultural Traditions in the Orient block. The OODA
13/ Loop is a constant feeback loop that can be sped up with social media messages, Trump tweets, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. Boyd thought the OODA Loop was extremely dangerous. Now imagine companies armed with mountains of data plugged into this model. 
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