Thread by @MsMariaT

(5/15) Alexander Nix (Cambridge Analytica) meeting with Rodrigo Duterte campaign assocs, at national press club in Manila, Phillippines:

https://twitter.com/brexit_sham/status/983088405688053763

"Guardian has seen an email from Nix (1/26/15), ref'g to the “Israeli team”.

It says: “Although it is outside of our remit, I have asked for an update on what the Israeli team has been working on & what they will be delivering between now/the election.”

theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/m…

"They were planning on stealing the election’: Explosive new tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression, manipulation and bribery

Prev unknown recording reveals extraordinary ‘black ops’ on three continents"

(h/t @karolcummins )

opendemocracy.net/en/they-were-p…

"...Kaiser spoke often about “the crazy things Alex would say”. But it was hard to find the smoking gun. Then Kaiser and I found an old recording buried deep in her laptop...It was Nix’s extraordinary pitch, recorded on her iPhone in the heat of that fateful summer of 2016."

"In the recordings, Nix describes one of his major clients, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, as a "fascist". And he sheds more light on the nexus of data, money and power that Cambridge Analytica deployed as it backed Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency.

"It was almost six years ago, in a London sushi bar, that Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix first sought to enlist Brittany Kaiser, saying: “Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets.”

"Nix had teamed up in 2013 with the alt-right entrepreneur Steve Bannon and the family of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer to launch Cambridge Analytica. Their mission was to arm a rising populist right to defeat the big data machine built by Obama."

"[Brittany Kaiser] testified against her former colleagues, providing arresting new evidence about their unpaid data work on Brexit for the controversial businessman Arron Banks (now under investigation by the National Crime Agency) and his Leave.EU campaign..."

"...as well as possible abuses of Facebook and insurance data. She provided the first real proof of Steve Bannon’s role in setting up these deals for Nix, and of Cambridge Analytica’s exclusive data relationship with Bannon’s alt-right propaganda platform, Breitbart News."

"In 4/18 Kaiser testified before the British parliament’s ‘fake news’ inquiry. She covered a dizzying array of topics alongside Cambridge Analytica, including her friends’ cryptocurrency-powered telecomms schemes in MX, and her time working w/WikiLeaks’ British lawyers..."

"The parliamentarians wanted to know more about a group of hackers – alumni of Israeli intelligence – who she had introduced to oil-billionaire clients, and who had infiltrated the Nigerian political opposition as part of a 2015 campaign by Nix’s firm...."

"...But when it came to the inflammatory content of that campaign, Kaiser pointed the finger firmly at SAM PATTEN, a long-standing fixture on Cambridge Analytica’s roster of globe-trotting political strategists."

"Immediately after running the controversial Nigeria campaign for Nix, Patten went into biz w/the RU operative KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK. His new partner was not only the right hand of...Paul Manafort in Ukraine, but also a suspected Russian military intelligence asset."

"Patten has recently pleaded guilty to channelling donations from a Ukranian oligarch into Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Kilimnick himself is wanted for questioning by special counsel Robert Mueller, and has recently fled to Moscow."

"One of the British parliamentarians asked Kaiser the obvious question: “Have you ever worked for, paid or unpaid, or provided info to, any country’s intelligence agency, their representatives or associated organisations?” Her answer was “No;” but pressed..."

"...she acknowledged having been “approached” in the past, before her time at Cambridge Analytica, “although they wouldn’t properly identify themselves... I’ve been taught what to look out for: my grandfather was a military intell officer for 27 yrs...

"...and knew when I was young that would be a possibility, and told me what to look out for… and to say no.”

"Damian Collins MP, the chair of the fake news inquiry, had one final question for Kaiser. “If Alex Nix wanted to reach out to Assange, couldn’t he do it through you?” W/o losing her self-possession, she laughed for a split second and responded: “That’s what I was wondering…”

"Collins then announced that Nix was pulling out of his own scheduled interrogation the following day. Within wks, Cambridge Analytica and Nix’s wider network of data, political and security consulting ops had filed for bankruptcy...."

"It took another month before the silver-tongued, polo-playing Etonian consultant [Alex Nix] accepted his third summons from Parliament. Wriggling under the spotlight, he claimed to be the real victim of the Cambridge Analytica scandal."

"According to his telling... "

Fuck him.

"Kaiser had originally acknowledged in Parliament that she introduced Nix to her friends in Julian Assange’s London legal team in 2015, but said she knew nothing of her boss’s own contacts with him...."

"[Kaiser's] cryptocurrency donation to WikiLeaks (made with gifted Bitcoin she had no other use for) had taken place several years earlier, while she was working on human rights issues in countries like Iraq. "

I'm skipping a bit, it's a long piece.

Linking back midpoint in case you want to read the full article:

opendemocracy.net/en/they-were-p…

"One former employee of Cambridge Analytica compared others’ reticence to “the omertà of the Mafia”, not least because people were afraid of the company’s powerful principals..."

"The fam of Robert Mercer, not only a billionaire but also a data scientist accused of white supremacist views, were its controlling investors. The Mercers’ consigliere...Bannon sat on Nix’s board w/Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who Nix sometimes referred to as his “work wife”.

"Materials revealed to me and testimony provided by Brittany Kaiser and other sources...confirm that Bannon was actively involved in brokering Cambridge Analytica’s relationships w/Trump, Brexit campaigners and a flotilla of Mercer-linked organisations."

"Bannon admitted last spring that he “put the co together”, but continues to claim he knew nothing of Cambridge Analytica’s misdeeds during his time on its board...."

"Earlier this mo he launched The Movement, [Bannon's] latest attempt to lay waste to the politics of the Eu and empower the populist far right w/data and strategic advice."

"n the course of my investigation, I nonetheless managed to speak w/ almost a doz sources with close knowledge of the co’s ops....One senior source who originally wanted to save the company swiftly realised that they had to “kill the dragon”.

"[Cambridge Analytica] overhyped its value proposition, its data architecture and processes were chaotic, not all projects went well; but many felt proud of their work."

"They compartmentalised the most controversial contracts, blamed Nix and his lieutenants for any sketchiness, and believed that Cambridge Analytica had become a scapegoat for the systemic abuses of the data brokerage industry. “Everyone is doing it,” I heard again and again."

"Last March...Ch 4 News released undercover recordings of Nix and his fellow execs. They talked about ‘honey traps’ that used UKRAINIAN PROSTITUTES and boasted of secret teams who “ghosted in..."

"...did the work, ghosted out” of countries, and “put info into the bloodstream of the internet… w/no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable”.

"But even in the Ch 4 sting, Nix was careful to caveat his most inflammatory claims. Not so in Kaiser’s iphone recording: THE MASK IS TRULY OFF."

"What we sought to do here is… to build a workable model of persuasion to be rolled out across the U.S. initially. To help us to target people at an individual level in a way that would increase COMPLIANCE through communications."

Shit, they're talking about brainwashing.

"Our inventory has questions like, are you frequently lonely, do you enjoy taking part in new initiatives? It's not an opinion survey. B/c we're not interested in what you think about the president. We're interested in you, and trying to work out...“WHAT ARE YOUR BUTTONS?"

"A few yrs later we were in Nigeria again, and this was a campaign for [presidential candidate Umaru] Yar’Adua, who was the puppet for [incumbent president Olusegun] Obasanjo,” Nix continues...."

"....He appears to be talking about the 2007 elections, not the 2015 race in which Brittany Kaiser and Sam Patten were involved."

AHEM: 👀

“So we persuaded our client to do something quite unusual. We persuaded him to allow us to tell everyone in Nigeria that they were PLANNING ON STEALING THE ELECTION."

Sound familiar?

"Trump doubles down on unsubstantiated claims of election 'stealing' in Florida"

cnbc.com/2018/11/10/tru…

"And the reason we did this was TO INOCULATE THEM. We ran this campaign for about 12 mos saying, oh, the govt's going to steal the election. And then, when the Jimmy Carter Center announced that the election was not ‘free and fair’, everyone was like… ‘Yeah, we know that.’" 👀

"As opposed to going ‘WHAT?!!’ and getting really angry!” Yar’Adua won the election by a landslide, but the outcome was controversial and widely thought to have been rigged."

*"In the course...

"Nix’s UK company Strategic Communications Laboratories and its US wing Cambridge Analytica were usually careful to mask their most controversial activities in case studies. But I found one brochure..."

"...in which further telling details of this Nigeria campaign slipped through: “SCL advised that rather than focusing on swing voters, THE PARTY SHOULD INSTEAD AIM TO DISSUADE THE OPPOSITION SUPPORTERS FROM VOTING..."

Voter suppression.

"...an action that could be easily monitored. This was achieved by organising anti-election rallies on the day of polling in opposition strongholds, many conducted by local RELIGIOUS FIGURES to maximise their appeal to rural communities.”

"This previously unknown recording provides irrefutable evidence of [Alex Nix] boasting to prospective clients about his experience in voter suppression, his comfort with sowing apathy and fatalism about corruption..."

"...and [Alex Nix's] readiness to facilitate election-stealing. Asked for comment about his own statements, Nix today denied that SCL had worked in Nigeria in 2007."

"Crucially, this recording sets in context the claim by a senior Trump campaign source that “WE HAVE THREE MAJOR VOTER SUPPRESSION OPS under way” [PARSCALE], made to Bloomberg in 10/16. By then Cambridge Analytica was working simultaneously with the Trump campaign..."

"the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC, overseen PERSONALLY by Rebekah Mercer; an underground platform doing psychographic microtargeting of CONGREGATIONS and RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES; the far-right Media Research Center...."

"...the NRA; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies."

Next Section entitled:

"How to Make Black Youth NOT Vote"

"Nix moved on to pitch his next case study – a youth mobilisation campaign. Again, all is not as it seems. “Trinidad is a very interesting case history of how we look at problems,” Nix said. “Trinidad's tiny – it's 1.3 million people...."

"...but almost exactly half the country are Indian and half the country are Black, Afro-Caribbean. And there are two main political parties, one for the Blacks and one for the Indians… when the Indians are in power the Blacks don't get anything, and vice-versa, you know..."

"...you know – they SCREW EACH OTHER. So we were working, I think for the third time in Trinidad, and we were working for the Indians, and we did a huge amount for research, and two really important things came out:"

@Deoliver47

@Deoliver47 "One was that all the youth, Indian and Afro-Caribbean, felt disenfranchised … And secondly, amongst the Indians the familial hierarchies were really strong. There was huge respect for their elders and their parents and their families...."

@Deoliver47 "but not so for the Afro-Caribbeans. And that was enough info to inform the entire campaign.

“We said to the client, we only want to do one thing...to run a campaign where we target the youth – all youth, all the Blacks and all the Indians – and WE TRY TO INCREASE APATHY."

@Deoliver47 "...they didn't really understand why… but they allowed us to do this campaign, and [it] had to be non-political, because no one, the kids don’t care about politics. It had to be reactive, because they’re lazy; inclusive of all ethnicities; bottom-up."

@Deoliver47 "We came up with this campaign which was all about ‘Be part of the gang, do something cool, be part of a movement.’ And it was called the ‘Do So’ campaign… A3 posters. And graffiti, yellow paint, you know, we cut stencils with the jigsaw…"

@Deoliver47 "And we'd give these to kids, and they'd get in their cars at night, you know, just make a drawing, get in the car, and race around the country putting up these posters and getting chased by the police and all their friends were doing it, and it was fucking brilliant fun… "

@Deoliver47 "“Do So. DON'T VOTE. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage."

@StaceyPlaskett

"And the reason why this was such a good strategy is b/c we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out, vote."

"And so all the Indians went out, voted, and the difference on the 18-35-yr-old turnout is like 40%, and that SWUNG THE ELECTION by...6%...all we needed!”

Again, Nix was selling his co’s expertise in promoting cynicism and apathy to suppress turnout among the opposition."

"But this campaign was even more manipulative: enlisting young Afro-Caribbeans in what pretended to be an authentic youth movement, secretly designed to manipulate them into surrendering their votes...."

"...This is what ‘COMPLIANCE’ means in psychological warfare: achieving the desired behavioural effect from a ‘hostile audience’."

"Nix’s closing comments in his summer 2016 pitch were tantalising: “We’ve got an in-house intel team, so we can do full intel protection… Opposition don’t hack your emails and everything else. And we're pretty good at getting intel too…WE DO A LOT OF COUNTER OPS."

"You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys IN TO OFFER THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION A BRIBE, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”

"Beneath the veneer, this seems to have been some of the work Alex Nix was most proud of. This is how he pitched his co around the world...This is the man who the Mercers and Bannon enlisted to help them reshape the American political mind."

"...Nix talks cynically about his work in the Republican primaries: w/TED CRUZ, w/BEN CARSON, and then w/Trump. He claims to have turned Cruz from “the most hated man in US politics” into the front runner before Trump’s wildcard surge. It was not out of love: “WE HATED THIS GUY."

@emlas

@emlas "[CRUZ] is far right wing, he's like, you know, FASCIST,” Nix says of his own candidate. The success factor was big data, which “allows you to literally go in and target every single individual...”

"...What about Brexit? “We don’t talk about that,” he says knowingly, after including it in a list of campaigns they were involved in. Kaiser adds ironically, “Oops – we won!”

"As Nix gleefully claims of another campaign in which the son of a billionaire African liberation leader COVERTLY FUNDED the youth movement which then drafted him as their candidate for president, “We created everything. We created a need that didn’t exist.”

"A yr after this recording, Nix was negotiating an abortive acquisition deal with Martin Sorrell’s world-leading WPP conglomerate of advertising and marketing firms. In 1/18, he finally raised almost $20M for a new co called Emerdata."

"Papers obtained by my investigation indicate the Mercers were joined by CHINESE AND GULF INVESTORS in this effort, although the ultimate sources of their funds remain unclear. Johnson Ko, the Chinese state-linked biz partner of American mercenary Erik Prince..."

"...[Johnson Ko] briefly joined Emerdata’s board alongside one of his associates. (Cambridge Analytica China was also incubated at Ko’s firm Reorient Capital during 2017.)"

"The majority of the new funds injected into Emerdata seem to have been extracted personally by Nix through various different pretexts, according to conversations I had w/well-placed sources and review of bankruptcy documents..."

"The biggest withdrawal of $8.7 Million took place after Kaiser’s whistleblowing, and before Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections went into administration. Many employees were never paid their outstanding salaries and severance: the general sacrificed his footsoldiers..."

"I first discovered Brittany Kaiser’s support for BERNIE SANDERS via a YouTube video of a company party at the dog races, arrestingly subtitled “WE 'RIGG" ELECTIONS”. It shows a comedy routine performed by one of Cambridge Analytica’s data scientists..."

"...who notes Kaiser’s past involvement with the Obama campaign, suggests she may still be working for the Democrats, and includes this memorable line about Alexander Nix: “He could sell an anchor to a drowning man.”

"Listening again to the pitch recording, I felt that Nix, who continues to protest his innocence and attempt to reboot his career, is now the one sinking under the weight of accumulating evidence. What about those who enabled him?"

"There is no question that Cambridge Analytica’s tactics were somewhat effective in pulling “the wires which control the public mind”, although I have found little evidence that their much-vaunted psychographics actually worked...."

"...What seems to have had the most impact was the dubious data hoard they assembled to target DARK ADS ON FACEBOOK, combined with the brutal efficacy of their messages and tactics."

"Central players in the subversion of our open societies regularly attend conferences of the global elite, such as last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Most still seem to operate with impunity. "

"During our debrief in Thailand, Kaiser soon started connecting the dots between her fury at the powerful men who had been pulling her strings, her conviction that the greatest abuses of power were taking place in Silicon Valley, and the way her own company had...."

"..been used to “manipulate millions of voters across America”. Her curiosity started to sharpen: how had she and countless others been so misled?

“Brittany spent a long time in the underworld,” I say toward the end of 'The Great Hack'..."

"Nix memorably describes in his pitch how much more effective it is to protect a private beach from trespassers by putting up a sign that says “Sharks! Keep Out”....

"The ultimate goal of Russian interference and billionaire voter suppression campaigns alike is to get us to ‘Keep Out’ of politics: to accept the dominance of transnational oligarchs, and to lose hope that things can change."

"The Federal Trade Commission is reported to be considering imposing an “unprecedented” fine on Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, which has also been indicted by Washington DC’s attorney general for facilitating the breach of users’ data without our consent."

"I spoke on the phone w/Kaiser shortly before Christmas. “I was being too nice,” she said. “It gets worse every day. You can’t fix it now, it’s not fixable, not in its current form. Break it up with anti-trust laws. Pull away WhatsApp and Instagram… reorg their business model. "

"It’s completely out of control, and they never thought anything would happen. They’re not really keeping any of it secret; it’s all in the open, but they thought nobody would notice or care.”

OK, this is towards the end now. I will link back to the article again, here:

opendemocracy.net/en/they-were-p…

I am going to go back up to the top, and look at more of Nix's/Cambridge Analytica's misdeeds...

Going to look at that article linked here:

"The parliamentarians wanted to know more about a group of hackers – alumni of Israeli intel – who she had intro'd to OIL-BILLIONAIRE CLIENTS, and who had infiltrated the Nigerian political oppos as part of a 2015 campaign by Nix...."

"Cambridge Analytica was offered politicians' hacked emails, say witnesses

Hackers offered personal data about future Nigerian president and future PM of St Kitts and Nevis, sources say"

theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/m…

The data analytics firm that worked on the Donald Trump election campaign was offered material from Israeli hackers who had accessed the private emails of two politicians WHO ARE NOW HEADS OF STATE, witnesses have told the Guardian."

"Multiple sources have described how senior directors of Cambridge Analytica – including its chief executive, Alexander Nix – gave staff instructions to handle material provided by computer hackers in election campaigns in Nigeria and St Kitts and Nevis."

"They claim there were two episodes in 2015 that alarmed members of staff and led them to refuse to handle the data, which they assumed would have been obtained illegally."

"SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, denied taking possession of or using hacked or stolen personal information from such individuals for any purpose in either campaign."

"In all, the Guardian and Observer has spoken to seven individuals with knowledge of Cambridge Analytica and its campaign in Nigeria in early 2015.

Hired by a Nigerian billionaire to support the re-election of Goodluck Jonathan...."

"...[in Nigeria] Cambridge Analytica was paid an estimated £2m to orchestrate a ferocious campaign against his rival, the opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari. Jonathan lost out to Buhari in the presidential race. There is no suggestion Jonathan knew of the covert operation."

"Staff working on the campaign say in early 2015 they met Israeli cybersecurity contractors in Cambridge Analytica’s offices in Mayfair, London. Employees say they were told the meeting was arranged by Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at the firm."

"The Guardian and Observer have been told the Israelis brought a laptop from their office in Tel Aviv and handed employees a USB stick containing what they believed were HACKED PERSONAL EMAILS."

Gross.

"Sources said Nix...and other sr directors told staff to search for incriminating material that could be used to damage opposition candidates, including Buhari.

“It made everyone feel really uncomfortable...They wanted people to load it into their email programs.”

"People “freaked out”, another employee said. “They wanted to have nothing to do with it.”

One member of the campaign team told the Guardian and Observer that the material they believed had been hacked included BUHARI'S MEDICAL RECORDS."

From another thread from last year....

now that I think about, it the Israeli firm could also be Black Cube, but I'm just guessing:

https://twitter.com/MsMariaT/status/1013533436496056320

Back to Guardian: "I’m 99% sure of that. Or if they didn’t have his medical records they at least had emails that referred to what was going on.”

When news of the London meeting filtered back to Cambridge Analytica staff working on the ground in Nigeria, it caused panic..."

"Local security advisers told the firm’s team to leave the country immediately because if opposition supporters found out, they could turn on them.

“What is clear is that the security of their employees didn’t even seem to have occurred to them..."

"In a second episode in early 2015, sources said the same Israeli team that had worked on the Nigeria campaign obtained private information of the St Kitts and Nevis politician Timothy Harris. At the time he was an opposition leader, and is now prime minister."

Nix and his buddies were trying to get their preferred passport fixer into that election:

https://twitter.com/MsMariaT/status/1013533436496056320

"Sources have said staff did not want to handle what appeared to be STOLEN MATERIAL. “Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” one employee said."

A statement from SCL Elections said:

Mierda, basura, garbage....

Link to the other article I did a THREAD on if you want to read about Nix and his passport fixers:

https://twitter.com/MsMariaT/status/1013529778106716160

Here's the investigative reporter's work on that, worth a read, shocking details:

Good night all! ✌️

https://twitter.com/annmarlowe/status/1013506651314442242

I’m reading elsewhere, that: Buhari (former pres Johnathan’s opposition) retained PPG, via Burson-Marsteller. PPG is Charlie Black. That’s Charlie Black of BMS&K - Manafort’s & Stone’s LP partner 😳 They worked both sides? 🤔