[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

More on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook:

Essay: Christopher Wylie: Privacy rights threatened by Cambridge Analytica’s “grossly unethical experiments”

The testimony of Christopher Wylie, a pink-haired Canadian researcher-turned-whistleblower, is currently poised to educate millions of Americans––possibly for the first time––on how Facebook profits from sharing information about them. The business model that the platform has been using since its inception has led to one of the largest threats to voter privacy to emerge since the invention of the open web.

The scope of that threat isn’t limited to just an election, a president, or a social network––though historically any one of those things would have individually captured the top news on a normal day.

This room is rather dark... Let me light this TNT shaped candle.....

I like the way he thinks...

That dude has seen Hobo With A Shotgun a few too many times.

Gremlin wrote:

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach: Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Technically not a breach, more like taking advantage of a poorly written api. They just got people to click things and used normal Facebook calls to grab all they could grab and save it.

Mixolyde wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach: Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Technically not a breach, more like taking advantage of a poorly written api. They just got people to click things and used normal Facebook calls to grab all they could grab and save it.

Yeah. I’ve been struggling with this one all day. I did development against Facebook APIs for 4 years at the start of the decade. This is what Facebook IS. Intentionally. It’s one giant data breach.

Now, the company I worked for didn’t syphon all that data out of Facebook. We were interested in transmitting likes and connecting friends. But if we wanted to save all that graph data we could have. Nothing was stopping us.

There are issues with how Cambridge Analytica was using the data. No doubt. And I’m happy for a light to shine on this overall. But I feel like people are going to be shocked how much of this is normal.

If a billionaire wants to purchase Facebook, take it private and shut it down they’d be my hero. Until then, this is the product. This is what they built.

Everyone knows that the only reason to take a personality test on Facebook is so someone can have the answers to your bank's security questions.

Why Are Black Students Punished So Often? Minnesota Confronts a National Quandary

NYT wrote:

MINNEAPOLIS — When Erin Rathke, the principal at Justice Page Middle School, is called to extract a student from class, she hears the same plea over and over again, most often, she has to admit, from black children: “The teacher only sees me.”

The plea weighs heavily at Justice Page, where African-American students are 338 percent more likely to be suspended than their white peers. “It’s painful sometimes, but I have to say, ‘Yes, that’s probably true,” Ms. Rathke said.

It is a reality that district leaders here have been grappling with for years: The Minneapolis school district suspends an inordinate number of black students compared with white ones, and it is struggling to figure out why. Last year, districtwide, black students were 41 percent of the overall student population, but made up 76 percent of the suspensions.

Numbers like that prompted the Obama administration in 2014 to draft tough new policies to try to address racial disparities in school discipline across the country. Now, the Trump administration is trying to reverse those policies — in part, administration officials say, as a response to school shootings like the massacre last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

The Obama-era policies — and the Trump-era reversals — have divided educators in the Twin Cities. In recent months, educators from Minneapolis, St. Paul and suburban Minnesota traveled to Washington to lobby the Education Department in support of reversing the 2014 guidelines, which encouraged school districts to review racial disparities in student discipline rates to ensure against violations of federal civil rights laws. Those that do not comply can face federal investigation or a loss of funding.

...

But in Minneapolis, as in districts across the nation, discipline policies are more than a political flash point. They are a daily struggle to balance safety and statistics, and the uncomfortable truths about how race may be clouding educators’ perception of both.

“We’re in a pressure cooker,” said Michael Thomas, the district’s chief of schools. “And what’s happening in Minneapolis is a microcosm of what’s happening across America.”

While critics of the Obama-era discipline changes argue that disparities cannot be explained away by racism, education leaders here say it is the natural place to start.

Bernadeia Johnson, a former Minneapolis schools superintendent, launched her own review of discipline referrals for kindergarten boys after the federal government began investigating her district. The review was revealing, she said. The descriptions of white children by teachers included “gifted but can’t use his words” and “high strung,” with their actions excused because they “had a hard day.”

Black children, she said, were “destructive” and “violent,” and “cannot be managed.”

“When you see something like that and you’re a leader, and you’re trying to figure out how to move the school system forward — it was alarming,” Ms. Johnson said.

Nationally, black students are suspended three times as often as their white peers; in Minnesota, it is eight times as often. To explain this trend, officials here point to the rapid increase in the state’s minority population in the last decade, and the fact that the state has the largest poverty gap between blacks and whites in the nation.

Last month, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights notified 43 school districts and charter schools that suspension rates for nonviolent offenses still suggested widespread discriminatory practices.

“We’re at a tipping point, and that’s what you see in the schools” said Kevin Lindsey, the state’s human rights commissioner.

OG_slinger wrote:

Why Are Black Students Punished So Often? Minnesota Confronts a National Quandary

NYT wrote:

Numbers like that prompted the Obama administration in 2014 to draft tough new policies to try to address racial disparities in school discipline across the country. Now, the Trump administration is trying to reverse those policies — in part, administration officials say, as a response to school shootings like the massacre last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

This just infuriates me: using the shootings to justify getting rid of rules they don't like (because they're racist...period).

If they want to identify the people who are likely to shoot up a school, they'd better make sure they're disciplining white kids a hell of a lot more than black kids, as the profile of school shooters says it will be a white male a huge percentage of the time.

OG_slinger wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
Hockosi wrote:

They just fired McCabe.

Seriously messed up, and I can totally hear Trump in my head like "I just saved the government a LOOOOOOOOOOOT of money by not letting him retire," in some stupid future speech.

McCabe's full pension was probably like two or three Trump trips to Mar-a-Lago.

Almost certainly less than one trip.

Mixolyde wrote:

Everyone knows that the only reason to take a personality test on Facebook is so someone can have the answers to your bank's security questions.

Only a sucker provides true answers to their bank security questions?

thrawn82 wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Everyone knows that the only reason to take a personality test on Facebook is so someone can have the answers to your bank's security questions.

Only a sucker provides true answers to their bank security questions?

This person speaks the truth. Subscribe to his podcast (which may or may not exist).

Maybe at the Republican National Convention?

Why did it take 8 years to find this out?

In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”

No one has authority to give away other people's personal data. Hopefully, this leads to the downfall of Facebook. I doubt it, but it would be a good step in the right direction.

And we get to why journalists are so reviled today: When their Messiah did it, it was brilliant! Now that the Mercers did it too, it's criminal. How about it has always been wrong. Can we at least agree on that?

As an IT guy, I always warned people about Facebook and other social media. That's why my Facebook page is a boring set of status updates from Culver's and Supercuts.

TAZ89 wrote:

And we get to why journalists are so reviled today: When their Messiah did it, it was brilliant! Now that the Mercers did it too, it's criminal.

I know right-leaning media are in a lather about this right now, but it's hardly news. From a June 2013 article in the NYT:

The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said.

Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said.

The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ” (Facebook officials say warning bells go off when the site sees large amounts of unusual activity, but in each case the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards.)

By March 2012, Wagner’s team had a workable list of what it deemed to be the most persuadable voters — in total, roughly 15 million of them in the swing states. Messina ordered the campaign to direct a majority of its efforts toward winning them back, one by one if necessary. They could reach many through their Facebook friends and others through more conventional means like e-mail and knocking on doors. But how could the Obama campaign be as targeted and tech-savvy on TV?

The Internet, and specifically social media, may have fundamentally changed politics, but there is still nothing with the power to enrage or inspire like a well-produced television ad (see “47 percent, Romney”). This is in part because of the evocative nature of video, which can be transmitted over the Internet as well. But it’s also because that imagery is typically put in front of people when they are at their most receptive, zoning out on the couch, relaxing, their defenses down.

So, why was this less of a scandal? My guess would be less about messiahs (which, really?) - I think in part, because the Obama campaign was working within the rules Facebook established, unlike Cambridge Analytica, and also in part because society was still terribly naive about the risks of social media (individually and collectively).

Lessons which we have slowly and painfully learned over the intervening six years, and continue to learn in the present.

TAZ89 wrote:

And we get to why journalists are so reviled today: When their Messiah did it, it was brilliant! Now that the Mercers did it too, it's criminal. How about it has always been wrong. Can we at least agree on that?

According to the article in 2011 Facebook encouraged developers--everyone from Farmville to dating apps to political campaigns--to do hoover up as much data as they could from Facebook. They didn't change their policy about 3rd parties scraping data until 2015 and even then it wasn't because they thought it was "wrong."

And none of that changes the fact that the Obama campaign followed Facebook's rules--however flawed they were--in 2011 while Cambridge Analytics didn't.

But I'm just one of those old "get off my lawn" people who never got on the Facebook or social media train or understood why anyone would willing share so much information about themselves, their friends, and family with a company whose sole reason for existing was to sell all of that information to other companies who would then use it to manipulate you.

TAZ89 wrote:

Why did it take 8 years to find this out?

In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”

No one has authority to give away other people's personal data. Hopefully, this leads to the downfall of Facebook. I doubt it, but it would be a good step in the right direction.

And we get to why journalists are so reviled today: When their Messiah did it, it was brilliant! Now that the Mercers did it too, it's criminal. How about it has always been wrong. Can we at least agree on that?

As an IT guy, I always warned people about Facebook and other social media. That's why my Facebook page is a boring set of status updates from Culver's and Supercuts.

You should really stop it with the “Messiah” bullsh*t. It doesn’t make your argument look very strong. Yes it’s always been wrong. It’s also a technical evolution of the kinds of stuff political campaigns have always done (gathering voter data and targeting likely voters). I think the big difference in this case is running AstroTurf campaigns, pushing fake news using this data and running mostly negative advertising.

Nevermind that there’s the vector we still don’t have proof of. Did the information come from a foreign power? Was it obtained via illegal hacking. If these two things meet this is markedly different from what the Obama campaign was ever guilty of.

TAZ89 wrote:

And we get to why journalists are so reviled today

This came out last week and it didn't cause too much of a blip. It's all over the news today because Cambridge Analytics ALSO got caught on tape saying that they bribe political rivals and send them prostitutes, and because their UK offices were raided by police investigating criminal wrongdoing. Either of those things would have made it a big story, both happening makes it the news of the day, and probably the week if Trump doesn't take away another public servants pension.

Are you alleging that both of those things happened to Obama as well, but we don't know because of a cover-up?

TAZ89 wrote:

No one has authority to give away other people's personal data. Hopefully, this leads to the downfall of Facebook. I doubt it, but it would be a good step in the right direction.

I am struck by your use of the term "personal data" because I don't think what I "like" or say on Facebook is personal data. To me it feels public, because...well it is public. Anyone can see it.

The problem with FB et al is that what you say isn't necessarily the big money thing. It's really your browsing history and patterns that they're after. They're able to scrape an awful lot of info about you just by being able to track what you click on, what sites you've gone to, who you replied to, and so on.

I guess it's the difference between someone eavesdropping on a conversation you're having in a coffee shop, and that person following you around for a week, taking pictures of everything you do. Technically, both are out in public, but one is way more intrusive than the other.

Chaz wrote:

I guess it's the difference between someone eavesdropping on a conversation you're having in a coffee shop, and that person following you around for a week, taking pictures of everything you do. Technically, both are out in public, but one is way more intrusive than the other.

I agree with this but I wonder what we consider private vs. public in those scenarios. And is intrusive a term we need to define legally?

Exactly. It might not even be technically illegal to follow someone around that way (although I’m sure stalking is a crime), but it sure as hell is unethical. In a better world where we had time to worry about such things we’d try to make that kind of tracking illegal. I have to believe there’s a better use of computers and the potential of humanity than min/maxing our ability to sell stuff to people.

DSGamer wrote:

Exactly. It might not even be technically illegal to follow someone around that way (although I’m sure stalking is a crime), but it sure as hell is unethical.

Much like "private/public" I think terms like "unethical" are fraught with issues.

The other problem with all this is that the following around is happening effectively invisibly. If there's a dude following you with a camera IRL, you at least know about it. If the dude is wearing a shirt saying "I work for FB, you said it was cool to do this", then you could at least know "Alright, if I don't want the dude following me, I need to revoke the permission with FB."

Except in most cases, the tracking happens so pervasively and invisibly that it's almost impossible to really know who's following you around, and even harder to revoke permission. Just the other day, I was reading a forum post that had a picture of a minis painting station. I clicked it to get a bigger view. That somehow dropped a cookie, and two days later, Amazon was sending me emails offering that painting station. I hadn't logged into the forum with an Amazon login or anything, but word got back to them, and they hoovered up another data point about me. If we apply the metaphor to this, it would be like talking with some buddies, someone mentions painting minis, and next thing I know, I've got a salesman showing up on my doorstep selling minis painting gear, but I had no idea anyone was listening to that conversation.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/w3LfdeD.jpg?1)

From my reading on the subject the researcher that gathered the info did so legally. It was his giving the data to CA that caused the violation. In that case both he and CA are guilty of a serious theft from Facebook. The value of which is in the tens of millions of dollars. Anyone involved should be prosecuted fully.

It isn't a case that the Obama Campaign didn't do anything wrong. They did and both Facebook and them knew it at the time.

“They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Davidsen tweeted.

This also needs to be fully investigated. This was a one of a kind donation to a political campaign. Was it reported to the FEC? Was its value properly disclosed? Anyone involved should be prosecuted fully. Where was the press? Oh, right they were too busy cheerleading for 8 years.

In the end it is Facebook itself that is the real problem here. They used a lets make money any way we can and worry about the consequences later approach. There needs to be serious consequences for the company.

Two former federal officials who crafted the landmark consent decree governing how Facebook handles user privacy say the company may have violated that decree when it shared information from tens of millions of users with a data analysis firm that later worked for President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Vladeck, now a professor at Georgetown Law, said violations of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation, meaning that if news reports that the data of 50 million people were shared proves true, the company’s possible exposure runs into the trillions of dollars. Vladeck said that such a fine is unlikely but that the final penalty still could be very large.

Add to this any FEC violations and this could be huge. I don't believe they will ever be punished, they have bought off enough politicians to see that day never comes. The key is that people are finally catching on that Facebook and others are the bad guys. Silicon Valley is headed into a world of hurt as public opinion is turning on them. Talk is building of antitrust violations and regulations headed their way. This issue might be a watershed event.

TAZ89 wrote:
Vladeck, now a professor at Georgetown Law, said violations of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation, meaning that if news reports that the data of 50 million people were shared proves true, the company’s possible exposure runs into the trillions of dollars. Vladeck said that such a fine is unlikely but that the final penalty still could be very large.

Trump was playing 4D chess after all :O
1. Illegally abuse private data through Facebook.
2. Sue Facebook
3. Profit! Trillion dollar fix for the deficit!
4...
5. Deliver it to Putin

I find a lot of the hate for facebook seems to come from a place that bothers me in a way I can't really articulate. The argument I see is: "Company with whom I willingly shared a large amount of information about myself, you are the real bad guy for not stopping me from sharing so much information about myself"

It kind of reminds of the time congress berated Obama for not stopping them from overturning the veto on a piece of legislation that turned out to be as harmful as it first appeared.