I don't know why I don't trust this Christopher Wylie. They way he is pictured, filmed etc. looks over produced, like he is trying to lie to me. I can't put it in words but something is fishy about him. In one of his interviews I found out that CA has sue him, so he did not care about anything, he did something wrong to CA, they sue, he blows the whistle to save his *. Is not about "oh, I care so much about the data of millions of people and I can't live any more with the guilt", its about his own skin. If its your own skin that you care about please don't picture in a victim/tormented soul, it makes me hate you just for that.
Agreed. And did you see how he died his hair and changed his look to be more edgy when he got all this media attention? It's like he is playing some role and maximizing his media exposure. This is the behavior of a sociopath.
It really is looking more and more like the real story here is about a guy that tried to usurp his puppet masters with a technique that was likely oversold and probably couldn't really deliver what he claimed it could do, based on his limited understanding of machine learning and statistics.
The next best thing in his twisted mind is to become a "national hero", probably taking a card from Julian Assange and various other whistleblowers. I do think that most whistleblowers have positive intentions and what they do, they are doing for public good, not for notoriety or personal celebrity. However, I don't really feel that to be the case with Christopher Wylie. In his interviews he definitely gives me a strange gut feeling and I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this sentiment. I'm sure we will find out more facts about him as this whole thing continues to unfold, but I'm not holding my breath as to his intentions.
The silver lining in all of this is that Facebook and others will be forced to treat privacy seriously for a change, and its always good to have this conversation front and center for a change.
Or, he thought critically, just not about the stuff we would think a good actor would think about. Which is sort of the problem, and would explain why people are put off.
To his credit, though, he apparently has his limits — in particular, once he saw damage being done to democracy. That’s more than one can say for others involved.
I suspect it is more a case of turning states evidence in hope of clemency or leniency. He was all in on this until the wheels started to come off the cart and then he decided to flip sides.
With all the information he had we can assume he knew about his employers and clients backgrounds and connections and he was cool with that. What I don't understand is how Nix and co were fooled by Channel4 into bragging about their dirty tricks when they have all this information and work with ex-spies
As soon as Wylie opened his mouth in the Guardian interview something cried "spotlight-seeker" inside me. Trying to square his professed left leanings with the right-wing projects he's fronted still doesn't add up. His "guilt" trip was so phoney I nearly threw up.
If you need whistleblowers to be saints, you’re going to have a bad time. The guy who blows the whistle on bad practices has to have a lot of access, which means he’s probably culpable. That doesn’t make their information less accurate or valuable though. The world of informants is a world of compromised people, but still a world worth engaging with.
This makes me think about what someone said in regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, and its relative success. Essentially, if you're waiting for Jesus, or even just Martin Luther King, Jr, to come back, and be the pure, untainted perfect black person to martyr themselves because you think every other victims imperfections are cause of your struggle, then someone else has convinced you to rely on your predjuidices, instead of thinking clearly without emotion.
But those are controversial ideas that are not part of the reverence around Dr King. The conventional wisdom about Dr King is that he inspired an entire movement to universally take the high road and protest with nonviolence. In this sense, he is seen as pure.
The same holds true for Jesus Christ. It's just as likely he was objectively a flawed person in reality, and has been lionized by his supporters.
I feel quite differently. I don’t regard BLM as particilarly successful and at a realpolitik level I believe that no matter how just your cause may be, as a political entity you are only as strong as your leadership and your messaging.
I don't argue that they've been particularly successful, I simply said relatively successful. I mean relative to other recent movements that have never gone anywhere at all. The very fact that you confidently use the acronym BLM, and that its expansion is a common term in the American lexicon in the last several years proves that they have been successful to the point of at least resonating with supporters of the cause.
But I would generally agree, they have generally failed to motivate others to do much of anything outside of basic tolerance or superficial support of their cause.
I don't expect him to be perfect. The part that I don't like about him is that he feels guilty that he manipulated people and at the same time he tries to manipulate me and try to lie. Its like Snowden gives an interview about how bad the NSA is and at the same time my antivirus tells me that Snowden_malaware.exe is trying to install on my computer.
And that is why you never let such data off your premises in the first place. Who knows how many copies there have been made by now. Remember that AOL stuff that was online for a couple of hours? It will never go away.
A pretty good source of very interesting information is the OpenRTB interface to your average advertising bidding platform or company. A couple of bucks and you too could be bidding for ads. If you bid low you will get all the data you could possibly imagine and you can keep it even if you lose the bid. All you need is a good story and a couple of bucks to keep the exchanges satisfied.
> And that is why you never let such data off your premises in the first place.
I find it a much more defensible policy to not collect such data in the first place. Regardless of who you share it with, the fact that you have the data trove is dangerous enough.
Yes, totally agreed, that's the preferred approach. Unfortunately most start-ups seem to be under the impression that more data is better because that worked so well for everybody else. But let's hope it is not too late to turn the tide on that. Between Equifax and Facebook some people are waking up. Not enough of them yet but who knows.
Start-ups should start to see data as a liability instead of as an asset.
Equifax and Facebook may have PR black eyes right now, but they have made a shitload of money with their data and they continue to make money.
It's going to be really hard to convince businesses that data is a liability when the costs of data problems have not typically come anywhere close to offsetting the revenue made with that data.
Data might be better thought of like a type of inventory, in that it is an asset on the balance sheet, but has costs and risk that must be managed very carefully to maximize profitability. Because these costs and risks show up in the paperwork, manufacturers work to minimize their inventory even though it is technically an asset.
Or maybe another way to think about it might be a hazardous natural material, like oil or mine tailings. Accidental release is always a PR problem, but the only way direct costs are imposed on the business is via lawsuits or a regulatory enforcement regime. Otherwise the public just soaks up the costs of the breach.
Ultimately I think that the way data enables revenue is a new thing in business and although we can find analogies, the best way of accounting (I mean in the technical financial sense) for data is yet to be determined. I just think it's unlikely to be considered a straight liability.
In that regard, we could take a lesson from public service bureaucrats and politicians. Out of band communication and non existent paper trail are de rigueur. I've met a few FOI officers who treat information as a liability.
I've never understood why companies feel the need to combine personal data with browsing history. If I want to sell funnel cakes, I don't need (or want) to know the personal details of everyone at the carnival, I just need to setup my funnel cake booth AT the carnival.
Even worse, while you can change your password, or even your email or telephone number, you won't significantly change your personality.
I find it funny the kind of standards we have around passwords (PKDF, ...) and how it's anathema to not hash and salt them, while we casually store and trade much more valuable personal data.
Yeah short of running everything you write through a back-and-forth series of translations to non-native languages, stylometry is going to be the true end of anonymity.
Not really. If you know the patterns threat actors are using to deanonymize you, you can spoof yours to mimic the mean. You can even spoof them to create "writing profiles" for each of your identities. I know I already do.
This is why the attitude of "well, we know Facebook stores all our data, so what?" really annoys me.
It's not that Facebook tracks this data, it's that the Cambridge Analytica story shows that this data has been shared against their ToS. Not only that, Facebook's attitude to the initial arrest warrant shows that they were probably perfectly happy with trading data.
The data from CA is out there forever, and we've got no way of knowing who else has this data. We also don't know who else has profited from the larger pool of data, or whether there was more to the CA story than what we currently know from the Channel 4 investigation. Instead of laughing off this story, tech workers should probably panic more, because we know just how easy it is for data to spread, and how it is near impossible to stop that data spreading.
What's the point of this article, to try to discredit him? He's already discredited. The whistleblowing doesn't require his trust, it's true or it's not. We already know he's not trustworthy, and surprise, he did it (at least) twice.
I posit that its a beautiful piece of artwork designed as a honeypot. The sweetness that will draw certain people in is all of the conflicting, and therefore inherently controversial information that can be used to paint Facebook and Christopher Wylie as the true problem here, and the incredible Donald is just the poor guy caught up in the middle.
This is evidenced by the conservative media's discrediting of all of the people telling the story. I don't even contend that Buzzfeed is conservative or liberal, so I think Buzzfeed is either an unwitting accomplice in this honeypot, or perhaps it is their pot. Time will tell.
My thesis is that, just like actual honeypots, the sweetness is coverfire for the trap lying inside. That trap is to frame this whole story as if the most heinous part of the story is just Facebook losing control of the data. Once the key players admit to the microtargetting, but claim everybody does it, the jaws of the trap will spring shut.
Some of those players have already made their confessions, literally on Fox News, a week after the election, and they couldnt contain their joy:
It is obvious that Donald Trump intuitively understands the general concepts at play in microtargetting, but also just as obvious that he doesn't understand its mechanics.
Microtargetting is literally a deep learning algorithm, and Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer affiliated outfit. You may remember Robert Mercer from such travesties as high frequency trading. After all, he invented it, and used it to become a billionaire. Microtargeting is to humans as high frequency trading is to investment markets.
The underlying principle is the same. If you can glean information about your target faster than your competitors, you can act upon that information to your own gain. Microtargeting is literally a computer evolving its algorithm to influence the targetted. It is A/B testing what will unite one half of an electorate with the reddest of red meat policies, which by definition induce panic in the other half of the electorate.
Cambridge Analytica has cracked the code on how to divide or unite people with an algorithm. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one they are aiming for.
> I posit that its a beautiful piece of artwork designed as a honeypot.
Ok, but designed by whom? It seems interesting but tbh sounds a bit conspiratorial. Who is setting this elaborate honeytrap the CIA, the British, Buzzfeed, Mueller?
In the original whistle-blowing interview the whistle-blower (Wylie) says that he was the one which initiated this whole project:
> At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica
> It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation.
> Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’”
> But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”
I have a sneaking suspicion this guy is a plant or something for the C.I.A. or NSA. The interviews I have heard, he starts to ramble on about Russia, and making bizarre connections. There is such lust for a ward with Russia it is nuts.
I haven't been following this stuff super closely, but hasn't there been ongoing counternarrative of how CA data analysis and its 50 million profiles may not have been very useful, period? Because there's a concurrent (and legitimate) narrative of Facebook's questionable data practices, I've been wondering whether CA has been an overhyped antagonist in our media's rush to find the true villains.
Yesterday Drudge Report (still one of our biggest news drivers) had a headline [A] that almost made my eyes roll through the back of my head. It was "WHISTLEBLOWER: FACEBOOK CAN HEAR YOU!" But the linked story [B] contained nothing more than Wylie speculating how it was physically possible for Facebook (and other apps) to do this, but they probably weren't, but if they were, it could lead into some bad shit or something.
Yeah, Wylie can't control what linkbaiters write about him. Or what politicians ask him in a public hearing. But because he was a whistleblower about CA's abuse of FB's data, he's been considered an expert/whistleblower in domains far beyond what he actually has experience in. Being a good data analyst and having a bunch of FB scraped data is still not enough to remotely guarantee success in the startup scene.
In terms of the election, what's the most substantive discussion/proof that CA and its magic data was any more a game changer than, say, Brad Pascale [0]? And I also haven't read out CA's insights were a gamechanger in boosting the Russians' alleged propaganda and fake news bots schemes. I haven't yet read a better reporter on this angle than the New Yorker's Adrian Chen, and his relative reluctance to blame big data/bot schemes has perhaps made me too skeptical every time I read media stories about CA's magical mind-bending dataset [1].
The doubts about CA's real-world effectiveness are actually well-represented in the media, as your example or [0] show. This actually closely follows the a similar news cycle right after the election. I distinctly remember reading several articles casting doubt on CA's effectiveness in The New York Times and The Atlantic.
I also don't think many reports actually assert that CA was responsible for, say, a 10% swing. Why people are taking this serious is, I believe, because we now know that it's possible to get such data and we have seen the sort of feats that machine learning can do today. It's doubtful that CA was the company to successfully combine those two ingredients. But without changes it's all but guaranteed that someone will soon will.
Plus there is the fact that the election just happened to be incredibly close. You can make a list with about ten possible reasons for the result, from people being tired of Hillary, to the FBI's strange moves regarding the e-mail investigation, third-party candidates, russian trolls, the free media Trump got, Cambridge Analytica, and probably the weather in eastern Ohio. It's possible that the absence of any two or three of these would have changed the outcome.
Lets imagine you developed a Deep Learning algorithm that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to be able to pull off what CA pulled off. Why on god's green earth would you ever tell people that you have the algorithm, if you could instead use it for your own benefit? Why would you ever publish?
Answer A: in the case that you think you can publish at just the right time such that every political party would have enough time to master the tech before the next election cycle.
Answer B: in the case that you can charge exorbitantly for access to the published algorithm, and that - being a rational actor without nationalistic pride - you don't give two hoots and a holler what happens to the nation where you publish, so long as you can walk away with a fat paycheck.
The true power in microtargeting lies in the iteration speed achievable by computers. As with any effective weapon, if you can wield yours faster than your opponent, you will emerge victorious in the normal case. This is the same principle at play in High Frequency Trading. And just like High Frequency Trading, which was pioneered by the chairman of Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, the less competition you have, the less entities that can usurp your temporal advantage. There is no "mastery" of this technique, only being able to do it faster than everyone else. Thus, there is no balance lent by proliferating the algorithm, as I see it.
I guess as an irrational actor, which we all are as humans, I would either seek one of two outcomes, neither of which resulted in giving away the algorithm. If I felt no moral qualms empowering someone else with this ability, then that is the same lack of qualms to use the ability for myself. If I were so inclined, I could use this technique to make that fat paycheck, and never have to walk away. This technique is effective in many fields beyond elections. In the situation I'd walk away, it would only be to suppress the work, in the hopes it stays undiscovered.
All one has to do is watch Channel 4's Cambridge Analytica videos to see that the CEO is on video promising things which are both unethical and illegal, and a subversion of democracy. Sales pitch or not, the content itself is damning.
If I promise you I can provide you illegal drugs, weapons, child porn, etc. but don't actually have those things, does that make me a better person than if I actually did have those things? At the very best, I'm still a lying snake oil salesman. Except, I'm not promising a medical remedy. I'm promising you illegal and unethical things. This isn't a car that just happens to be a lemon.
I hate-hate-hate-hate to be putting any doubt on this particular case, but we have to start prepping for the world when it's trivial enough to create complete faked videos. The tech is here already. So, at least in the future, it will be possible that even such videos as those are merely inserting completely faked words and gestures etc.
How will we evaluate truth in the future? It won't be by trusting videos. It will somehow go back to he-said she-said and figuring out who we can trust. But if different people trust totally different sources, then agreement about truths seems it will end up being limited to easily testable facts and predictions.
What is going to happen in a world where your comment could apply to anyone because such a video of unethical promises could be generated of anyone??
Well, then you're gonna love love love love this. Faked videos are certainly bad, but lets travel in our mental time machines back to February 18th 1990, the day before Photoshop was released.
"We are rapidly nearing a world when its trivial enough to create complete faked pictures", they cried. "How will we evaluate truth in the future?"
"Hah," you exclaim. "You can just look at the pixels. There is always a way to tell if you look close enough."
But alas, they can't hear you, because this is my time machine, and I said so.
Just because we haven't had to adapt our lives to the new reality yet, doesn't mean we wont with the same relative ease we always have once that reality smacks us in the face.
> "Hah," you exclaim. "You can just look at the pixels. There is always a way to tell if you look close enough."
No I do not. And that claim is simply wrong. There's often a way to tell, not always. Nobody today thinks photographs are absolutely convincing proof anymore. Experts who detect altered photographs do NOT say nonsense like "always a way to tell".
Yeah, we'll adapt, but the adaptation is going to be rough. A simple point is: my comment above is part of the adaptation process.
Indeed I even think the overreactions we see about this “scandal” is because media in general love to follow such catastrophic plots and spread false or enhanced news. As always.
Many articles i read don’t understand even what happened and, from here, the whole thing seems a big bluff that will shake the internet based economy and powers.
Best we can do is ignore this case and go back to our life. It’s however an interesting phenomenon under many points of view.
You know how Donald Trump says he doesn't telegraph his moves?
You know how Donald Trumps supporters talk a lot about 4D chess?
There are several people playing 4D chess with Donald. The Cambridge Analytica story is lining up a path to Donald's opponent's queen, to entice him into taking that queen. Once the queen is taken, Donald Trump is in check, possibly mate.
And its all because Donald telegraphed his moves.
You've been triggered so hard to believe the Fake News narrative, you don't have a snowballs chance in hell at detecting the difference in this story. Its the same for your boy.
Facebook is the Red Herring, the delicious smoked creature served up on a platter to those most likely to bite into it.
Donald Trump will be (already is) in check, because once he bites on the controversy that Facebook losing control of the data is the actual problem at the root of this story, he will gush to us all about his far superior data operation, that hardly relied on facebook at all.
It is as Donald spits these flakes of herring meat he will confess.
You know how I've told you alot of this story in the future tense. Well, it turns out some of the players confessed right away, but they still don't know it. Here's one now:
> There are several people playing 4D chess with Donald. The Cambridge Analytica story is lining up a path to Donald's opponent's queen, to entice him into taking that queen. Once the queen is taken, Donald Trump is in check, possibly mate.
> It is as Donald spits these flakes of herring meat he will confess.
Who are these people setting this 4D (special relativity?) chess game up? If I had to guess why your posts are downvoted is because they sound too conspiratory. The conspiracy is what I like to call "Trump is getting impeached next Thursday" conspiracy. This has been running since inauguration pretty much. He was going to be impeached after Comey's hearing, after Flynn was talking with Mueller, after Russians were indicted and in general pretty much every other week in between. Your post is in the same category as it has the "aha he is taking the bait, and we finally go him, just wait a few more days...".
More than anything, its really hard to keep ones emotions in check after they realize they've been mindfucked for the last 1000 days or so. Some people react in anger at whoever tricked them, and others get overly excited when, like a bell, everything that has confounded them and challenged everything they understood before, suddenly makes sense in the context of some keystone piece of information, restoring faith in those heuristics the mindfucker convinced them to abandon.
I am firmly in the latter category. I have purposely made my arguments controversial to the entire "There's something vague I can't quite put my finger on about this guy and why I don't believe him", crowd, because the responses I was bound to get were certain to come from this very same crowd. I say certain, because I myself play 4D chess, and you've all telegraphed your moves to me through the cohesion of your arguments over time. Time is that fourth dimension, after all. The people constantly making vague arguments about how "we don't really know, but gosh, just think of ramifications of it being true, we better just be safe and investigate this closer" are dropping breadcrumbs, meta data, if you will, in the fourth dimension. It is the accumulation of these breadcrumbs over time that reveals the cohesion of your behavior in the aggregate. You are literally powerless to the tantalizing nature of conspiracies that confirm what you assume is true about the Left. Your primary heuristic is that conspiracies are filled with intrigue and mystery. Thus, anywhere you find intrigue and mystery, your brain immediately jumps to conspiracy theories. This is literally the effect of your media bubble trolling you so hard with controversy for so long, all of your previous heuristics you used to use to discern the truth have been weakened by the information vacuum perpetuated by that very controversy. As nature abhors a vacuum, your mind fills in the gaps in lieu having the phenomenon explained to you by someone who understands. This is literally the effect at play in horror movies where they rarely show the monster/killer. Your imagination is far better at evoking fear than any hollywood writer.
I just showed you a 4D chess move, and now I'm showing you the pawn I took with that move. I don't claim you will be able to fully see it, but it is right in front of your face, nonetheless.
To the degree that a person can be found to possess high cohesion in the aggregate of their behavior over time, that person can be said to displaying that behavior with purpose, and as a habit. By high cohesion of their behavior, I mean they are consistently achieving the same outcomes.
Trump has unwittingly telegraphed his intentions through the cohesion of his behavior and communication. That behavior and communication is nearly exclusively controversial. Trump has recently admitted he really likes conflict, so even he agrees with me. Donald Trump will start a fight with nearly anyone. I know you'll correct me with the idea that Donald Trump is responding to attacks from the left. I'm willing to even back off to that looser definition. Trump likes to fight back. Trump's cohesive action that accumulates as his habit is the fact that he injects controversy everywhere, at the expense of context. Trump's main skill is he understands that by picking issues to advance that are most rabidly supported by his base, he is concurrently giving his base what they want, and angering/frightening those who oppose those issues. This is the underlying mechanism of demagoguery. Give these people what they want, and make those people extremely unhappy about it. So Trump is really good at reading certain people, and telling them either what they want to hear (his base), or what they don't want to hear (his opponents). Trump is most effective when he uses the same subject to achieve both of those at once. It comes down to his timing in how fast he can iterate on which controversies resonate with the people he is telling them too. If he can read the listeners response to his speech faster than they can think of a logical framework to understand it within, and some how play off of their response to perpetuate their doubts, he can successfully repeat this process until he finds the speech his listeners respond to the best. This is why he likes "High Energy". The high energy is the validation he has properly read his audience.
Cambridge Analytica, through microtargeting, is performing the same process. Expose people to controversial information. Gauge their responses to this information through their social media responses. The main difference that makes Cambridge Analytica more effective is the speed with which they can iterate the process. More iterations will yield more insights, and give that much more stiff competition to the truly effective methods. Its actually strikingly similar to the Fourier Transform. Find the frequencies present in a periodic signal containing multiple harmonics by multiplying that signal by a range of single frequency signals. The results of this multiplication is a set of bins, each mapping to a specific frequency. If a particular frequency is present in the complex signal, then multiplying it by a signal with just that single frequency will yield a more significant value than a frequency that is not present in the multi frequency signal. The fourier transform is literally seeing which single frequencies resonate with the complex signal being transformed.
I posit that you can't refute any of these underlying principles. To the extent that we agree on the underlying principles, but disagree on their effect in concert, I will have enumerated the ships, the weaponry, the sailors, and the uniforms, and your contention will be that those don't constitute a Navy.
Oh, I almost forgot. A good way to think about downvotes is your subconcsious admission that the best recourse you have to any argument is to try and make sure as few other people read it as possible.
That means part of you that you have no control over knows the truth, but for whatever reason, decides your better off not knowing that truth.
The article itself contains multiple sources (links), not all of them reference previous Buzzfeed articles.
Unfortunately people nowadays expect one article to give them all the facts they think they need. Sometimes what appears to be bias in a story can be brought down to mistakes, space constraints, even the timing of the release of certain facts that may alter the story within a few hours. Any news story should be scrutinized with skepticism, but looking at the story from multiple sources should give you all the information you need to assess the veracity.
i don't like giving buzzfeed clicks and when i share stories with people i like to give sources that preferably isn't buzzfeed. kinda makes it less credible.
