Thread by @profcarroll

Cambridge Analytica flummoxed everything in its path, especially the entire regulatory apparatus, but Federal Election Commission’s stymied effort to enforce blatant violations is a particularly depressing example of ‘getting away with it.’ #TheGreatHack cnbc.com/2021/11/12/mon…

But I have put on a second collared shirt to recognize Bannon Indictment Day.

Bannon has been successfully evading accountability for quite some time now.

SSCI: UK ICO wouldn’t share what they found on the seized CA/SCL servers

FEC: UK ICO couldn’t share what they found on the seized CA/SCL servers.

UK ICO: We seized Trump campaign servers and found mass data abuse but they went out of biz so there’s nothing we can do about it.

also UK ICO: Sorry US gov but we can’t share what we discovered on the servers in our territory that contain key secrets about your 2016 elections.

Rick Gates, convicted of conspiracy against the USA, was worried about the exact same thing as me. Why did Bannon’s CA/SCL process US voter data in the UK? (To flummox any enforcement if they got caught? It worked like a charm if so.)

Tech press found the red herring in the final UK ICO letter to confirm their skepticism bias and then missed stuff like this because downplaying Cambridge Analytica was always the game.

But maybe the wildest part of folks losing the plot was how ICO confirmed in a most British way that the 2016 Trump database leaked to @Channel4News in 2020 shows how it matches the true Cambridge Analytica data source schema on the seized servers. Just too technical to follow.

Did I mention one of our closest allies seized the servers of our former president’s campaign vendor under criminal warrant and then did not/could not cooperate with Congress or the Federal Elections Commission in their investigations? So strange this is not widely acknowledged.

Well anyway. Happy Bannon Indictment Day, folks. #TheGreatHack

^Citations/Screenshots:
UK ICO Progress Report 11/2018
ico.org.uk/media/action-w…
SSCI Russia Report V5 8/2020
intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/…
Final UK ICO Letter 10/2020
ico.org.uk/media/action-w…
FEC CA/SCL 11/2021
fec.gov/files/legal/mu…