#so at that point i gave up on that line of enquiry; typed up a blog post; screenshotted everything & just submitted it'

[fingertipsmp3]

Obsessed with the way my most recent homework task was like "create this program in javascript and then document the process on your blog" because like. You know you're not getting an honest depiction of my process, right?

[chut-je-dors]

Who is chiclettes? I don’t know much about this whole situation but they sound really mean? Are they hating on stories or is it more like harassment? (Sorry I just don’t know a whole lot)

Chiclettes is a person who started commenting on my fic This Is Not Them in July 2017. Previously I had received similar type of comments from an anon called Sevigne_Morris, who then disappeared once Chiclettes made their first appearance, making me suspect they are the same person. Chiclettes seems to have a real problem with fics that differ from their preferred world view ; they really seem to hate all and any fics where Paul bottoms, and usually write near incomprehensible mammoth-length comments. Here is their first comment on This Is Not Them from July :

Hopefully you're feeling better health wise. I know someone that have had vertigo and it isn't a walk in the park but fortunately her episodes have stopped for a longer time so let's hope that the same will happen with you. Another intense chapter but really realistic ? lol. Realistic if it counts Paul's determination and fierce strong work ethics that he applied everywhere and on everything that he pursues during his life. Matter of fact , I think that John is your favorite " not is wrong with that" , as almost all on your fics you described him the strong, the leader, the one that everything and everyone revolves in etc, etc. And Paul the weak, the giggling, the girlish, the histrionic, waiting for strong John to come to his rescue. Hope by the end of this fic Paul's doesn't get hemororroids with all the men's actions he was getting nightly! Anyway you're a great writer!

What I really love about this comment is how they just basically go « Anyway you’re a great writer ! » as if everything they said didn’t leave me mulling and panicking over my characterisation of Paul for the better half of the year. (In case you’re interested in my response to these opinions, it’s here) Chiclettes’ comments tend to narrow down to this idea : “Hello. The fact that your Paul bottoms in this fic means that he’s girlish, and I think Paul was the macho one. John on the other hand was more likely to take it up the arse, here have a bunch of « proof » that I’m ready to repeat in each and every comment I ever leave. Basically you don’t know how to write Paul. Paul showing any kind of emotion is BAD because this makes him a giggly girl, which I don’t like. Blah blah have you read JP Kenwood’s fic ? It is really good. Paul is a macho man.”

(This is heavily stylised. If you want to see how they really write comments, I suggest you check Ten Minutes chapter 3 comment section. That. That there is hell. Me and Puck couldn’t believe our eyes when it just kept happening)

Chiclettes then eventually kind of stopped writing comments to my fics out of me refusing to answer them, but kept referring to me when commenting on Puck’s fics, and on Ten Minutes? Here is what they wrote on Puck’s fic Can You Still Love Me Tomorrow (check out the whole comment to, again, see what the fuck is going on) :

This author (imaginebeatles) from all the Called “ new, younger writers ‘, ones seems before to be one the sweetest, more respectful to them and from her fan base she never ever wrote something like that lines of Paul opening his legs to anyone or have something advertised to it put at his neck to take advantage of him blah, blah before she started yes, collaborate with the other writer, the other writer. Her fan base think she’s getting wrong awful ideas with this collaboration. You don’t, the other writers fans don’t but we do. This writer doesn’t want to acknowledging me now but she has have received complaints from others telling exactly what I expressed here. It is right there at her tumblr and people can read about it. Besides I received lots of emails and I can prove it by people feeling bad about other people like you gang on them and being nasty to them when they don’t agree with people like you and friends from the other writer.

That is when I became The Other Writer™. (That is literally where my blog title comes, since I took this with humour while Puck was seething (she’s scary)) Since then they’ve never referred to me by CJD or anything else, just « the other writer ». Pretty soon after this they stopped interacting with me and Puck, since we refused to engage with her and Puck had to tell them to stop. Since then they’ve commented on 5 Thomas Lane kinda gently, but very often with a confused tone (Like « what does pop mean ? » which is just….. that comment is in chapter 12. Paul has been called « Pop » for all the past chapters. What ?). I kind of assumed and hoped they’d stopped with these terrible comments, but yesterday after the anon enquiry I went to see the AO3 comment section and,, this is the comment she left on some explicitly rated, well-tagged fic written by an aspiring author:

The most trash ever. Get your trash and take with you to the hole you came from . This community are made of people with more dignity and you don’t belong here.

??????????????????????????????? the FUCK, Chiclettes ???

Here’s another one from the same fic :

To the people that are saying I am disrespectful, Let me tell you disrespectful is writing trash, porno and trying to pass as fanfiction. Disrespectful is writing something completely obscene about a alive person without worrying about his feelings, family’s and reputation. Disrespectful is writing something as a sock value to hide your utmost lack of talent and respect ! That is what real disrespect are about.

This is,, what is this ?? Now they’re saying that writing smut is bad ? These comments are what really had me going off yesterday. I’m sick of this person. They can’t do this to the authors. They complain endlessly if the fic features bottom!Paul, and do their best in putting writers self-confidence down. They must be deranged somehow, because this is not normal behaviour. What I mean they’re completely bonkers, and that doesn’t give them the rights to say things like this. They feel entitled to tell their opinion without minding of what it does to the authors. The line of constructive criticism was passed in the very first comments they left me. And while I agree with some of the points they’re making, they’re doing it wrong. Just, wrong.

So. Yeah. That is Chiclettes. By checking the comment sections in the fics I gave you you’ll see what carnage it really is; I can’t post her whole comments here since they’re so long and I get cancer from reading them. You can basically find them from every fic where Paul bottoms, complaining about the same thing. And it’s fairly truthful if I say we authors are getting a little bit tired with them.

[sussex-nature-lover]

Sunday 27th December 2020

What Have We Seen?

♦ outside links indicated by bold type - not affiliated to this blog

When I was a little girl, as an only child, my Christmas Day evening and the days afterwards were spent diligently writing. It was all about the Thank You cards and filling in my new diary (remember them?) This year the house has been equally quiet, just me and Crow and it set me thinking that as I’ve been using this Blog as a kind of journal, documenting our weekly life, I should try and make a definitive list of all the birds we’ve seen in our Sussex garden and on our walks straight out of the front door, all within half an hour’s gentle amble. I’m going to include birds seen flying overhead as well as in the trees and on the ground.

As of the 30 November 2020 update, the British lists of species seen stands at 622, so we have a very long way to go.

The UK List from the British Ornithologists’ Union - check the site for further qualifications on the categories below.

Now yesterday was a super exciting day for us here and we didn’t even leave the house. It wasn’t to do with forgotten Christmas presents or stuffing ourselves with left overs either.

I’d got this Blog entry partly drafted out (and annoyingly lost everything I wrote earlier, so am having to start again, boo hoo) but I’m going to take the opportunity to start at the end instead of the beginning.

You might remember that last week I reported seeing a Tree Creeper for the first time. I used an illustration as I just didn’t manage to get a photo. After a shout out on Twitter two friends supplied me with personal pictures and said I could use them. Here’s one and the other will be showcased again soon. It’s great to be able to use friends’ photos if I haven’t got one rather than rely on the reference sites.

Tree Creeper in Sefton Park by Dave Edwards ‘ Lifelong LFC Fan. Proud Scouser. Lakeland walker, lover of all wildlife. Photography lover’ Thanks Dave

Yesterday morning I was looking out of a front bedroom window and could tell there was a huge amount of activity in the field across the lane (Babs the Buzzard’s Field) but this time it was tiny activity, dwarfed by the Rooks and Crows over there.

First off there was a big flock of Pied Wagtails. I’d guesstimate more than 20. The most I’ve ever seen before (in Real Life) would be eight or nine. They were really, really busy little birds. Lovely.

They’re quite hard to make out and were over a fair area. I just wanted to offer a bit of proof I hadn’t seen about four and told a Fisherman’s Tale.

Peer closely and they are there I promise

Then I noticed that right at the back along the tree line where the Deer usually linger, what might have been leaves blowing in the wind, was actually something totally different.

I do believe (and my Guru will soon put me right if I’m mistaken) that there was a huge number of both Redwing (above) and Fieldfare (below) - the so called Winter Thrushes.

Link includes video which gives you more of an idea what I saw.

They were hard to snap as well because they were so active, leaping up on the wing and dancing about.

What I’ve lost in clarity I’ve gained by showing scale

We’ve never seen either of these birds for ourselves before, so that’s another first - three within a week or thereabouts.

BUT...We weren’t done yet - brace yourselves.

I was on the phone to Ms NW tE and didn’t have the binoculars to hand. A huge bird caught my eye. The Heron? Oooh, no, TWO huge birds and then a third smaller bird flying behind.

I managed to get a very poor photo with which to tease my Guru. I actually gave him the pic that looked like a spec of dust on the screen, but he knows my modus operandi by now and politely enquired if I had anything a little better? Tee Hee.

Still not the best, but I offered up what I have. Through a process of enquiry and thought, we identified what the two large birds are. See Link Here.

RECONNECTING PEOPLE AND LANDSCAPES

A group of private landowners and nature conservation organisations are working together to help the white stork return home to South East England for the first time in several hundred years.

These large birds, symbolic of rebirth, are native to the British Isles and evidence suggests that they were once widely distributed. Whilst it is unclear why this spectacular and sociable bird failed to survive in Britain, it is likely that a combination of habitat loss, over-hunting and targeted persecution all contributed to their decline. A contributory factor may be that it was persecuted in the English Civil War for being associated with rebellion. The white stork is a migratory bird species, and there have been many sightings in the UK over recent years, but conservationists identified that the species would need a helping hand to re-establish a breeding population in Britain.

Read more at The White Stork Project

I think we agreed there’s no doubt as the project is 4-5 miles away by road and a friend from another nearby village also confirmed sightings here last week (of several, circling) I wish I’d known.

To say that I am BEYOND EXCITED (yes - shouting, sorry) is an understatement. This was our first sighting and now we know, we’ll definitely be on the look out. Sometimes I find it hard to identify a new bird because it just doesn’t occur to me that I’m going to see something unusual - which is odd because I do know the science and always advise other people that you just don’t know what’s out there. My mind boggles at all the spottings I’ve missed because I wasn’t looking out at the right time...but then sometimes you just get lucky.

I’ve only ever seen a Stork in real life once before and that was in South Africa. I’ll embarrass myself here and confess that neither of us thought it was real. We came straight out of the Lodge (in the open Land Rover) with our Ranger and Tracker and there it was. We actually thought someone had made a giant painted cut out as some kind of way marker.

Saddle Billed Stork at 5′ approx, the tallest Stork in the world, with a wing span of between 8-9′ Incredible. Click link for all the details

To be fair to us that was in the fairly early days of our interest in bird watching and they are usually shy and somewhat reclusive.

So that’s four new to us sightings within a week or 10 days. What an end to the year that is, not that it’s over yet. I’ll sign off now and start over on the full Sightings Blog that I’d written earlier. Back to Square One it is.

LOCAL NEWS:

Just down the lane this morning. The post and wire fence on the right is where I took the Goldfinch photos in the Summer. Luckily our house is on a slope down from the village towards this point. Apparently the roads all around are flooded, some can’t be used at all and it goes as far as St Leonard’s (towards the coast)

Photo Credit: a fellow villager

And a couple of villages along, a friend’s view at the end of the garden - there is no river there as a rule.

Photo credit: friend * permission has been requested. Will remove if not forthcoming

NOTE FROM LAST NIGHT’S KITCHEN:

I was quite the Domestic Goddess. We have some beautiful large Majool Dates. They were £4 for two packs on offer from Morrisons.

I really recommend you read that link.

I made a slit in them and inserted a Pistachio Nut and drizzled some melted dark chocolate over them, sprinkling it before it set with some more finely chopped nuts.

I was also prepping on the off-chance our power got cut off later because of Storm Bella revving up outside. There’s been some awful flooding around the country and I could hear high winds. I slept with ear plugs in last night, which did help, but woke about 6ish and my goodness it was still raging. There are rail and road disruptions all over and goodness knows what it was like out at sea. A friend said around Brixham container ships and an empty cruise liner were clinging in close to shore for what shelter they could get. It’s around 9am as I type and it just about seems to be calming down here.

More weather reports.

I’d got some cous cous with mixed spices and so we made that up, steamed some plain potatoes to make into a potato salad with chives from the freezer and have been making my favourite olive and preserved lemon Tagine recipe, which has been marinating for a day already.

I got that all ready for an emergency reserve supper but as it happened we were ok. The camping stove was on standby, but it wasn’t needed. Phew. Pity the hundreds of people who did lose power though

Decoration from the Standen Courtyard Christmas Trees

a colourful hand crafted tree with leaves and blossom - very cheery for a dull day

Today’s Carol from the Vienna Boys’ Choir

with the London Symphony Orchestra 

‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’

[innayatparihar]

How to Optimize Your Content for Voice Search SEO?

Almost 33% of search traffic come from the versatile clients lately. Huge numbers of individuals are utilizing the mobiles in this way, the site should be the versatile inviting. To make a simple cycle for portable clients and the site engineers are focusing on voice search SEO. Since it is anything but difficult to talk than type in telephone or PC. Lately a large portion of the voice search is done in mobiles than work area.

What is Voice Search?

The voice search measure is propelling advance to all locales it helps for client requests and gives the outcomes. The substance based estimations of the past or present quests helps in the voice look for finding the SEO results. For instance, in substance search, we use it as "Where is Digital prepared" in voice search we articulate a similar way like "Where is Digital prepared". The SEO gadgets for voice search and substance search are nearly to be the equivalent and we will utilize Top 10 Digital Marketing Companies London as same for voice search also.

What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

The significant piece of web indexes customers will presumably type on one of the primary 5 recommendations in the outcomes pages (SERPS), so to misuse this and get visitors to your webpage or customers to your online store you need to in the top positions. Site design improvement is the way toward improving the perceivability of the site in the internet searcher results. It may appear as though something straightforward to do it requires an incredible exertion, right methodology and capacity to satisfy all the difficulties going ahead our way while upgrading the undertaking. In the present market, SEO is more significant subject. Huge numbers of individuals posing inquiries and simultaneously they are getting arrangements. Web optimization can assist with being on the top, if two sites are selling something very similar, the web crawler upgraded site will have more clients.

What is Voice Search SEO?

The significant factor for voice search website optimization system is catchphrase revelation. The site blast will be made through the pursuit when they examine which watchwords are generally pertinent to meet business goals, and afterward use SEO systems to improve position in web crawlers. Voice search is been changing generally to support characteristic setting. The long-tail watchwords are exceptionally utilized in the voice search than the short tail catchphrases. Normal voice searches can surpass the seven-word phrases, profoundly long tail catchphrases contrasting and the customary work area and portable pursuits.

Reasons People Use Voice Search

It's faster than composing. You can talk 110–150 words for every second, instead of the typical person's composing rate is of 38–40 words for each second. Voice look has a higher pace of suggested scraps. A considerable lot of them says that 43.3% for voice questions have included pieces, offset with 40.6% for content requests.

Rank Brain and Voice Search

More grounded sway on 15% of request requests Google has never noticed, and they have a propensity to be voice looks. You're prepared to better positioning in easy going request inquiries with watchwords. Voice look for questions are longer than content chase requests. The ordinary request length for voice is 4.2 words, and the typical inquiry length for content is 3.2 words. Utilize Structured Data to increment contingent on the substance sort. Work to know and get information on your image. Call focus, live visit and email information is helpful to discover regularly posed inquiries about your item, administration or brand. Utilize various apparatuses for finding the watchwords for voice searchers.

Voice Search Tools

There are numerous apparatuses which helps during the time spent voice looking through like alright google, cortana, alexa, siri.

1. Alright Google

The individuals who need utilize the alright google to look, you can say "alright google" on your Android telephone or tablet to begin voice search. Alright google is a Google item that permits to utilize google search by talking on your Android versatile or Tablet. It helps clients by voice measure, most individuals are utilizing alright google in Android telephones.

2. Cortana

Cortana the administration gave by the microsoft to windows 10, windows 10 for versatile, windows 8.1 where individuals can undoubtedly look through data by utilizing cortana. Cortana can undoubtedly comprehend and perceive the normal voice and offers the responses. As of now cortana is accessible in numerous dialects like French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish etc., in light of the product stage. Cortana is valuable to numerous individuals during the time spent the voice search.

3. Siri

Siri is likewise an instrument which helps in voice search in Apple ios, Watch os, Tv os, Mac os. The element utilizes normal language to addresses the inquiries of the voice look. Siri has become necessary piece of the ios since presenting a component in iPhone 4s and simultaneously siri has become highlight in Apple watch os and television os. Siri is sans hand you can pose inquiries and it give answers to clients effectively.

Improvement Strategies for Voice Search SEO

1. Long Tail Keywords

While I don't believe that short tail watchwords will give results the long tail catchphrases impact the web crawlers. The long tail watchwords or expressions are normally longer can undoubtedly discover for results. we consider the typical statements used as a piece of voice look. We need to focus more consideration than any time in ongoing memory on easy going, long tail watchwords.

2. Give Context

The HTML add-on in the setting encourages the pursuits motors to comprehend the setting of your substance and assists with being in the top in inquiries, you will be more appropriate to explicit ventures or questions you made in voice search.

3. Enhance Your Site's Micro Data

At the point when you perform voice search, clients will by and large allude miniature information, for example, business areas, contact number, cost of the item and so forth, ensure things like bearings to actual areas and XML Sitemaps are exact to visitors and web crawlers on your website. You can offer kindness yourself by giving the data about the sitemap of your site, giving your location and individual data, and furthermore bearings from the primary parkways and interstates.

4. Add Pages that Answers FAQ's

At the point when voice search as an inquiry, they customarily start it with various inquiries like and they're looking for answers that fulfill a speedy need. To answer these requests, make a FAQs page and start each question with these action word modifiers. By then answer them for the most part to draw in voice search.

5. Do Keyword Research on Conversational Queries

Watchword research apparatuses like Rank Tracker (disclaimer: my instrument) will let you auto complete requests using a catchphrase and a unique case. Build the inquiries regarding the FAQs portrayed above and quest for generally required long tail catchphrases to sort out what addresses you need to answer.

6. Use Question Phrases

Consider the numerous inquiries you use in voice search. How might you customarily communicate your inquiry? A significant number of them start with modifiers like who, how, why and so forth, the most google look through beginning with qualifiers as it were. For instance "Who is Abhilash", "Where is nearest gaming zone". As indicated by web index land the 61% of individuals are utilizing the inquiry expressions to discover the arrangements.

7. Be More Mobile Friendly

Portable benevolent is most significant thing in nowadays huge numbers of individuals are generally utilizing mobiles for voice look in this way, the connection among versatile and voice search should resemble Fish and Water, however shouldn't resemble Fish and Fishermen. An examination in that 40% of cell phone proprietors are utilizing voice look for their requests.

Voice Search Is Now Capable of Clarifying and Responding

1. Spelling Corrections/Queries

On the off chance that you request the image from dolphin, at that point you will get back the photos of dolphins. In voice search you should just articulate the sentence obviously, there is no possibility of spelling botches.

2. Recently Said Words/Searched

In the event that you request to google "who is Abhilash" and follow with inquiries "I need to see pictures of him". google gather the data and give list items and show the photos of the Abhilash and his profile information. Then again, if Google can't answer a request, you can assist it with bringing down the right reaction through setting. Thusly, in case you pose that numerous inquiry google and follow up the inquiries and recoveries the past information

3. Setting Based on Location

The setting dependent on the Top 10 Digital Marketing Companies Leeds inquiries are continuous hunts in voice search, huge numbers of them utilizes the voice look for area-based enquiry. The area-based requests are generally done in voice search.

4. Application Based Context

The voice search is useful for application-based setting. In the event that you're visiting about a specific café structure an application then we look for menu data by the assistance of voice search. At that point google voice search assists with finding and give precise data for the clients.

5. Setting You See On Screen

Turning upward in wikipedia about Telangana State Chief Minister KCR, you can ask google by voice search "show me the photos of kcr" and get back CM Kcr photographs, since he's the CM Kcr you presently have on screen.

End

The Main reason for this assist the locales with making their sites as voice search agreeable. A large number of the individuals in the new days they are utilizing cell phone along these lines, the versatile clients principally search by voice search measure. The catchphrases for voice search website design enhancement cycle should be centered accurately.

[dipulb3]

How investigators found a jet engine under Greenland's ice sheet

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/how-investigators-found-a-jet-engine-under-greenlands-ice-sheet/

How investigators found a jet engine under Greenland's ice sheet

The pilots were greeted by a smattering of flashing warning lights, but they did not grasp the scope of the problem until one of the flight attendants made their way to the cockpit, according to report about the incident from French regulators. They brought a phone from one of the passengers, and on it was a photo of the damage to the engine, which was easily visible from passengers’ windows on the right side of the cabin.

The plane, an Airbus A380, which was supposed to be cruising comfortably at 37,000 feet, made an emergency landing in Canada two hours later, and no one was injured. But regulators warned the incident could have played out much differently if debris from the explosion had hit the aircraft instead of plunging to the ground.

The ordeal set French authorities on a years-long mission to find the lost engine pieces and pinpoint the root cause of the problem, requiring investigators to survey miles of terrain made perilous by deep, invisible cracks in Greenland’s ice sheet and the constant threat of polar bear attacks. The endeavor was also hampered by months of inhospitable storms, limited daylight and low visibility. Researchers ultimately found the key piece of debris — the engine’s fan — by accident, when a robot mapping glacial crevasses happened to roll over the spot where it was buried nearly two years after it had fallen from the sky, said Austin Lines, a US-based engineer who aided the recovery effort. It was packed in four meters (or about 12 feet) of snow and ice.

Studying the recovered debris showed the engine wasn’t damaged during maintenance, as investigators initially predicted. Rather, the problem seemed to be linked to weakness in the metal used to create the engine’s giant front fan — indicating what first appeared to be a freak accident may not be an isolated incident, according to a September report from France’s Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, or BEA, which led the investigation. Engine manufacturers have already worked to address the problem, but the BEA is now calling on regulators in the United States and Europe to take a closer look at how aircraft engines are designed, manufactured and certified for flight — hoping more careful scrutiny can root out such defects before they happen.

In-flight engine failures remain extremely rare, according to US and European authorities. But the unexpected conclusions from the BEA’s investigation highlight how an excruciating, 21-month search for a lost engine part was key to understanding how to prevent the same disaster from striking twice.

Searching Greenland’s tundra

The day after the 2017 Air France flight, BEA investigators and representatives from the plane’s and engine’s manufacturers, which included Airbus, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney, gathered at the Canadian airport to survey the plane’s damage.

“It was determined quite early on in the investigation that the recovery of the missing parts and in particular, the fragments of the fan hub, was essential to establish the circumstances and factors explaining this accident,” according to the BEA report.

Investigators pored over data in the aircraft’s flight data recorder — or “black box” — to hash out exactly when the explosion occurred and determined the debris likely landed about 60 miles from Narsarsuaq in the southwest of Greenland. Within days, helicopters were dispatched and investigators scoured the pure white landscape for signs of the large fan. But after one week and three unsuccessful search flights, the terrain was already buried in fresh layers of snow.

With months of harsh winter weather ahead, investigators decided to resume their search the following spring. They would use aircraft equipped with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) — the same type of radar used to create 3D maps of the Earth — that would attempt to search for unseen objects beneath the surface of the ice sheets.

A team of investigators would also join the effort on foot, wielding ground penetrating radar, a device that looks like a lawnmower and is commonly used by archaeologists searching for buried artifacts. They zeroed in on spots that the airborne radars indicated might be the resting place of the engine debris while bracing against the freezing temperatures and dodging large and often hidden cracks in the ice sheets, called crevasses.

But both of those initial efforts failed, in part because the radars weren’t searching deep enough below the icy surface.

With another brutal winter looming, the search was once again put on pause.

Lines told Appradab Business that at one point, investigators dropped a replica of the engine fan into the snow, just to make sure the radars they were using for the search could accurately detect the buried metal. But they couldn’t. And for months, the replica debris was lost, too.

France’s Onera research lab, which was behind the effort to use SAR radar on aircraft to locate the debris, also found the data it collected was too messy — or “noisy” in engineering terms — and the Onera team spent months developing new ways of analyzing the information before finally narrowing down the search field to a handful of possible locations, according to the BEA report.

Lines, who developed a four-wheeled robot called FrostyBoy that’s designed to map crevasses, was tapped by the BEA to help the recovery effort — but the robot ended up being the lynchpin for the entire project. While searching for cracks, the rover’s sensors picked up an abnormal reading, reavealing the robot had — by pure happenstance — rolled over the engine fan’s exact resting place.

“We’re ridiculously lucky that it happened the way it happened,” Lines said of FrostyBoy’s chance detection. It gave his robot, a project he worked on while pursing his PhD at Dartmouth, a small but bizarre claim to fame.

“I don’t think anyone would care that much if a bunch of dudes went out with a robot and didn’t do much with it,” he joked.

Actually retrieving the fan hub fragment, however, presented its own set of problems. It was buried less than 20 feet away from a 13-foot-wide crevasse that could have been hundreds of feet deep, according to BEA documents.

The dig

In June last year, a five-person team, including Lines and a team of Icelandic mountain guides, flew by helicopter to the excavation site. A small dome-shaped tent built to withstand the severe winds sheltered them during their three-day-long excavation effort. At night, they slept with rifles next to their sleeping bags — a precaution for a polar bear attack.

Hidden crevasses posed the constant risk of the ground beneath the crew’s feet caving in, and they used metal rods to check the ice’s depth before trekking onto new territory. An unseen crevasse could have even been hidden underneath the dig site, so they wore harnesses with ropes attaching them to a nearby anchor point as they shoveled snow.

Lines, who had earlier helped dig the engine fan replica out of the ice sheet, was the only member of the five-team recovery crew that had been part of that effort and knew how grueling the work would be.

The first few meters of snow and ice above the engine fan shoveled out easily, but Lines used a chain saw to hack apart the thick, compacted layers of frost further down. The crew carved a ramp into the excavation site so that a sleigh operated by a pulley system could be used to shuttle about 20 metric tons of snow out of the pit.

“We had a lot of sunshine because the sun doesn’t really set [that time of year],” Lines said. “So we just worked through the night, and then went to bed for a few hours and then woke up and just started digging again.”

Finally, on day three, the tips of the engine’s fan blades came into view.

An industrial heater was used to melt ice away from the fan before the makeshift pulley system hauled it out to surface level. In footage of the excavation captured by the team, Lines and the rest of the crew whoop and applaud as a helicopter airlifts the giant fan fragment, which was mangled and slightly warped from the 2017 explosion but still largely intact.

The battered piece of debris later proved crucial in understanding what actually went wrong on the 2017 Air France flight. Investigators determined that it wasn’t a maintenance issue, as previously thought. The engine actually failed because of a phenomenon called “cold dwell fatigue,” which caused the metal in the engine’s fan to fail far sooner than anticipated. Part of the problem could have stemmed from the fact that jet engine designers didn’t fully understand the limits and weaknesses of the type of titanium — called Ti-6-4 — that was used in this engine. The material is also extremely common across the aerospace industry.

In fact, according to the final BEA, report, “the mechanisms at the origin of the initiation of a cold dwell fatigue crack were still not completely understood at the time of the accident and are still not understood today.”

[spamzineglasgow]

SWAT SIGHT: An Interview with Nasim Luczaj

In this interview, Glasgow-based writer, dj and multidisciplinary artist Nasim Luczaj talks to SPAM editor Maria Sledmere about her recent publication, SWAT SIGHT: a hybrid essay and artist’s book that weaves modalities of lyric, photography and online dialogue to explore Luczaj’s experience of aphantasia and its implications for aesthetics, perception and philosophical enquiry.

~

Can you explain what aphantasia is, and how did you discover this was something you experienced?

Aphantasia is the inability to form mental imagery. To have aphantasia is to not be able to ‘see in your head’ – not the characters of a book you are reading, not the faces of your loved ones, not a random object you’ve been asked to visualise, not the sheep you may or may not be counting. It seems there is a spectrum in people’s ability to do any of these things. Roughly, those without it have aphantasia, while those who are extremely good at visualising have hyperphantasia. Most people fall somewhere in between. I get something imagelike appear when I’m falling asleep or really really tired, and once in my life I visualised while reading (about the Quidditch World Cup – I saw Viktor Krum flying about the stadium!)  – but I had a fever at the time and as soon as I noticed what was going on and got excited about it, I was unable to keep the imaging up. I think I mentioned my imageless way of reading to a friend, probably one of the times we were watching a film (again, probably Harry Potter) and she complained that the character doesn’t look like they’re ‘supposed to’. What did they mean, supposed to? I remember talking to them, shocked at how they claimed to have something like a film unfolding in their head. They were as shocked as I was to find that I didn’t have one, especially since I was a full-on bookworm, and they didn’t understand why I’d ever want to read if it wasn’t a filmlike experience (guess what: I was reading for the words!). I accepted these differences and didn’t think too much about which of us was normal, or whether either of us were not. Then, a couple of years ago, another friend discovered the term and asked me whether I have it – reading my work gave her the feeling I might. I started reading and found out what I have is a rare disorder. I’m still not so sure it is. I don’t think the samples studied so far are big enough for us to come to that kind of conclusion.

Maybe a cheeky question, but what does the SWAT in the title stand for?

Swatting sight is partly a play on catching sight. I can’t do justice to what sight is but trust that I’ve caught something, an angle, a thing among many. It’s also a bit like ‘shot’ in ‘screenshot’ (at first the title was actually going to be SIGHT SWAT), but ‘swat’ is more organic, and invokes a kind of slaughtering of something that’s necessary in order to study it.  I wanted a title that sounded nice, compact, yet violent nevertheless, because as I wrote I became aware I was feeling angry at the misjustice being done to people who are called abnormal or disordered without careful consideration. Only writing fully enabled the sensation to emerge out of a plethora of ambivalent strands to my experience. And then the insect-connotations of swatting work nicely with one of the central metaphors I consider in the work, that is, Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box. I guess all of the above considerations, the rational reasons, were hovering somewhere in the background of my choice, but here’s a short and honest answer: it just came to me once I got to the I-need-a-title-stage. And I felt it fit, although – bad pun – I hadn’t seen it coming.

I’m interested in the mode of address that opens SWAT SIGHT, which features a sequence of questions. It’s unclear whether the speaker is speaking to the reader, or having a dialogue with herself. So many times in your poetry I get to a point where I think I know what’s happening, but then a few lines come and totally throw me off my assumptions. It’s poetry that keeps you dancing through metaphysics, for sure. Can you talk a bit about how asking questions of yourself, of the world, of the reader, is a process or form of poetics for you—and perhaps to what end?

I guess I’ve always been inquisitive but have felt increasingly answerless. I love the questioning stage, and the addressal that it often entails, for its own sake. I’ve kind of given up on answers, I don’t trust them, don’t feel as comfortable in them as I do in the mode of questioning. What I want to be expressing, in perhaps every piece I ever write, is roughly: wow, all this exists and we don’t really know anything, or if we do we can’t confirm whether we do or fit it into a whole that would really be the whole thing. Answering has never seemed as doable, as satisfying to me, as asking. The best poems distil the poise of a question. It’s a shame questions are often rashly associated with despair.

You recently graduated with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy (congrats!), which I know included elements of creative writing. What do you see as the relation between the two, and how has each fed or diverged from the other?

I used both to access a kind of metaphysical vertigo of not knowing what the hell’s going on, as explained above. At first I approached the ‘content’ of this vertigo as a philosophical one. I think I’ve been able to address similar things to myself in a ‘creative’ way and in a ‘philosophical’ way, but I no longer believe that the hard work of philosophical answers is worth anything to me personally. I’m chasing a connection with a feeling partly composed of not accepting answers. I believe in attentiveness and possibilities for elaborate playfulness that do arise in philosophy and always appreciate willingness to take on difficult and deep questions. But I cannot feel devoted to this field, while I can be attentive, elaborately playful, and ‘deep’ through writing, I hope. It’s easier to find works of literature of this kind than philosophy that is honest about its inability to actually answer as much as it claims to.

Poetry seems a totally embodied thing for you, ‘a pinch in relation to the tongue’. Where do you see the body in your poems? Does poetry need more body?

I don’t see it anywhere, ha! But I try to be in the moment, and poetry can very much be the art of the moment, the linguistic equivalent of some alarming glimpse. I like how you can – though maybe not always should – read a poem in a short unit of time, one in which you have not yet disconnected from the physical motions that brought you to this page, because you haven’t and will not repeat it in quite the same way as when reading gripping prose. If something odd happens in the language, as I like it to, I want to be there to feel it ‘oddening’ the body, for it to all amount to a flash, an enacting of the gut that leaves space for me to feel all of these effects.

It strikes me that a lot of this book is about the possibilities of attunement, for instance: ‘a sense of the circuit run through / worldly activity’. What poets for you manage to supplement, enhance, expose or skew particular senses?

This is hard for me to answer. I read in quite a scattered way and try not to distinguish much between the senses, to read in undistinguished frenzy and love for what’s going on in the words without categorising what’s happening on a ‘sensual’ level. Without having any synesthetic tendencies whatsoever, I still struggle with things that are grouped into categories: 5 senses and then their subdomains, such as types of taste. I’m more than a little obsessed with how anything is partly something else, how things affect one another in a way that makes it unhelpful to present things as belonging to clear-cut types. So I don’t seem to fall into noticing what’s going on on the level of the 5 separate senses, but yes, some poetry and some work in other art forms have indeed enhanced and skewed and supplemented my perception, I think increasingly. They make me notice a word, an object, an emotion I may have neglected. I’ve recently been excited by Nasser Hussain’s airport poems. Hussain wrote a whole collection (SKY WRI TEI NGS) of poems written using only existing airport codes. I’m pretty sure I’m going to see the airport world through them for years to come. More than for a synesthetic image, that’s what I’m looking out for: works that change the structuring of my experience, that alter noticing, that leave me interested in some phenomenon.

This is probably the first poetry book I’ve seen (outside of SPAM!) that replicates the architectures of Facebook discussion, including groups, comment threads and private messages. Without quibbling over the term ‘post-internet’, what do you think happens when these kinds of archives are translated onto the printed page? I’m interested in your decision to reproduce the discussions as screenshots rather than, say, collage select quotes in a more traditional poem. What’s the importance of including the context, the avatars, the reactions?

The only one? That’s surprising! I remember wanting to write a detective novel in chatroom form as a child, and the reader would only have these online conversations to go by and figure the truth out (one of the messagers was guilty). Now I’m quite dedicated to my phone notes, in which I mainly write down dreams, funny things people say, and passing thoughts (without ever making note of which category a note belongs or who is its author). I proudly show them to people when we’re killing time. As they are one of the ways in which I feedback loop with my surroundings, one of the things that shape my cognition, I always wanted to use them in my work, and knew they belonged in SWAT SIGHT as soon as I decided to write it. Then I started messaging people about the fact I’m writing something and wanted to engage them somehow,  so I ended up embedding what they say in their own words, partly because of how seriously I treat the beetle in the box problem. I thought that maybe you’ll understand what they’re telling me better than what I tell you they told me, even if you don’t know these people as the reader, and I (think!) I do. I’ll give you exactly what they said and what the context of the words were (by context I mean, in large part, the interface that always affects the way they say it), and you can have fun figuring it out or leave it if it’s not your thing. The chats, forums, websites are a habitat I’m in, the form of communication I am immersed in as I do my thinking, the way I arrive at knowledge, arrangements, humour. They have a massive effect on the way my mind and, I presume, your mind works, for better or for worse, and I want to convey that, even if the craft lies in what the disembodied, timeless-y voice has to say and how. As for screenshotting rather than quoting, I’m also really interested in signs I see in the streets and how they operate linguistically, but that’s also something I’d take a picture of and think of including in a text – something I’m rarely tempted to take out and play with without its context, the pole it’s fitted to, the road it’s next to, the weeds that grow at the bottom of it. The way things are framed is partly responsible for their juice. I really want people to communicate about this in whatever way that is natural to them – so giving this much space to the discussion is a way of counterbalancing the strength of the ‘literary’ voice, of saying: it’s equally important to use language in all sorts of other ways and places.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered within the aphantasia ‘community’ online?

Nothing, really. There’s a divide between people who are genuinely upset about not being able to visualise and those who are extremely affirmative of the way they are, but I expected as much.

I’d love to hear more about your decisions around the book’s design. What’s especially unique, of course, is the palimpsest effect whereby text printed on clear acetate is layered over content printed on white pages. As readers, we can lift the acetate with all its textual clutter to ‘cleaner’ pages underneath. I’m struck in particular with the page of Aphantasia Awareness Group content, lifted to reveal a short passage underneath: ‘research on aphantasia is sparse. my looking into it decorated with a pang. […] what keeps me out and makes me look like this is apparently a lack’. Can you talk a bit more about this lack and how it relates to the play between white space, acetate, page and text?

The lack I’m mostly on about here is a lack of seeing – and then of course there’s a play there. On another page, one full of messages, thanks to the lack in the acetate page I can see the text on paper (as ‘i hope for darkness’ in the passage itself). I can tell myself that I’m missing something, that I don’t have an ability, but it’s not like someone cutting the content of a text box – it’s a reshuffling and change of the relationship of everything else that is giving me this different outcome, and to think of myself as ‘deficient’ is not to think about my cognition as play. Quirks are, to an extent, enabling. The form mimics this. Also emptiness can be good, so I wanted places where a condition for arriving at some sentence is the empty space that allows it to be seen. Sometimes I imagine daydreaming as if it were a film, which apparently people do, and I wonder how that would affect my peace of mind, my mental clutter, my voice. You know the truism: less is more. It’s unverifiable what I’d be up to if my mental processes were different, but I have a feeling that I am gifted with a space that could have been cluttered beyond my control.

I’m also interested in how the book’s design goes some way to dramatising Marshall McLuhan’s point about us directing towards acoustic civilisation, as you put it, civilisation ‘infused with simultaneity’. Lifting a page is a bit like opening or closing a window, and the size of the book replicates that sense of screen. Sometimes light catches the plastic acetate and I’m tricked into thinking someone’s left their iPad on my desk. I also think of screening as in brain-scan. What is the work of ‘screening’ in poetry?

I’ve mentioned this already, but what I like about poetry is containment. I often encounter longer poems with confusion and laziness, at first, which ceases if the work is still at the pitch/intensity of a shorter poem, except, hurrah, longer (as is the work of Anne Carson). Good poetry brings me straight into a space of simultaneity. It gets at something that’s both a detail and sort of everything at once. It makes you look at everything like that. Screening is also a kind of framing. You need something brisk to catch and then place just right on the screen, let it replay.

In a message you include to your mum, you write ‘aphantasia is horizontal again but with a margin that makes it a different kind of rectangle’. For me this speaks, quite beautifully, to the book as a whole. What or where is your sense of geometry in writing, and how does this relate to aphantasia and maybe even the structure of the book?

I love flippability. And maybe it’s in poetry that I get to have a sense of order I’m probably lacking elsewhere. But then most poems are like something that intended to be rectangular and then persists in trailing off. Of course there are all sorts of ways of trailing, many of them elegant. Here I wasn’t really writing poems, but a piece that was self-consciously scattered. Intuitively I picked up the shapes, the widths for each part. Maybe I use a similar intuition to drive and park my car – if you asked me, I’m not actually sure how much or what sort of space I have, I can’t see it, but I can do what I have to do just right. The shapes make or dictate themselves in a similar way.

In being orientated landscape, SWAT SIGHT also has the satisfying feel of a guestbook or ledger. Which feels appropriate, given that you include song lyrics, text conversations, comments, quotes and cross-references from philosophy, poetry (even William Blake is in there!) and what looks like Yahoo! Answers. I see SWAT SIGHT as a kind of experimental archive, or revisionist provocation of the-archive-as-such in the time of social media alongside the ‘traditional’ book. I think within this what you’ve done is quite remarkable: established a vernacular compendium of feedback, testimony and reflection on a condition that is not only rarely heard of but seems (at least until very recently) also to lack research or medical recognition. Do you see SWAT SIGHT as a counter-text to this discursive absence? Who should be reading this book?

Yeah, I guess it’s a form of affirmation – I want to encourage conversation about aphantasia in any way possible, and all sorts seem fit. But I need fun. I need to draw attention in some other way than linking to a BBC article on Facebook, which really doesn’t feel like engagement. I guess I’m also implying: I’m engaged with my environment and its diversity of mediums/registers, even of matter (different kinds of pages, B/W and colour images, shots from classic cinema, scans of my clothes and of plants, memes), as I seek to be engaged with people and their diverse ways of functioning. People work in mysterious ways, like poems – they might ‘work’ for you and one could assume that means there’s something similar about you, you could be part of one book. But it turns out you’re doing (even similar) things really really differently. I want to get some kind of rush from that. As for who should read it – whoever also might get a rush from what I give them.

In this discussion around the book’s holding together of analogue and digital, I was reminded of visual snow: a neurological ‘disorder’ characterised by continuous visual disturbance, often described as miniscule dots that flicker like the noise of a detuned analogue telly. It’s interesting how these conditions ‘glitch’ or interrupt the representations of visual perfection or clarity which culture and technology pushes towards with retina displays, Blu-ray etc. I wonder if you’d come across any other under-studied neurological conditions (especially those of the senses) in your research? Are there any famous poets or musicians who’ve ‘come out’ as aphantasic?

No - I guess that’s the problem with the under-studied! There’s Aldous Huxley, whom I quote in the book. My mum is also an aphantasiac poet. It’s more of a thing that visual artists tend to ‘come out’ with, because it can be counterintuitive and shocking. The conversation comes more naturally than in the case of writing, which doesn’t seem necessarily tied to any traditional sense (one kind of archetypical writer is cut off from the sensual world in a dusty study with just enough lamplight to keep to their lines). An interesting example in the visual domain has resurfaced recently, via the BBC. One of Disney’s most important animators had aphantasia, while his collaborator who worked the identical job was on the opposite end of the visualising spectrum.

Is neurodivergent poetics a term you recognise or identify with? Do you think we’re moving towards recognising the role of neuroscience more in understanding poetry as also a kind of cognitive manifestation or aesthetics?

I’ve never looked into it much. What I’ve been coming to terms with is how much of what I’d consider normal might be identified as ‘divergent’ – it’s interesting that different people might have differing tendencies here, some to distinguish differences and others to widen what the norm might be. I am interested in making people pay attention to difference and to question whether there is not so much of it that it collapses back into a kind of sameness. I guess that’s my poetics. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘cognitive aesthetics’, but the term sparked a thought in me: people find very different kinds of poetry (if any) pleasing, and I wonder about the neurological basis of this. How does a combination of words ‘hit the spot’? If language can get to our emotions even when it’s not someone we are closed to addressing themselves to us specifically, it must do so on the basis of connections that will vary from person to person, and are to do with a multitude of factors, maybe even a kind of genetic memory for the ways their ancestors used language. There’s certainly a lot to investigate and, at the same time, a lot that will resist investigation.

I’m struck by the book’s illumined confusion of paratextual, marginalia, annotation, footnotes or poetic content. At the same time, there’s often a lyric voice weaving through, synthesising things, moving between exemplary media, linking anecdote with theory. There’s a drive towards turning the page, even as each page is also a ‘field’ in its own right. So in a sense I’d say SWAT SIGHT is maybe actually a lyric essay remixed with its paratextual materials. An essay that stages its own research process? What’s the value in this ‘transparency’, did any particular text inspire you to take that risk of reflexivity and assemblage?

Yeah, that’s what I’d say it is. I wanted to write a lyric essay and wasn’t sure how to start. As soon as I did, the voice started pushing me. It had a lot to say and I think it still does. To me of course the voice is the most important part, it’s most akin to my ‘core’ that all the rest branches from, is light that my leaves pick up and comes back to the trunk. But as for all the staging – my voice does that. Another thing I wanted to stage was my need for props, my love for images, designs, the ways of working of different websites, which I find inextricable from my lack of ‘invention’. I look at things out there, I get excited about things out there, and what’s going on in my head is either a tic, or something not quite surfaced, or, at best, that voice of the lyric essay. So the book ends up being my mental process and the world that it takes from, that it reacts to, that it is shocked and moved by and tries, in turn, to shock and move (more feedback loop!).

The whole book, of course, is about ‘vision’. I found that line, ‘to have a song stuck in your head, for some reason, is harder to treat as a metaphor than an image being stuck. […] rain on the trees as jewels. I couldn’t, I can’t’, really emotional. Throughout SWAT SIGHT, you recalibrate what ‘imagination’ is --   in both form and content. How can poetry intervene in what we consider ‘sight’, to be less ocular-centric? Do we need new tropes and metaphors, or more a kind of visual refusal?

I love the phrase ‘visual refusal’! It’s right up my street and I don’t think it’s occurred to me before. Poetry brings awareness to language, and so an awareness of the baggage, the loadedness of any word. If sight has to be visual, and we have words like ‘foresight’, that does subtly hint at how we imagine the future. So maybe we can work on other terms. But I think what is best to do is to remind yourself of your other senses and how much it means to you to smell/taste/hear/feel/pull something sensual from the world, categorised or not. If you pay attention to that, you’ll write differently, thus enhancing others’ attention to those things.

But as you put it, ‘no-one’s looked in anyone else’s box. language doesn’t quite do inner life’. We can’t expect SWAT SIGHT to provide an actual snapshot of the aphantasic experience, any more than we can expect reading Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to somehow allow us to comprehensively ‘enter’ an autistic mind. I think the fact that you weave personal perspective alongside many other voices and representations (including an art exhibition) makes that clear. I’m interested, then, in what you might want readers to take away from this book in terms of empathy, awareness but also potentially recalibrating their own neurological sensitivities?

I would like us all to be aware of unnamed, unsaid, unprovable diversity. To approach it as a gift, with childish glee, and to know that it cannot be unwrapped. To ask each other questions and listen in to the way we describe each other’s mental processes, and to be aware of the fact that even when we think we agree or disagree there aren’t ‘samples’ of experience we can put next to each other to confirm or disconfirm anything. Also to be aware of the fact that our culture is skewed towards the visual, that it privileges it partly arbitrarily.

Can you talk about the images you chose for SWAT SIGHT, which include a lovely full-colour photo of you lying on a bed of coastal heather, as well as many representations of abstracted or glitched scenes/textures which must’ve taken a toll on your printer’s black ink cartridge. How do you see the relationship between image and text in this work, and are there any other writers who use images in an interesting way who you might’ve taken inspiration from?

The glitchy toner-heavy images are scanned objects from around my room – a top, a leaf, a headline, a daffodil. I really enjoyed their textures, the kind of nightscape of a piece of fabric that barely stands out of the uniform black. I’d achieve the glitches by moving the objects around while they were being scanned just the right amount, at the right time. I was intentionally confusing the printer but not quite in control either. It was both a hectic and repetitive process. It had in it excitement and tediousness – like writing. The images show the world as processed by a kind of system – a printer – thus running parallel to my verbal processing.

In SWAT SIGHT, the relationship between image and text is of course crucial. At first, I was tempted to completely do away with seeing, adornment – to have a kind of unity between sign and signified. Then I started adding the black scanned images as something along the lines of, but never really, illustrations. As soon as I did that, I started craving contrast and thought, to hell with that, I love the visual world and don’t want to be misunderstood as someone who doesn’t, just because I’m making a kind of cultural critique of vision-centricity. I am engaged in the visual world, and this lack of ‘inner’ will not take it away from me, and it does work for my way of perceiving the world, too. The images dispel inner and outer.

I really like W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs as strange hinges on oneiric texts. They complicate the voice by putting pressure on the distance we make for speaker from author, without ever allowing us to identify that voice with the author.

You also run a radio show for subcity, [underthunder]. Can you talk about the ethos behind the show. How important is music to your writing process, and do you think your experience of music has changed or intensified since you recognise your (visual) aphantasia?

At some point I realised that I love contrasting interactions between tones, mediums, textures. I like profound-grumpy-metaphysical things being read out loud and I also like ‘tribal’ energy. I was once editing a poem while listening to some Detroit techno and it struck me that these two things really fit together, that the words are energised, driven, dipped in densely and magnetically. I became increasingly curious about how best to combine these and whether others do it. I started paying attention to uses of language in electronic music, where words have diverse but recognisable, categorisable roles, but are not what you’d call ‘lyrics’. Now my experience of music is changing and intensifying by the day. This happened partly through that discovery, and so through poetry. I felt that it gave me an entry point into music, because I knew I was good at words and started copy-pasting them into other people’s tracks – otherwise I would never have felt entitled to ‘touch’ music. I always feel a bit guilty when I do that copy-pasting, a tad unsatisfied, hungry for something I’ve made from scratch. I’ve not got there at all yet, but it’s poetry that got me to focus on music in its own right. And my being drawn to poetry must stand in some relationship to aphantasia. I think I’m more at ease with oddness, a kind of casual surrealism, because of it, and that’s what often keeps my work going. When I feel I’ve written something good, it’s always because I’ve flexed the world without some specific message or thing in mind.

You write that ‘bliss’ is ‘a current […] i obsess over’. Your website says you are ‘here to make bliss’. What does bliss mean to you, or better still, what’s giving you bliss right now?

I just love the word. I think I fell in love about two years ago, and I’m not sure how, but it happened to me and my mum more or less simultaneously. She also puts that word everywhere; although I don’t know what’s in anyone’s box, including I think the most similar box to mine in this world, it does feel like a shared entity. Bliss is a short word that echoes out, like most poems – present, compact, extending its arm to everyone. A really small thing giving everything else a hug. And it seems like a half-place, a spacious state, not something like ‘joy’ which is much more identifiable with the springing up of some happy hormone, much more bound up with a person and nothing else. ‘Bliss’ is halfway between ‘joy’ and ‘paradise’. It’s something you can have next to you, or visit, or, as my mum says, ‘plug into’.

What’s giving me bliss now? Apricots, speeding tracks up as I DJ, ferry red.

Anything else you’d like to say about the publication, or what you’re currently working on?

I’m working on how to have a lot of time + space. Then full-blown bliss is gonna move in and we’ll split the bills.

~

SWAT SIGHT is out now. To order a copy, drop an email to nasimluczaj[at]gmail.com. 

Images by Nasim Luczaj and Maria Sledmere, all taken from the publication.

Published 8/9/19

[sheminecrafts]

Brittany Kaiser dumps more evidence of Brexit’s democratic trainwreck

A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation, it was told by both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and the main financial backer of the Leave.EU campaign, the businessman Arron Banks, that Cambridge Analytica did no work for the Leave.EU campaign.

Documents published today by the committee clearly contradict that narrative — revealing internal correspondence about the use of a UKIP dataset to create voter profiles to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU.

They also show CA staff raising concerns about the legality of the plan to model UKIP data to enable Leave.EU to identify and target receptive voters with pro-Brexit messaging.

The UK’s 2016 in-out EU referendum saw the voting public narrowing voting to leave — by 52:48.

New evidence from Brittany Kaiser

The evidence, which includes emails between key Cambridge Analytica, employees of Leave.EU and UKIP, has been submitted to the DCMS committee by Brittany Kaiser — a former director of CA (who you may just have seen occupying a central role in Netflix’s The Great Hack documentary, which digs into links between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign).

We have just published new evidence from Brittany Kaiser relating to Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and Leave EU – you can read them all here @CommonsCMS https://t.co/2LjfJiozO6 #TheGreatHack

— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) July 30, 2019

“As you can see with the evidence… chargeable work was completed for UKIP and Leave.EU, and I have strong reasons to believe that those datasets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Phase 1 payable work engagement… were later used by the Leave.EU campaign without Cambridge Analytica’s further assistance,” writes Kaiser in a covering letter to committee chair, Damian Collins, summarizing the submissions.

Kaiser gave oral evidence to the committee at a public hearing in April last year.

At the time she said CA had been undertaking parallel pitches for Leave.EU and UKIP — as well as for two insurance brands owned by Banks — and had used membership survey data provided by UKIP to built a model for pro-brexit voter personality types, with the intention of it being used “to benefit Leave.EU”.

“We never had a contract with Leave.EU. The contract was with the UK Independence party for the analysis of this data, but it was meant to benefit Leave.EU,” she said then.

The new emails submitted by Kaiser back up her earlier evidence. They also show there was discussion of drawing up a contract between CA, UKIP and Leave.EU in the fall before the referendum vote.

In one email — dated November 10, 2015 — CA’s COO & CFO, Julian Wheatland, writes that: “I had a call with [Leave.EU’s] Andy Wigmore today (Arron’s right hand man) and he confirmed that, even though we haven’t got the contract with the Leave written up, it’s all under control and it will happen just as soon as [UKIP-linked lawyer] Matthew Richardson has finished working out the correct contract structure between UKIP, CA and Leave.”

Another item Kaiser has submitted to the committee is a separate November email from Wigmore, inviting press to a briefing by Leave.EU — entitled “how to win the EU referendum” — an event at which Kaiser gave a pitch on CA’s work. In this email Wigmore describes the firm as “the worlds leading target voter messaging campaigners”.

In another document, CA’s Wheatland is shown in an email thread ahead of that presentation telling Wigmore and Richardson “we need to agree the line in the presentations next week with regards the origin of the data we have analysed”.

“We have generated some interesting findings that we can share in the presentation, but we are certain to be asked where the data came from. Can we declare that we have analysed UKIP membership and survey data?” he then asks.

UKIP’s Richardson replies with a negative, saying: “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest” — adding that he has a meeting with Wigmore to discuss “all of this”, and ending with: “We will have a plan by the end of that lunch, I think”.

In another email, dated November 10, sent to multiple recipients ahead of the presentation, Wheatland writes: “We need to start preparing Brittany’s presentation, which will involve working with some of the insights David [Wilkinson, CA’s chief data scientist] has been able to glean from the UKIP membership data.”

He also asks Wilkinson if he can start to “share insights from the UKIP data” — as well as asking “when are we getting the rest of the data?”. (In a later email, dated November 16, Wilkinson shares plots of modelled data with Kaiser — apparently showing the UKIP data now segmented into four blocks of brexit supporters, which have been named: ‘Eager activist’; ‘Young reformer’; ‘Disaffected Tories’; and ‘Left behinds’.)

In the same email Wheatland instructs Jordanna Zetter, an employee of CA’s parent company SCL, to brief Kaiser on “how to field a variety of questions about CA and our methodology, but also SCL. Rest of the world, SCL Defence etc” — asking her to liaise with other key SCL/CA staff to “produce some ‘line to take’ notes”.

Another document in the bundle appears to show Kaiser’s talking points for the briefing. These make no mention of CA’s intention to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU — merely saying it will conduct “message testing and audience segmentation”.

“We will be working with the campaign’s pollsters and other vendors to compile all the data we have available to us,” is another of the bland talking points Kaiser was instructed to feed to the press.

“Our team of data scientists will conduct deep-dive analysis that will enable us to understand the electorate better than the rival campaigns,” is one more unenlightening line intended for public consumption.

But while CA was preparing to present the UK media with a sanitized false narrative to gloss over the individual voter targeting work it actually intended to carry out for Leave.EU, behind the scenes concerns were being raised about how “national microtargeting” would conflict with UK data protection law.

Another email thread, started November 19, highlights internal discussion about the legality of the plan — with Wheatland sharing “written advice from Queen’s Counsel on the question of how we can legally process data in the UK, specifically UKIP’s data for Leave.eu and also more generally”. (Although Kaiser has not shared the legal advice itself.)

Wilkinson replies to this email with what he couches as “some concerns” regarding shortfalls in the advice, before going into detail on how CA is intending to further process the modelled UKIP data in order to individually microtarget brexit voters — which he suggests would not be legal under UK data protection law “as the identification of these people would constitute personal data”.

He writes:

I have some concerns about what this document says is our “output” – points 22 to 24. Whilst it includes what we have already done on their data (clustering and initial profiling of their members, and providing this to them as summary information), it does not say anything about using the models of the clusters that we create to extrapolate to new individuals and infer their profile. In fact it says that our output does not identify individuals. Thus it says nothing about our microtargeting approach typical in the US, which I believe was something that we wanted to do with leave eu data to identify how each their supporters should be contacted according to their inferred profile.

For example, we wouldn’t be able to show which members are likely to belong to group A and thus should be messaged in this particular way – as the identification of these people would constitute personal data. We could only say “group A typically looks like this summary profile”.

Wilkinson ends by asking for clarification ahead of a looming meeting with Leave.EU, saying: “It would be really useful to have this clarified early on tomorrow, because I was under the impression it would be a large part of our product offering to our UK clients.” [emphasis ours]

Wheatland follows up with a one line email, asking Richardson to “comment on David’s concern” — who then chips into the discussion, saying there’s “some confusion at our end about where this data is coming from and going to”.

He goes on to summarize the “premises” of the advice he says UKIP was given regarding sharing the data with CA (and afterwards the modelled data with Leave.EU, as he implies is the plan) — writing that his understanding is that CA will return: “Analysed Data to UKIP”, and then: “As the Analysed Dataset contains no personal data UKIP are free to give that Analysed Dataset to anyone else to do with what they wish. UKIP will give the Analysed Dataset to Leave.EU”.

“Could you please confirm that the above is correct?” Richardson goes on. “Do I also understand correctly that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on Leave.EU’s legitimately acquired data to infer (interpolate) profiles for each of their supporters so as to better control the messaging that leave.eu sends out to those supporters?

“Is it also correct that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on publicly available data to infer (interpolate) which members of the public are most likely to become Leave.EU supporters and what messages would encourage them to do so?

“If these understandings are not correct please let me know and I will give you a call to discuss this.”

About half an hour later another SCL Group employee, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown, joins the discussion to back up Wilkinson’s legal concerns.

“The [Queen’s Counsel] opinion only seems to be an analysis of the legality of the work we have already done for UKIP, rather than any judgement on whether or not we can do microtargeting. As such, whilst it is helpful to know that we haven’t already broken the law, it doesn’t offer clear guidance on how we can proceed with reference to a larger scope of work,” she writes without apparent alarm at the possibility that the entire campaign plan might be illegal under UK privacy law.

“I haven’t read it in sufficient depth to know whether or not it offers indirect insight into how we could proceed with national microtargeting, which it may do,” she adds — ending by saying she and a colleague will discuss it further “later today”.

It’s not clear whether concerns about the legality of the microtargeting plan derailed the signing of any formal contract between Leave.EU and CA — even though the documents imply data was shared, even if only during the scoping stage of the work.

“The fact remains that chargeable work was done by Cambridge Analytica, at the direction of Leave.EU and UKIP executives, despite a contract never being signed,” writes Kaiser in her cover letter to the committee on this. “Despite having no signed contract, the invoice was still paid, not to Cambridge Analytica but instead paid by Arron Banks to UKIP directly. This payment was then not passed onto Cambridge Analytica for the work completed, as an internal decision in UKIP, as their party was not the beneficiary of the work, but Leave.EU was.”

Kaiser has also shared a presentation of the UKIP survey data, which bears the names of three academics: Harold Clarke, University of Texas at Dallas & University of Essex; Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent; and Paul Whiteley, University of Essex, which details results from the online portion of the membership survey — aka the core dataset CA modelled for targeting Brexit voters with the intention of helping the Leave.EU campaign.

(At a glance, this survey suggests there’s an interesting analysis waiting to be done of the choice of target demographics for the current blitz of campaign message testing ads being run on Facebook by the new (pro-brexit) UK prime minister Boris Johnson and the core UKIP demographic, as revealed by the survey data… )

[gallery ids="1862050,1862051,1862052"]

Call for Leave.EU probe to be reopened

Ian Lucas, MP, a member of the DCMS committee has called for the UK’s Electoral Commission to re-open its investigation into Leave.EU in view of “additional evidence” from Kaiser.

The EC should re-open their investigation into LeaveEU in view of the additional evidence from Brittany Kaiser via @CommonsCMS

— Ian Lucas MP (@IanCLucas) July 30, 2019

We reached out to the Electoral Commission to ask if it will be revisiting the matter.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “We are considering this new information in relation to our role regulating campaigner activity at the EU referendum. This relates to the 10 week period leading up to the referendum and to campaigning activity specifically aimed at persuading people to vote for a particular outcome.

“Last July we did impose significant penalties on Leave.EU for committing multiple offences under electoral law at the EU Referendum, including for submitting an incomplete spending return.”

Last year the Electoral Commission also found that the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits. It channelled money to a Canadian data firm linked to Cambridge Analytica to target political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with a youth-focused Brexit campaign, BeLeave.

Six months ago the UK’s data watchdog also issued fines against Leave.EU and Banks’ insurance company, Eldon Insurance — having found what it dubbed as “serious” breaches of electronic marketing laws, including the campaign using insurance customers’ details to unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages.

A spokeswoman for the ICO told us it does not have a statement on Kaiser’s latest evidence but added that its enforcement team “will be reviewing the documents released by DCMS”.

The regulator has been running a wider enquiry into use of personal data for social media political campaigning. And last year the information commissioner called for an ethical pause on its use — warning that trust in democracy risked being undermined.

And while Facebook has since applied a thin film of ‘political ads’ transparency to its platform (which researches continue to warn is not nearly transparent enough to quantify political use of its ads platform), UK election campaign laws have yet to be updated to take account of the digital firehoses now (il)liberally shaping political debate and public opinion at scale.

It’s now more than three years since the UK’s shock vote to leave the European Union — a vote that has so far delivered three years of divisive political chaos, despatching two prime ministers and derailing politics and policymaking as usual.

Many questions remain over a referendum that continues to be dogged by scandals — from breaches of campaign spending; to breaches of data protection and privacy law; and indeed the use of unregulated social media — principally Facebook’s ad platform — as the willing conduit for distributing racist dogwhistle attack ads and political misinformation to whip up anti-EU sentiment among UK voters.

Dark money, dark ads — and the importing of US style campaign tactics into UK, circumventing election and data protection laws by the digital platform backdoor.

This is why the DCMS committee’s preliminary report last year called on the government to take “urgent action” to “build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system”.

The very same minority government, struggling to hold itself together in the face of Brexit chaos, failed to respond to the committee’s concerns — and has now been replaced by a cadre of the most militant Brexit backers, who are applying their hands to the cheap and plentiful digital campaign levers.

The UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, is demonstrably doubling down on political microtargeting: Appointing no less than Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the official Vote Leave campaign, as a special advisor.

At the same time Johnson’s team is firing out a flotilla of Facebook ads — including ads that appear intended to gather voter sentiment for the purpose of crafting individually targeted political messages for any future election campaign.

So it’s full steam ahead with the Facebook ads…

Yet this ‘democratic reset’ is laid right atop the Brexit trainwreck. It’s coupled to it, in fact.

Cummings worked for the self same Vote Leave campaign that the Electoral Commission found illegally funnelled money — via Cambridge Analytica-linked Canadian data firm AggregateIQ — into a blitz of microtargeted Facebook ads intended to sway voter opinion.

Vote Leave also faced questions over its use of Facebook-run football competition promising a £50M prize-pot to fans in exchange for handing over a bunch of personal data ahead of the referendum, including how they planned to vote. Another data grab wrapped in fancy dress — much like GSR’s thisisyourlife quiz app that provided the foundational dataset for CA’s psychological voter profiling work on the Trump campaign.

The elevating of Cummings to be special adviser to the UK PM represents the polar opposite of an ‘ethical pause’ in political microtargeting.

Make no mistake, this is the Brexit campaign playbook — back in operation, now with full-bore pedal to the metal. (With his hands now on the public purse, Johnson has pledged to spend £100M on marketing to sell a ‘no deal Brexit’ to the UK public.)

Kaiser’s latest evidence may not contain a smoking bomb big enough to blast the issue of data-driven and tech giant-enabled voter manipulation into a mainstream consciousness, where it might have the chance to reset the political conscience of a nation — but it puts more flesh on the bones of how the self-styled ‘bad boys of Brexit’ pulled off their shock win.

In The Great Hack the Brexit campaign is couched as the ‘petri dish’ for the data-fuelled targeting deployed by the firm in the 2016 US presidential election — which delivered a similarly shock victory for Trump.

If that’s so, these latest pieces of evidence imply a suggestively close link between CA’s experimental modelling of UKIP supporter data, as it shifted gears to apply its dark arts closer to home than usual, and the models it subsequently built off of US citizens’ data sucked out of Facebook. And that in turn goes some way to explaining the cosiness between Trump and UKIP founder Nigel Farage…

So Donald Trump wants Nigel Farage on any trade negotiating team?

Maybe this is how #Brexit will end? Not with a bang, not with a cliff edge, but with a great Tory shriek of revulsion?#nodealbrexit #ridge #marr #bbcbh #farage pic.twitter.com/iCn6hd9eka

— carol hedges (@carolJhedges) July 28, 2019

  Kaiser ends her letter to DCMS writing: “Given the enormity of the implications of earlier inaccurate conclusions by different investigations, I would hope that Parliament reconsiders the evidence submitted here in good faith. I hope that these ten documents are helpful to your research and furthering the transparency and truth that your investigations are seeking, and that the people of the UK and EU deserve”.

Banks and Wigmore have responded to the publication in their usual style, with a pair of dismissive tweets — questioning Kaiser’s motives for wanting the data to be published and throwing shade on how the evidence was obtained in the first place.

You mean the professional whistleblower who’s making a career of making stuff up with a book deal and failed Netflix film! The witch-hunt so last season !! https://t.co/f2rsPfoDdT

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) July 30, 2019

Desperate stuff @DamianCollins lol

know one cares – oh and are those emails obtained illegally – computer misuse act – tut tut stolen data, oh the irony https://t.co/BNWxUJmwoQ

— Andy Wigmore (@andywigmore) July 30, 2019

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/315tAbu via IFTTT

[endenogatai]

Brittany Kaiser dumps more evidence of Brexit’s democratic trainwreck

A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation, it was told by both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and the main financial backer of the Leave.EU campaign, the businessman Arron Banks, that Cambridge Analytica did no work for the Leave.EU campaign.

Documents published today by the committee clearly contradict that narrative — revealing internal correspondence about the use of a UKIP dataset to create voter profiles to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU.

They also show CA staff raising concerns about the legality of the plan to model UKIP data to enable Leave.EU to identify and target receptive voters with pro-Brexit messaging.

The UK’s 2016 in-out EU referendum saw the voting public narrowing voting to leave — by 52:48.

New evidence from Brittany Kaiser

The evidence, which includes emails between key Cambridge Analytica, employees of Leave.EU and UKIP, has been submitted to the DCMS committee by Brittany Kaiser — a former director of CA (who you may just have seen occupying a central role in Netflix’s The Great Hack documentary, which digs into links between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign).

We have just published new evidence from Brittany Kaiser relating to Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and Leave EU – you can read them all here @CommonsCMS https://t.co/2LjfJiozO6 #TheGreatHack

— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) July 30, 2019

“As you can see with the evidence… chargeable work was completed for UKIP and Leave.EU, and I have strong reasons to believe that those datasets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Phase 1 payable work engagement… were later used by the Leave.EU campaign without Cambridge Analytica’s further assistance,” writes Kaiser in a covering letter to committee chair, Damian Collins, summarizing the submissions.

Kaiser gave oral evidence to the committee at a public hearing in April last year.

At the time she said CA had been undertaking parallel pitches for Leave.EU and UKIP — as well as for two insurance brands owned by Banks — and had used membership survey data provided by UKIP to built a model for pro-brexit voter personality types, with the intention of it being used “to benefit Leave.EU”.

“We never had a contract with Leave.EU. The contract was with the UK Independence party for the analysis of this data, but it was meant to benefit Leave.EU,” she said then.

The new emails submitted by Kaiser back up her earlier evidence. They also show there was discussion of drawing up a contract between CA, UKIP and Leave.EU in the fall before the referendum vote.

In one email — dated November 10, 2015 — CA’s COO & CFO, Julian Wheatland, writes that: “I had a call with [Leave.EU’s] Andy Wigmore today (Arron’s right hand man) and he confirmed that, even though we haven’t got the contract with the Leave written up, it’s all under control and it will happen just as soon as [UKIP-linked lawyer] Matthew Richardson has finished working out the correct contract structure between UKIP, CA and Leave.”

Another item Kaiser has submitted to the committee is a separate November email from Wigmore, inviting press to a briefing by Leave.EU — entitled “how to win the EU referendum” — an event at which Kaiser gave a pitch on CA’s work. In this email Wigmore describes the firm as “the worlds leading target voter messaging campaigners”.

In another document, CA’s Wheatland is shown in an email thread ahead of that presentation telling Wigmore and Richardson “we need to agree the line in the presentations next week with regards the origin of the data we have analysed”.

“We have generated some interesting findings that we can share in the presentation, but we are certain to be asked where the data came from. Can we declare that we have analysed UKIP membership and survey data?” he then asks.

UKIP’s Richardson replies with a negative, saying: “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest” — adding that he has a meeting with Wigmore to discuss “all of this”, and ending with: “We will have a plan by the end of that lunch, I think”.

In another email, dated November 10, sent to multiple recipients ahead of the presentation, Wheatland writes: “We need to start preparing Brittany’s presentation, which will involve working with some of the insights David [Wilkinson, CA’s chief data scientist] has been able to glean from the UKIP membership data.”

He also asks Wilkinson if he can start to “share insights from the UKIP data” — as well as asking “when are we getting the rest of the data?”. (In a later email, dated November 16, Wilkinson shares plots of modelled data with Kaiser — apparently showing the UKIP data now segmented into four blocks of brexit supporters, which have been named: ‘Eager activist’; ‘Young reformer’; ‘Disaffected Tories’; and ‘Left behinds’.)

In the same email Wheatland instructs Jordanna Zetter, an employee of CA’s parent company SCL, to brief Kaiser on “how to field a variety of questions about CA and our methodology, but also SCL. Rest of the world, SCL Defence etc” — asking her to liaise with other key SCL/CA staff to “produce some ‘line to take’ notes”.

Another document in the bundle appears to show Kaiser’s talking points for the briefing. These make no mention of CA’s intention to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU — merely saying it will conduct “message testing and audience segmentation”.

“We will be working with the campaign’s pollsters and other vendors to compile all the data we have available to us,” is another of the bland talking points Kaiser was instructed to feed to the press.

“Our team of data scientists will conduct deep-dive analysis that will enable us to understand the electorate better than the rival campaigns,” is one more unenlightening line intended for public consumption.

But while CA was preparing to present the UK media with a sanitized false narrative to gloss over the individual voter targeting work it actually intended to carry out for Leave.EU, behind the scenes concerns were being raised about how “national microtargeting” would conflict with UK data protection law.

Another email thread, started November 19, highlights internal discussion about the legality of the plan — with Wheatland sharing “written advice from Queen’s Counsel on the question of how we can legally process data in the UK, specifically UKIP’s data for Leave.eu and also more generally”. (Although Kaiser has not shared the legal advice itself.)

Wilkinson replies to this email with what he couches as “some concerns” regarding shortfalls in the advice, before going into detail on how CA is intending to further process the modelled UKIP data in order to individually microtarget brexit voters — which he suggests would not be legal under UK data protection law “as the identification of these people would constitute personal data”.

He writes:

I have some concerns about what this document says is our “output” – points 22 to 24. Whilst it includes what we have already done on their data (clustering and initial profiling of their members, and providing this to them as summary information), it does not say anything about using the models of the clusters that we create to extrapolate to new individuals and infer their profile. In fact it says that our output does not identify individuals. Thus it says nothing about our microtargeting approach typical in the US, which I believe was something that we wanted to do with leave eu data to identify how each their supporters should be contacted according to their inferred profile.

For example, we wouldn’t be able to show which members are likely to belong to group A and thus should be messaged in this particular way – as the identification of these people would constitute personal data. We could only say “group A typically looks like this summary profile”.

Wilkinson ends by asking for clarification ahead of a looming meeting with Leave.EU, saying: “It would be really useful to have this clarified early on tomorrow, because I was under the impression it would be a large part of our product offering to our UK clients.” [emphasis ours]

Wheatland follows up with a one line email, asking Richardson to “comment on David’s concern” — who then chips into the discussion, saying there’s “some confusion at our end about where this data is coming from and going to”.

He goes on to summarize the “premises” of the advice he says UKIP was given regarding sharing the data with CA (and afterwards the modelled data with Leave.EU, as he implies is the plan) — writing that his understanding is that CA will return: “Analysed Data to UKIP”, and then: “As the Analysed Dataset contains no personal data UKIP are free to give that Analysed Dataset to anyone else to do with what they wish. UKIP will give the Analysed Dataset to Leave.EU”.

“Could you please confirm that the above is correct?” Richardson goes on. “Do I also understand correctly that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on Leave.EU’s legitimately acquired data to infer (interpolate) profiles for each of their supporters so as to better control the messaging that leave.eu sends out to those supporters?

“Is it also correct that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on publicly available data to infer (interpolate) which members of the public are most likely to become Leave.EU supporters and what messages would encourage them to do so?

“If these understandings are not correct please let me know and I will give you a call to discuss this.”

About half an hour later another SCL Group employee, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown, joins the discussion to back up Wilkinson’s legal concerns.

“The [Queen’s Counsel] opinion only seems to be an analysis of the legality of the work we have already done for UKIP, rather than any judgement on whether or not we can do microtargeting. As such, whilst it is helpful to know that we haven’t already broken the law, it doesn’t offer clear guidance on how we can proceed with reference to a larger scope of work,” she writes without apparent alarm at the possibility that the entire campaign plan might be illegal under UK privacy law.

“I haven’t read it in sufficient depth to know whether or not it offers indirect insight into how we could proceed with national microtargeting, which it may do,” she adds — ending by saying she and a colleague will discuss it further “later today”.

It’s not clear whether concerns about the legality of the microtargeting plan derailed the signing of any formal contract between Leave.EU and CA — even though the documents imply data was shared, even if only during the scoping stage of the work.

“The fact remains that chargeable work was done by Cambridge Analytica, at the direction of Leave.EU and UKIP executives, despite a contract never being signed,” writes Kaiser in her cover letter to the committee on this. “Despite having no signed contract, the invoice was still paid, not to Cambridge Analytica but instead paid by Arron Banks to UKIP directly. This payment was then not passed onto Cambridge Analytica for the work completed, as an internal decision in UKIP, as their party was not the beneficiary of the work, but Leave.EU was.”

Kaiser has also shared a presentation of the UKIP survey data, which bears the names of three academics: Harold Clarke, University of Texas at Dallas & University of Essex; Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent; and Paul Whiteley, University of Essex, which details results from the online portion of the membership survey — aka the core dataset CA modelled for targeting Brexit voters with the intention of helping the Leave.EU campaign.

(At a glance, this survey suggests there’s an interesting analysis waiting to be done of the choice of target demographics for the current blitz of campaign message testing ads being run on Facebook by the new (pro-brexit) UK prime minister Boris Johnson and the core UKIP demographic, as revealed by the survey data… )

[gallery ids="1862050,1862051,1862052"]

Call for Leave.EU probe to be reopened

Ian Lucas, MP, a member of the DCMS committee has called for the UK’s Electoral Commission to re-open its investigation into Leave.EU in view of “additional evidence” from Kaiser.

The EC should re-open their investigation into LeaveEU in view of the additional evidence from Brittany Kaiser via @CommonsCMS

— Ian Lucas MP (@IanCLucas) July 30, 2019

We reached out to the Electoral Commission to ask if it will be revisiting the matter.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “We are considering this new information in relation to our role regulating campaigner activity at the EU referendum. This relates to the 10 week period leading up to the referendum and to campaigning activity specifically aimed at persuading people to vote for a particular outcome.

“Last July we did impose significant penalties on Leave.EU for committing multiple offences under electoral law at the EU Referendum, including for submitting an incomplete spending return.”

Last year the Electoral Commission also found that the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits. It channelled money to a Canadian data firm linked to Cambridge Analytica to target political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with a youth-focused Brexit campaign, BeLeave.

Six months ago the UK’s data watchdog also issued fines against Leave.EU and Banks’ insurance company, Eldon Insurance — having found what it dubbed as “serious” breaches of electronic marketing laws, including the campaign using insurance customers’ details to unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages.

A spokeswoman for the ICO told us it does not have a statement on Kaiser’s latest evidence but added that its enforcement team “will be reviewing the documents released by DCMS”.

The regulator has been running a wider enquiry into use of personal data for social media political campaigning. And last year the information commissioner called for an ethical pause on its use — warning that trust in democracy risked being undermined.

And while Facebook has since applied a thin film of ‘political ads’ transparency to its platform (which researches continue to warn is not nearly transparent enough to quantify political use of its ads platform), UK election campaign laws have yet to be updated to take account of the digital firehoses now (il)liberally shaping political debate and public opinion at scale.

It’s now more than three years since the UK’s shock vote to leave the European Union — a vote that has so far delivered three years of divisive political chaos, despatching two prime ministers and derailing politics and policymaking as usual.

Many questions remain over a referendum that continues to be dogged by scandals — from breaches of campaign spending; to breaches of data protection and privacy law; and indeed the use of unregulated social media — principally Facebook’s ad platform — as the willing conduit for distributing racist dogwhistle attack ads and political misinformation to whip up anti-EU sentiment among UK voters.

Dark money, dark ads — and the importing of US style campaign tactics into UK, circumventing election and data protection laws by the digital platform backdoor.

This is why the DCMS committee’s preliminary report last year called on the government to take “urgent action” to “build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system”.

The very same minority government, struggling to hold itself together in the face of Brexit chaos, failed to respond to the committee’s concerns — and has now been replaced by a cadre of the most militant Brexit backers, who are applying their hands to the cheap and plentiful digital campaign levers.

The UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, is demonstrably doubling down on political microtargeting: Appointing no less than Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the official Vote Leave campaign, as a special advisor.

At the same time Johnson’s team is firing out a flotilla of Facebook ads — including ads that appear intended to gather voter sentiment for the purpose of crafting individually targeted political messages for any future election campaign.

So it’s full steam ahead with the Facebook ads…

Yet this ‘democratic reset’ is laid right atop the Brexit trainwreck. It’s coupled to it, in fact.

Cummings worked for the self same Vote Leave campaign that the Electoral Commission found illegally funnelled money — via Cambridge Analytica-linked Canadian data firm AggregateIQ — into a blitz of microtargeted Facebook ads intended to sway voter opinion.

Vote Leave also faced questions over its use of Facebook-run football competition promising a £50M prize-pot to fans in exchange for handing over a bunch of personal data ahead of the referendum, including how they planned to vote. Another data grab wrapped in fancy dress — much like GSR’s thisisyourlife quiz app that provided the foundational dataset for CA’s psychological voter profiling work on the Trump campaign.

The elevating of Cummings to be special adviser to the UK PM represents the polar opposite of an ‘ethical pause’ in political microtargeting.

Make no mistake, this is the Brexit campaign playbook — back in operation, now with full-bore pedal to the metal. (With his hands now on the public purse, Johnson has pledged to spend £100M on marketing to sell a ‘no deal Brexit’ to the UK public.)

Kaiser’s latest evidence may not contain a smoking bomb big enough to blast the issue of data-driven and tech giant-enabled voter manipulation into a mainstream consciousness, where it might have the chance to reset the political conscience of a nation — but it puts more flesh on the bones of how the self-styled ‘bad boys of Brexit’ pulled off their shock win.

In The Great Hack the Brexit campaign is couched as the ‘petri dish’ for the data-fuelled targeting deployed by the firm in the 2016 US presidential election — which delivered a similarly shock victory for Trump.

If that’s so, these latest pieces of evidence imply a suggestively close link between CA’s experimental modelling of UKIP supporter data, as it shifted gears to apply its dark arts closer to home than usual, and the models it subsequently built off of US citizens’ data sucked out of Facebook. And that in turn goes some way to explaining the cosiness between Trump and UKIP founder Nigel Farage…

So Donald Trump wants Nigel Farage on any trade negotiating team?

Maybe this is how #Brexit will end? Not with a bang, not with a cliff edge, but with a great Tory shriek of revulsion?#nodealbrexit #ridge #marr #bbcbh #farage pic.twitter.com/iCn6hd9eka

— carol hedges (@carolJhedges) July 28, 2019

  Kaiser ends her letter to DCMS writing: “Given the enormity of the implications of earlier inaccurate conclusions by different investigations, I would hope that Parliament reconsiders the evidence submitted here in good faith. I hope that these ten documents are helpful to your research and furthering the transparency and truth that your investigations are seeking, and that the people of the UK and EU deserve”.

Banks and Wigmore have responded to the publication in their usual style, with a pair of dismissive tweets — questioning Kaiser’s motives for wanting the data to be published and throwing shade on how the evidence was obtained in the first place.

You mean the professional whistleblower who’s making a career of making stuff up with a book deal and failed Netflix film! The witch-hunt so last season !! https://t.co/f2rsPfoDdT

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) July 30, 2019

Desperate stuff @DamianCollins lol

know one cares – oh and are those emails obtained illegally – computer misuse act – tut tut stolen data, oh the irony https://t.co/BNWxUJmwoQ

— Andy Wigmore (@andywigmore) July 30, 2019

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/315tAbu via IFTTT

[chocmarss]

Abundant of Denial

Summary: “I was simply pointing out how you don’t usually expose about yourself in front of strangers.”

“I don’t.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of, as you see,” Ulaz continued, and his light tone made Keith tense more. “The Blade doesn’t forbid relationships.”

-

Keith couldn’t escape the type of interrogation the members of the Blade would give him even if he wanted to, especially if this had to do with his lack of personal life.

voltron. sheith. bom!keith. T (ao3)

Sequel to this

“You admire him.”

Such words had been the last thing Keith thought would come out of Ulaz’s mouth, and it took all of his training to not square his shoulders out of surprise as he glanced at the Galra beside him, who kept his eyes on the same scene they had been watching for the past few doboshes. “Who?”

The corners of his lips curled up at Keith’s tentative enquiry. “It shows,” Ulaz continued lowly, and Keith heard a body being slammed on the ground rather than seeing it, followed by breathless laughter. “When you stand beside him.”

The subtlest incline of his head made Keith follow his line of sight out of curiosity, before steel grey flashed with mirth while a hand was offered towards the Blue Paladin, who clasped it tightly before he was hauled up to his feet with similar grins on their faces.

Keith made sure his expression was arranged into something more stoic when he replied, “I try to follow what was required as a team when we train on the field, following his orders was one of it.”

Deflection was an efficient shield when needed to be used, and he thought it would work on most people.

Most people. Unfortunately, it didn’t include one of the highest members of the organisation.

“A wise choice,” the smallest hint of amusement in his tone made Keith shift his weight onto one foot. “As it should be. It would make an advantage for you and Voltron when the time comes.”

Keith knew that idle talk didn’t exist, as much as the prospect of a joke had hardly ever been indicated between the both of them for the whole time Keith grew up at the main base. This included the fact that Ulaz had barely been there in the first place.

The sentence itself was odd, and the situation of such encounters was making Keith feel borderline squeamish.

“Of course,” he replied slowly, and Ulaz merely shifted his gaze on Keith with the apathy of someone who knew more than they liked to reveal.

It was daunting, almost setting him on edge like all those times when he was assigned to wait for the other members from Zarkon’s commander ship to send a feedback to their base, to keep them updated of his latest actions.

“Seeing your own kind has only been so recent made you immediately latch onto one of them,” Ulaz stated, and Keith felt the way warmth crept up his neck while he didn’t break his gaze away from the Galra. “The gesture holds some endearment in it.”

The suit provided enough cover for his pale skin, and Keith tried to deal with the growing embarrassment squirming inside his very being at the statement. “That sort of,” he paused, thinning his lips as he intently focused on the mat, where Shiro was going through the basics of self-defence with Hunk. “Camaraderie, is expected the moment I became the Red Paladin. Especially when I finally found the same type of species that shows half of my heritage.”

Keith was one of the few things that had been shown on the small tablet his mother left with him in the pod. Human and Earth was the other two that described the way he looked from the Galra, where he had been too small of a baby with bright and hairless skin when the members took him in; a single child without parents to care him for.

He would have passed up as an Altean if they smeared some paint onto him and made his hair hide the blunt curve of his ears, but they knew the creature his mother mated with existed somewhere far beyond the galaxies that some didn’t know existed.

“Of course,” Ulaz echoed his words. “I was simply pointing out how you don’t usually expose about yourself in front of strangers.”

“I don’t.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of, as you see,” Ulaz continued, and his light tone made Keith tense more. “The Blade doesn’t forbid relationships.”

“As comrades, I’m fully aware,” Keith remarked quickly, feeling as if the heating system of the castle was fused to his skin and was cranked up to several degrees. Then, he glanced at Ulaz again. “Why are you bringing this up?”

His ear flicked away the accusation. “Can’t I be curious of things?”

“To the point of misinterpreting it?”

Ulaz hummed shortly. “This bothers you.”

“You don’t usually come to stand beside me to gossip,” Keith said airily. “especially if it doesn’t give you any sort of benefit.”

“Of course it does,” Ulaz responded easily, causing Keith to stare at him in mild disbelief. “The excitement of confirming what I’ve seen with my own eyes is one, and that the simple pettiness that comes with it can be rather satisfying, especially when you want to take a rest from all the work you’ve gone through.”

Keith couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This had to be some sort of trick, or else, Ulaz wouldn’t have the ease of sprouting baffling sentences that Keith usually heard between teenagers of various species every time they had to land on planets to buy some spare parts for their ships, where the markets they went to would hold certain youth that could be considered as his age.

“And,” Ulaz continued in a lower tone. “You know how I’ve made acquaintance with him before, when I was stationed as his medic. I had to observe him under close care, and I found out he has the heart of someone who will try to see good despite being in unfortunate circumstances. I haven’t seen such hope that exists in a creature for a long time, especially when it comes to carrying the title of Champion.”

They watched the way Hunk landed a punch onto Shiro’s shoulder before kicking the back of his legs, but Shiro was faster, and used the outstretched arm as base to flip himself over. Ulaz gave a single nod absentmindedly. “Choosing Shiro as the Black Paladin had been a wise choice.”

Of course, Keith saw how Shiro gave advice to his teammates, how he handled every situation barged into them with grace, how he tried to straightened the quarrel between the Princess and the rest of Galra at the very beginning. Keith knew a good leader when he saw one, and it showed whenever Shiro took over.

There would be some days when Keith would have a glimpse of him during the long nights of plan making. At those times, the mightiest of Shiro’s determination had already mellowed down for the night, allowing Keith to see the raw exhaustion underneath; the type of tiredness that stuck on him after being in the arena, one that could easily be morphed into something terrible if treated the wrong way.

His gentle soul prevented that from happening though, encased in its titanium cage from being set free.

Keith found himself looking at how Shiro was pulling back most of his hits as he opted for defense, and it took swift planning before Hunk found his back on the mat as well.

“Okay,” he grunted out. “You got me. Man down.”

Shiro chuckled, straightening his spine. “One more try, and then we’re done.”

“Fine,” Hunk groaned as he stood up, adjusting the band he wore. “One more. And then, it’s Keith turn.”

Keith raised an eyebrow when his new teammates looked at him expectantly.

“Oh, yeah,” Pidge cut in from where she was leaning against the wall, just a few feet away from him. “We haven’t seen you two spar yet, which something that we always do between Paladins as a bonding moment and to strengthen our defences.”

“Getting my ass kicked is not a ‘bonding moment’,” Lance snorted. Then, he grinned. “But, everyone should get a turn in feeling just how hard the mat is.”

Fascinating.

Keith shared a look with Ulaz, who merely lifted an eyebrow at him as a challenge of his own.

Well? How about it?

Keith was on his own in this. It said so by the way Shiro himself was standing in the middle of the clearing with a small twist of his lips, waiting patiently with an easiness that seemed to hum around him. Keith only sent Ulaz an annoyed twitch of his nose, who let out a huff of a chuckle when Keith slowly made his way towards the Black Paladin.

“I’d like to see your hand-to-hand combat, if you don’t mind,” Shiro addressed him with a roll of his shoulders, and Keith stopped a few feet away as he faced the man. “Three strikes. Who goes down last, wins.”

Keith simply shifted into a stance instead of answering, bracing his feet against the floor.

Shiro’s smile only grew a bit wider. “Alright.”

They didn’t move an inch for the next few seconds, taking their time in assessing their component and the situation beforehand. It wasn’t until Keith felt the tingle of restlessness crawl up his spine that he began the first strike forward.

To say the least, when Keith’s shoulder blades collided with the mat after struggling to get the upper hand of the situation, he could hear Ulaz preening from his place.

Defending his dignity was pointing out that Shiro had his two strikes as well, but Keith wasn’t going to make himself whine at the taste of defeat as both of them swallowed in deep breaths.

Blink. Keith looked up, seeing bright grey.

Blink. The ceiling was in his line of sight now.

Blink. Keith turned his head towards where Shiro towered over him, rubbing the back of his neck before offering his hand. “You okay down there?”

Blink. And whatever loose was hidden to prevent anyone from noticing.

“Yeah.” Keith managed, clasping their hands together before he was hauled up.

Thankfully, Ulaz didn’t say anything about his supposed discovery to anyone else.

Keith was hoping it would stay that way until the end of time.

“Is there anything else?” Antok rumbled from beside him, where both of them stood in front of the screen after Thace kept them updated through the Blade’s main base. Kolivan wasn’t able to join them as he was still in deep discussion with the rest by the bridge of the Castle of Lions, the hologram of the commander ship still floating in the centre of the round table.

“For now,” Thace murmured, glancing at the shut door. “They’re becoming anxious, and Haggar tightened the security by adding more sentries to scout for any trouble. And it appears that every commander was given a druid for safety reasons, or so they say.” He furrowed his brows. “Communicating with the base would be difficult.”

“They’re beginning to suspect something,” Keith spoke out, arms loosely wrapped around his middle. “After what you told us, they’re probably trying to leach you out.”

“I know, and I’m doing everything I can to avoid that,” Thace responded wearily. “As it is, I can’t have a peace of mind without one of them breathing over my shoulder.”

It was worrying, whatever extra intel that might be vital to the plan wouldn’t be able to get through, and that witch would give an excuse to make Thace suffer for the treachery he committed towards the Empire and the emperor himself.

“Have faith, and we will get this through.” Then, Antok used his hip to lean against the dashboard, and it took Keith a second too late to realise the error before Antok continued with complete casualty, “On a lighter note, Keith found a potential mate.”

Pitifully, the force of Keith’s glare wasn’t enough to stab through his armour.

Thace blinked at them in surprise, before focusing his attention onto Keith alone. “Already?”

Antok snorted. “You make it sound as if he’s still a cub.”

“I’m a little surprised, is all,” Thace responded, the twinkle in his eyes bright. “Because he was the one who insisted he didn’t need anyone to bond with in his life. When he was younger, he told me it’d be better to die alone as to prevent trouble.”

“Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not standing here.” Keith sighed.

“Who is it?”

“The Black Paladin himself,” Antok informed him with a chuckle, his tail flicking lazily behind him. “There might be a possible ceremonial act between the both of them once all of this ends. Sooner, if they’re impatient.”

“Don’t make it too big,” Thace advised, glancing at the door again, before shooting Keith a toothy smile. “Because everyone in the universe would want to see it, and most of us aren’t exposed to rowdy environments without having the need to be irritated at them, including yourself.”

Us, as in the Blade itself. The thought made Keith groan internally.

“Did Ulaz pull you into this?” he demanded, rubbing the side of his face to get rid of the embarrassed flush. Stupid pale human skin. “Making lies out of me as if we don’t have anything else better to do?”

They had the audacity to ignore him. “Ulaz knows?”

“Before I did.” Antok agreed.

“Of course he would,” Thace muttered, and that only caused Antok to let out a bark of laughter. “He thinks he’s being subtle in everything, but he won’t be able to keep his excitement in even if his life depended.”

“Don’t insult your elders like that.”

Something beeped at the other end of the line, and Thace immediately turned somber as he began tapping on the board. “I’ll have to leave, the druids are already asking for me.”

Antok nodded, straightening his posture. “Call for us if anything happens.”

“I will.” Thace gave one last crooked smile towards Keith. “Send my regards to your mate.”

“He’s not my-”

Thace was already gone, and Keith was left staring at the blank screen to pick up the last of his annoyance.

A large hand clasped on his back, and he lifted his gaze towards where Antok stood beside him, no doubt soaking up his disbelief under the mask. “Why do you deny what you have?”

“Because there’s nothing between us in the first place,” Keith insisted, scowling as he stepped aside to let the hand fall. “And yet, all of you keep saying as if there is.”

“We’re only observing what we see,” Antok didn’t seem perturbed with the gesture and only shrugged one shoulder. “And sharing what we’ve picked up when given the chance is something common between all of us, even you know this.”

“I’m not some experiment that needs to be poked every time you see some changes.” Keith replied flatly.

“It’s normal to tease, Keith,” Antok chortled, ruffling his hair that caused the younger member of the Blade to frown deeper. “And it’s normal to be teased. While being in that position is hardly tolerable, I’m sure, but it will ease some of the pressure away when loosing up.”

Keith patted his hair down. “I’ll stick to sparring, thanks.”

Then, the screen showed an upcoming call from the castle, and Antok began reaching over to answer. “They’re probably done.”

It was Shiro who greeted them, giving both members a wry smile. “Am I interrupting?”

“Not at all,” Antok answered. “We were discussing about Keith’s revelation, that’s all.”

Said person bristled slightly. “No, we weren’t.”

Shiro’s eyes flickered between them; suspicious and curious at the same time. But, he dismissed it quickly to address them both, “Kolivan wants you here. We’ll be needing your input in this discussion if we’re going to continue our plan, and if Thace had told you anything that needed to be added or changed.”

“Some, and it’s important.” Keith raked his fingers through his hair, realising dimly he hadn’t been wearing the mask and cowl as much as he used to do. “What we know for sure is that it’s not good news, we might want to be careful the moment we began.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll be able to handle it,” Shiro assured, giving him another smile of his. Unable to help it, Keith answered back with a smaller one of his own. “Now that with your help, we’ll be able to do this properly and quickly. And if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to avoid minimal damage.”

Keith raised an eyebrow. “Minimal damage doesn’t exists when we’re dealing with Zarkon. To him, it’s either all or nothing.”

Shiro hummed in consideration. “Sounds obnoxious. Probably had something to do with the fact he conquered most of the universe for ten thousand years.”

“Apparently.”

Chuckling under his breath, Shiro shook his head. “We’ll see you later.” Then, he nodded at the large Galra. “Antok.”

“Shiro.” The unconcealed amusement made Keith wince, but Shiro didn’t notice before he gave a small wave and signed off.

Then, Antok faced Keith. “You forgot I was here for a tick.”

Keith merely turned his heel and began his way out, not caring whether or not Antok was following him. “Kolivan is waiting, and Red and I would leave you if you don’t keep up.”

“Avoiding this is futile.” Antok called out, and Keith hastened on his steps when there was another rumble of laughter drifting towards him.

Sleep was particularly non-existent nowadays.

What helped Keith from falling face first into the floor was the beverage Pidge had introduced as ‘coffee’; or what was similar of it to what they have on Earth, she had told him monotonously. She dragged her feet across the floor to get to the pot, glasses on top of her head while dark circles dragged below her eyes. Something to make him scourge through the night without having a ton of rocks hanging onto his shoulders, she said.

He squinted at the dark green sludge, and she merely waved away his skepticism while commenting how ‘it works.’

Before adding, “Just don’t drink too much and you’ll be fine.”

He didn’t know how long he stared at the bottom of his cup without blinking.

The doors slid open with a loud sigh, and Keith jumped a foot in the air as he fumbled with his empty cup, only to see Shiro walk in.

Surprisingly, he looked relatively decent after a whole night of dissecting and putting back their plan, going through the minor details again and again that Keith could memorised the whole thing in his sleep. Shiro still wore his Paladin armour, the white and black shell gleaming the slightest bit under the blue lights of the kitchen castle as he made his way towards the pot as well.

Keith blinked when Shiro caught his eye, and paused near the counter. “Keith? You alright there, buddy?”

Shrugging, Keith carefully set his cup onto the island, fingers shaking slightly. “I probably drank that coffee a bit too much.”

Chuckling slightly, Shiro took out one of the  cups from the cabinet, making his fill of that concoction while Keith merely watched tendrils of smoke wafting up blankly. “How many cups?”

“Three,” Keith answered without missing a beat, not dragging his gaze away until Shiro set the pot back in its place. He gave a shrug when Shiro raised his eyebrows. “Four. Dunno. I lost count.”

“Wow,” Shiro responded with a crooked smile, taking a sip. “How do you feel?”

“Okay,” Keith crouched down to pull the dishwasher a little too roughly, wincing when the other used dishes clattered together in protest. He set his cup inside, squeezed between two bowls, before he pushed it close again. Gentler this time. “I guess. I feel a bit tingly.”

“Like you could jump around the moon?”

“Moons.” Keith agreed with a nod, but remembered he was still hidden from sight before bounding up to meet Shiro’s gaze, where the man was laughing quietly with his eyes despite not saying anything. Keith felt his cheeks reddening from his actions. “I mean, I haven’t drank anything this, uh,” he cleared his throat. “energetic, since trying one of Antok’s drinks by the base. It’s nice and burns down your throat when you take a sip and- I don’t mind, of course-”

He stopped himself, flushing harder. “I’m sorry.”

Shiro shook his head. “No harm done, it sounds nice to hear something else other than the words ‘commander ship’ or wanting to shoot anyone.” He swirled the contents of the cup around. “Good thing about this is that it’s sweet in its natural form and not bitter like we have on Earth. So, I kinda understand why you drank four cups in one go.”

Keith braced himself against the island, trying to make himself comfortable. “People drink it bitter?”

“Oh yeah, you’ll be surprised at how they get addicted to it.” Shiro snickered into his cup. “I know I did.”

Keith wrinkled his nose. “Sounds gross.”

“You’ll get used to it, and you’ll prefer it bitter the moment you do.”

“It still sounds gross.”

Shiro shrugged idly. “The things you do to make sure you don’t get screamed at.”

Keith was still processing the words when the doors opened again, where both Kolivan and Allura were talking in hushed tones as they walked in with ducked heads, no doubt still discussing about their earlier conversation.

Straightening up in Leader’s presence was habitual the moment Keith learned the definition of respect, and it was easy to lock himself into that despite having the urge to tap his finger against the surface of the island out of pure restlessness that buzzed in his system.

Like him, Shiro didn’t disturb their private conversation as he took another sip, one eyebrow arched at Keith.

Allura noticed the paladins first, and smiled tiredly in greeting. “I’m guessing sleeping isn’t working for you too?”

“Not particularly.” Shiro answered, lifting his cup slightly when Kolivan pulled his attention towards them as well. “There’s still more of this, it’ll keep you up for the day if you don’t feel like sleeping any time soon.”

“From the way Keith can’t stop moving,” Kolivan began dryly. “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

It took Keith a moment to realise that his fingers had found themselves fiddling with the knife by his waist, the unmistakable sound of the blade being pulled in and out of its sheath was cut off abruptly the moment he froze. Three pairs of eyes watched the way he winced, and he slowly slid back the blade into its casing. “Sorry.”

When he met Kolivan’s eyes, there was something odd about the way he was looking at him, and the adrenaline rush in his veins wasn’t helping Keith in making sure he stayed perfectly still under his Leader’s careful observation. Then, his eyes shifted towards where Shiro was talking to Allura, before going back to Keith again with a slight furrow of his brow.

It all clicked at once.

Keith felt mortification dropped to his feet when Kolivan began talking to him next.

“Should there be any children,” he spoke, clear as the ship’s windows, and as stiff as Keith himself as both of them held a stare down in their own little bubble of uncomfortable advances and parenthood role-playing. “The members would want me to make it vital for you to come visit when the time comes. An order, if you desist.”

Keith licked his dry lips. “Does it have to be an order?”

“If you desist,” Kolivan gruffed out in repeat, clearly not wanting to be in this kind of situation as much as Keith did. “We expect a call before you arrive.”

“There would always be a call before anyone arrives,” Keith muttered weakly, dragging down a hand at the side of his face. “And I can’t make any promises of it in general.”

Nodding, Kolivan only took the cup of mutated coffee Allura had put on the island for him, and left without another word.

A sigh heaved out before he could stop it, and Keith lifted his head to find the other two occupants staring at him, and what irked him more was the knowing glint shining in Allura’s eyes while she took a pointed sip of her beverage.

Keith tried not to think too much of the way Shiro’s face was beat red as he finished off his drink with a loud gulp and a tilt of his head.

Running his tongue over the front of his teeth, Keith knew Zarkon was willing to blast him into a void if he only made a show of stumbling into fire range.

Tragically effective, no matter how desperate it would seem.

Keith pushed himself off the island. “I’ll be at the training deck.”

Hitting the gladiator might flush out all the pent up energy he was dealing with, and hopefully, he’d be able to think calmly without wanting the need to scream every time any one of the members decided they were trying to be helpful on his behalf.

Keith only hoped they weren’t going to give Shiro some talk that would surely include threats, making it seem like it was only a passing thing that they’d laugh about, before covering it up with some jokes that would only make Keith cringe.

If that were to happen, he would beg Zarkon to kill the embarrassment of having too many father figures for the whole time Keith lived on that base, to the point that the tyrant himself would be uncomfortable to end his life and let him suffer anyway.

Ah, well, at least, they were able to accept Shiro as his person of affection.

[alysaalban]

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[ecotone99]

[HM] Technically, she's right.

This is an original piece of work... due to the content, grammar has to be PERFECT (you'll understand after reading) so I welcome grammar Nazis with open arms. I'd like to make this longer, but I'm trying to keep it under 1750 words.

Now, I don’t know whether you’ve been in the situation where you’ve just about had enough of people and their woefully inadequate understanding of their intellectual shortcomings, but it was in precisely this situation I found myself about a month ago and it led the series of events I will recount to you now.

I sauntered into the office with a debonair resolve as the proverbial excrement had no doubt collided with the fan and I was damned if I was going to go out in anything other than the finest style. You see, I’d had it to the back teeth with this whole circus of an operation they called an educational institution and, I’ll admit, had not been as diplomatic as I perhaps could have been.

I’d started teaching in the golden days; when an educator was respected as being at the top of his or her field. I never intended to stay long, but it was a decent enough pay cheque to support me while I wrote my novel, and teaching English seemed a logical application of my literary skillset. However, as time moved on I let the comfort of a regular income and decent holidays grow upon me like moss on the inactive stone and the emotional drain I hadn’t quite anticipated seemed to suck the creative life from me. Jaded and cynical my wife called me. Well she would say that wouldn’t she? However, upon further consideration she might have been onto something because, whilst I have never suffered fools gladly, I found myself becoming increasingly short tempered with those unfortunate souls for whom the act of employing logical thought was a daily struggle. Especially those who should know better. I allowed some students to make mistakes as they were learning; their intellectual dwarfism was to be expected, but adults were increasingly beginning to earn my ire. Couple this with the school’s new policy of giving passing grades to students who didn’t earn them and I must admit I was about ready to pack the whole thing in.

The young girl behind the front desk smiled weakly at me. She was obviously in a conundrum over whether or not to feel sympathy. Bright and ferociously good at her job, I had always appreciated her competency; though at this moment she resembled an unwilling observer to an autopsy, as she was shifting uncomfortably in her chair, not knowing what to say or where to look.

“Is he in, Suzie?” I enquired, nonchalantly.

The girl shook her head disapprovingly at me, suddenly amused and baffled at my demeanour. She chuckled, once, then simply nodded and mouthed the words “Good luck.”

I sauntered down the hall and knocked twice courteously on the door as I poked my head into the office. The incumbent at the desk was a middle-aged chap who invariably gave the impression he was one step away from collapsing into a nervous wreck. Robert was the principal of our little institute for the educationally depraved and today he appeared more remarkably harried than usual. He possessed the air of someone whom, upon waking, had discovered a rabid Tasmanian Devil in his sock drawer and that this revelation had somewhat set the tone for his entire morning.

“You wished to see me?” I enquired.

He furrowed his brow and responded in the affirmative, whilst doing his best to look stern. I asked after his general well-being, relating the analogy to the Tasmanian Devil I mentioned earlier but he didn’t seem to take this line of enquiry well, so I spared his delicate constitution and dropped the subject.

“What is this?” he snapped at me, shoving a piece of paper across the desk. I recognised the document of course. It was a standard, typed piece of work and covered almost entirely in red, corrective ink. At the bottom of the offending article was a large letter “F” in a circle with the inscription next to it: “This is a grammatical disaster. See me immediately.”

“It appears to be a corrected piece of literature.” I responded with fake curiosity. “A letter writing exercise if I have spied the original correctly, it is hard to tell under all that red marking.”

Robert snatched back the document and roughly held it up to display my signature in red at the bottom. “YOU did this! WHY did you do this?”

I sat down in a chair and reclined at ease, enjoying the obvious frustration of the besieged man before me.

“Well,” I began, “the piece is supposed to be a letter, however the formatting functions more like a magazine article written by a student in kindergarten. The spelling and grammar certainly matches that demographic only, the sentence structure and content reminds me of a communist manifesto promising the beheading of the bourgeoisie at the hands of the beautiful revolution. The past, present and future tenses are used interchangeably and without discretion. Oh, and in the fourth line she used the word “pacific” instead of “specific” which I, for one, believe should be punishable by death. It was overly long, it was confusing and…”

What else it was I wouldn’t be able to tell him for it was at that point he cut me off. “IT WAS WRITTEN BY A PARENT!” he erupted, throwing the page on his desk which collided with what, I imagine, would have been a most unsatisfying light swish sound rather than the large powerful thump that would have perfectly punctuated his point.

I volunteered that the adult age of the composer only made the errors worse, but it appeared he was more concerned with other issues.

“The fallout of this? It’s going to be huge!” he began, infuriatingly choosing to speak only in sentence fragments. “Already contacted head office. District Director furious. Wants to know what kind of school I’m running. She wants you fired! He wants answers and I want to know what possessed you to mark a piece of correspondence and RETURN IT TO THE PARENT???”

I raised my eyebrows in a non-verbal question as to whether he was through with his little tirade and, after he’d sat back down and picked up a mug of pens he’d knocked over, he took a breath and deflated. You see I’d long since come to the realisation that, after the initial bluster and fight, Robert was actually one to avoid confrontation. He simply didn’t have the stamina for it. The “no failing grades” policy of the school was yet another symptom of his confrontational impotence. The new teaching graduates would cower under that initial first assault of his, but those of us who had been around the traps a bit longer had learned to let him have his little fit and wait it out. Myself, I could foresee even keeping my job so long as I first kept my cool and feigned unshakable confidence.

Still, I decided to take pity on the poor man. I could, after all, see his side of things. I’d landed him squarely in it and he was under pressure from all sides. My acknowledgement of how I’d wronged him, if only indirectly, seemed to calm him further and after a moment of quiet reflection, I imagine he was dwelling upon how a rabid Tasmanian Devil would be preferable to his current situation, he spoke quietly;

“From the beginning.”

I recounted the tale of how a boy had handed me his abomination of a final paper for the semester with a deluge of excuses as to its tardiness and not a hope of any one of them being believable. I marked the paper anyway and gave it a passing grade as per the school policy, with a cutting remark at the bottom that left no question as to my thoughts on his literary style, or lack thereof.

Well it was shortly after I returned this insult to creative writing that I received a letter from the invertebrate’s mother insisting that I change his grade. She argued that I was being unduly harsh and that I should be ashamed of my teaching.

“She should proofread her work before criticising mine.” I concluded.

Robert looked at me with a mixture of horror and awe. We had all received letters like this over the years and it was cathartic to spot the errors in the correspondence when the content was questioning your professionalism. He must have, at some level, dreamed of doing what I had done.

“But why antagonise her like that?” he pleaded.

“Well…” I smiled, recollecting, “In the letter she insists, point blank, that I am wrong. I mean, please? That’s akin to a McDonald’s employee criticising the Sous Chef at ‘Le Jules Verne’. One is simply not in the same league as the other.”

Robert was clearly conflicted. He was infuriated by the arrogance and audacity I had displayed and yet he was still smiling in disbelief. But he wasn’t quite ready to let me off the hook.

“So you marked her letter to prove who was right?”

I chuckled.

“No. I marked her letter because she THEN went on to say her son’s English was no worse than hers.”

He stared at me, then grabbed at the letter and stared at it reading furiously. His eyes widened in complete disbelief alternating between me, then the letter, then back again.

“You know…” he smiled cautiously. “Technically she’s right.”

“Yes…” I affirmed, realising my job was safe once more.

“Apparently she is.”

submitted by /u/HynraFoo [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2OCZVTl

[nbntv-blog]

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A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation, it was told by both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and the main financial backer of the Leave.EU campaign, the businessman Arron Banks, that Cambridge Analytica did no work for the Leave.EU campaign.

Documents published today by the committee clearly contradict that narrative — revealing internal correspondence about the use of a UKIP dataset to create voter profiles to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU.

They also show CA staff raising concerns about the legality of the plan to model UKIP data to enable Leave.EU to identify and target receptive voters with pro-Brexit messaging.

The UK’s 2016 in-out EU referendum saw the voting public narrowing voting to leave — by 52:48.

New evidence from Brittany Kaiser

The evidence, which includes emails between key Cambridge Analytica, employees of Leave.EU and UKIP, has been submitted to the DCMS committee by Brittany Kaiser — a former director of CA (who you may just have seen occupying a central role in Netflix’s The Great Hack documentary, which digs into links between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign).

“As you can see with the evidence… chargeable work was completed for UKIP and Leave.EU, and I have strong reasons to believe that those datasets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Phase 1 payable work engagement… were later used by the Leave.EU campaign without Cambridge Analytica’s further assistance,” writes Kaiser in a covering letter to committee chair, Damian Collins, summarizing the submissions.

Kaiser gave oral evidence to the committee at a public hearing in April last year.

At the time she said CA had been undertaking parallel pitches for Leave.EU and UKIP — as well as for two insurance brands owned by Banks — and had used membership survey data provided by UKIP to built a model for pro-brexit voter personality types, with the intention of it being used “to benefit Leave.EU”.

“We never had a contract with Leave.EU. The contract was with the UK Independence party for the analysis of this data, but it was meant to benefit Leave.EU,” she said then.

The new emails submitted by Kaiser back up her earlier evidence. They also show there was discussion of drawing up a contract between CA, UKIP and Leave.EU in the fall before the referendum vote.

In one email — dated November 10, 2015 — CA’s COO & CFO, Julian Wheatland, writes that: “I had a call with [Leave.EU’s] Andy Wigmore today (Arron’s right hand man) and he confirmed that, even though we haven’t got the contract with the Leave written up, it’s all under control and it will happen just as soon as [UKIP-linked lawyer] Matthew Richardson has finished working out the correct contract structure between UKIP, CA and Leave.”

Another item Kaiser has submitted to the committee is a separate November email from Wigmore, inviting press to a briefing by Leave.EU — entitled “how to win the EU referendum” — an event at which Kaiser gave a pitch on CA’s work. In this email Wigmore describes the firm as “the worlds leading target voter messaging campaigners”.

In another document, CA’s Wheatland is shown in an email thread ahead of that presentation telling Wigmore and Richardson “we need to agree the line in the presentations next week with regards the origin of the data we have analysed”.

“We have generated some interesting findings that we can share in the presentation, but we are certain to be asked where the data came from. Can we declare that we have analysed UKIP membership and survey data?” he then asks.

UKIP’s Richardson replies with a negative, saying: “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest” — adding that he has a meeting with Wigmore to discuss “all of this”, and ending with: “We will have a plan by the end of that lunch, I think”.

In another email, dated November 10, sent to multiple recipients ahead of the presentation, Wheatland writes: “We need to start preparing Brittany’s presentation, which will involve working with some of the insights David [Wilkinson, CA’s chief data scientist] has been able to glean from the UKIP membership data.”

He also asks Wilkinson if he can start to “share insights from the UKIP data” — as well as asking “when are we getting the rest of the data?”. (In a later email, dated November 16, Wilkinson shares plots of modelled data with Kaiser — apparently showing the UKIP data now segmented into four blocks of brexit supporters, which have been named: ‘Eager activist’; ‘Young reformer’; ‘Disaffected Tories’; and ‘Left behinds’.)

In the same email Wheatland instructs Jordanna Zetter, an employee of CA’s parent company SCL, to brief Kaiser on “how to field a variety of questions about CA and our methodology, but also SCL. Rest of the world, SCL Defence etc” — asking her to liaise with other key SCL/CA staff to “produce some ‘line to take’ notes”.

Another document in the bundle appears to show Kaiser’s talking points for the briefing. These make no mention of CA’s intention to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU — merely saying it will conduct “message testing and audience segmentation”.

“We will be working with the campaign’s pollsters and other vendors to compile all the data we have available to us,” is another of the bland talking points Kaiser was instructed to feed to the press.

“Our team of data scientists will conduct deep-dive analysis that will enable us to understand the electorate better than the rival campaigns,” is one more unenlightening line intended for public consumption.

But while CA was preparing to present the UK media with a sanitized false narrative to gloss over the individual voter targeting work it actually intended to carry out for Leave.EU, behind the scenes concerns were being raised about how “national microtargeting” would conflict with UK data protection law.

Another email thread, started November 19, highlights internal discussion about the legality of the plan — with Wheatland sharing “written advice from Queen’s Counsel on the question of how we can legally process data in the UK, specifically UKIP’s data for Leave.eu and also more generally”. (Although Kaiser has not shared the legal advice itself.)

Wilkinson replies to this email with what he couches as “some concerns” regarding shortfalls in the advice, before going into detail on how CA is intending to further process the modelled UKIP data in order to individually microtarget brexit voters — which he suggests would not be legal under UK data protection law “as the identification of these people would constitute personal data”.

He writes:

I have some concerns about what this document says is our “output” – points 22 to 24. Whilst it includes what we have already done on their data (clustering and initial profiling of their members, and providing this to them as summary information), it does not say anything about using the models of the clusters that we create to extrapolate to new individuals and infer their profile. In fact it says that our output does not identify individuals. Thus it says nothing about our microtargeting approach typical in the US, which I believe was something that we wanted to do with leave eu data to identify how each their supporters should be contacted according to their inferred profile.

For example, we wouldn’t be able to show which members are likely to belong to group A and thus should be messaged in this particular way – as the identification of these people would constitute personal data. We could only say “group A typically looks like this summary profile”.

Wilkinson ends by asking for clarification ahead of a looming meeting with Leave.EU, saying: “It would be really useful to have this clarified early on tomorrow, because I was under the impression it would be a large part of our product offering to our UK clients.” [emphasis ours]

Wheatland follows up with a one line email, asking Richardson to “comment on David’s concern” — who then chips into the discussion, saying there’s “some confusion at our end about where this data is coming from and going to”.

He goes on to summarize the “premises” of the advice he says UKIP was given regarding sharing the data with CA (and afterwards the modelled data with Leave.EU, as he implies is the plan) — writing that his understanding is that CA will return: “Analysed Data to UKIP”, and then: “As the Analysed Dataset contains no personal data UKIP are free to give that Analysed Dataset to anyone else to do with what they wish. UKIP will give the Analysed Dataset to Leave.EU”.

“Could you please confirm that the above is correct?” Richardson goes on. “Do I also understand correctly that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on Leave.EU’s legitimately acquired data to infer (interpolate) profiles for each of their supporters so as to better control the messaging that leave.eu sends out to those supporters?

“Is it also correct that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on publicly available data to infer (interpolate) which members of the public are most likely to become Leave.EU supporters and what messages would encourage them to do so?

“If these understandings are not correct please let me know and I will give you a call to discuss this.”

About half an hour later another SCL Group employee, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown, joins the discussion to back up Wilkinson’s legal concerns.

“The [Queen’s Counsel] opinion only seems to be an analysis of the legality of the work we have already done for UKIP, rather than any judgement on whether or not we can do microtargeting. As such, whilst it is helpful to know that we haven’t already broken the law, it doesn’t offer clear guidance on how we can proceed with reference to a larger scope of work,” she writes without apparent alarm at the possibility that the entire campaign plan might be illegal under UK privacy law.

“I haven’t read it in sufficient depth to know whether or not it offers indirect insight into how we could proceed with national microtargeting, which it may do,” she adds — ending by saying she and a colleague will discuss it further “later today”.

It’s not clear whether concerns about the legality of the microtargeting plan derailed the signing of any formal contract between Leave.EU and CA — even though the documents imply data was shared, even if only during the scoping stage of the work.

“The fact remains that chargeable work was done by Cambridge Analytica, at the direction of Leave.EU and UKIP executives, despite a contract never being signed,” writes Kaiser in her cover letter to the committee on this. “Despite having no signed contract, the invoice was still paid, not to Cambridge Analytica but instead paid by Arron Banks to UKIP directly. This payment was then not passed onto Cambridge Analytica for the work completed, as an internal decision in UKIP, as their party was not the beneficiary of the work, but Leave.EU was.”

Kaiser has also shared a presentation of the UKIP survey data, which bears the names of three academics: Harold Clarke, University of Texas at Dallas & University of Essex; Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent; and Paul Whiteley, University of Essex, which details results from the online portion of the membership survey — aka the core dataset CA modelled for targeting Brexit voters with the intention of helping the Leave.EU campaign.

(At a glance, this survey suggests there’s an interesting analysis waiting to be done of the choice of target demographics for the current blitz of campaign message testing ads being run on Facebook by the new (pro-brexit) UK prime minister Boris Johnson and the core UKIP demographic, as revealed by the survey data… )

Call for Leave.EU probe to be reopened

Ian Lucas, MP, a member of the DCMS committee has called for the UK’s Electoral Commission to re-open its investigation into Leave.EU in view of “additional evidence” from Kaiser.

The EC should re-open their investigation into LeaveEU in view of the additional evidence from Brittany Kaiser via @CommonsCMS

— Ian Lucas MP (@IanCLucas) July 30, 2019

We reached out to the Electoral Commission to ask if it will be revisiting the matter.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “We are considering this new information in relation to our role regulating campaigner activity at the EU referendum. This relates to the 10 week period leading up to the referendum and to campaigning activity specifically aimed at persuading people to vote for a particular outcome.

“Last July we did impose significant penalties on Leave.EU for committing multiple offences under electoral law at the EU Referendum, including for submitting an incomplete spending return.”

Last year the Electoral Commission also found that the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits. It channelled money to a Canadian data firm linked to Cambridge Analytica to target political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with a youth-focused Brexit campaign, BeLeave.

Six months ago the UK’s data watchdog also issued fines against Leave.EU and Banks’ insurance company, Eldon Insurance — having found what it dubbed as “serious” breaches of electronic marketing laws, including the campaign using insurance customers’ details to unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages.

A spokeswoman for the ICO told us it does not have a statement on Kaiser’s latest evidence but added that its enforcement team “will be reviewing the documents released by DCMS”.

The regulator has been running a wider enquiry into use of personal data for social media political campaigning. And last year the information commissioner called for an ethical pause on its use — warning that trust in democracy risked being undermined.

And while Facebook has since applied a thin film of ‘political ads’ transparency to its platform (which researches continue to warn is not nearly transparent enough to quantify political use of its ads platform), UK election campaign laws have yet to be updated to take account of the digital firehoses now (il)liberally shaping political debate and public opinion at scale.

It’s now more than three years since the UK’s shock vote to leave the European Union — a vote that has so far delivered three years of divisive political chaos, despatching two prime ministers and derailing politics and policymaking as usual.

Many questions remain over a referendum that continues to be dogged by scandals — from breaches of campaign spending; to breaches of data protection and privacy law; and indeed the use of unregulated social media — principally Facebook’s ad platform — as the willing conduit for distributing racist dogwhistle attack ads and political misinformation to whip up anti-EU sentiment among UK voters.

Dark money, dark ads — and the importing of US style campaign tactics into UK, circumventing election and data protection laws by the digital platform backdoor.

This is why the DCMS committee’s preliminary report last year called on the government to take “urgent action” to “build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system”.

The very same minority government, struggling to hold itself together in the face of Brexit chaos, failed to respond to the committee’s concerns — and has now been replaced by a cadre of the most militant Brexit backers, who are applying their hands to the cheap and plentiful digital campaign levers.

The UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, is demonstrably doubling down on political microtargeting: Appointing no less than Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the official Vote Leave campaign, as a special advisor.

At the same time Johnson’s team is firing out a flotilla of Facebook ads — including ads that appear intended to gather voter sentiment for the purpose of crafting individually targeted political messages for any future election campaign.

So it’s full steam ahead with the Facebook ads…

Yet this ‘democratic reset’ is laid right atop the Brexit trainwreck. It’s coupled to it, in fact.

Cummings worked for the self same Vote Leave campaign that the Electoral Commission found illegally funnelled money — via Cambridge Analytica-linked Canadian data firm AggregateIQ — into a blitz of microtargeted Facebook ads intended to sway voter opinion.

Vote Leave also faced questions over its use of Facebook-run football competition promising a £50M prize-pot to fans in exchange for handing over a bunch of personal data ahead of the referendum, including how they planned to vote. Another data grab wrapped in fancy dress — much like GSR’s thisisyourlife quiz app that provided the foundational dataset for CA’s psychological voter profiling work on the Trump campaign.

The elevating of Cummings to be special adviser to the UK PM represents the polar opposite of an ‘ethical pause’ in political microtargeting.

Make no mistake, this is the Brexit campaign playbook — back in operation, now with full-bore pedal to the metal. (With his hands now on the public purse, Johnson has pledged to spend £100M on marketing to sell a ‘no deal Brexit’ to the UK public.)

Kaiser’s latest evidence may not contain a smoking bomb big enough to blast the issue of data-driven and tech giant-enabled voter manipulation into a mainstream consciousness, where it might have the chance to reset the political conscience of a nation — but it puts more flesh on the bones of how the self-styled ‘bad boys of Brexit’ pulled off their shock win.

In The Great Hack the Brexit campaign is couched as the ‘petri dish’ for the data-fuelled targeting deployed by the firm in the 2016 US presidential election — which delivered a similarly shock victory for Trump.

If that’s so, these latest pieces of evidence imply a suggestively close link between CA’s experimental modelling of UKIP supporter data, as it shifted gears to apply its dark arts closer to home than usual, and the models it subsequently built off of US citizens’ data sucked out of Facebook. And that in turn goes some way to explaining the cosiness between Trump and UKIP founder Nigel Farage…

  Kaiser ends her letter to DCMS writing: “Given the enormity of the implications of earlier inaccurate conclusions by different investigations, I would hope that Parliament reconsiders the evidence submitted here in good faith. I hope that these ten documents are helpful to your research and furthering the transparency and truth that your investigations are seeking, and that the people of the UK and EU deserve”.

Banks and Wigmore have responded to the publication in their usual style, with a pair of dismissive tweets — questioning Kaiser’s motives for wanting the data to be published and throwing shade on how the evidence was obtained in the first place.

You mean the professional whistleblower who’s making a career of making stuff up with a book deal and failed Netflix film! The witch-hunt so last season !! https://t.co/f2rsPfoDdT

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) July 30, 2019

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Former Cambridge Analytica director, Brittany Kaiser, dumps more evidence of Brexit’s democratic trainwreck – TechCrunch A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

[technicalsolutions88]

A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation, it was told by both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and the main financial backer of the Leave.EU campaign, the businessman Arron Banks, that Cambridge Analytica did no work for the Leave.EU campaign.

Documents published today by the committee clearly contradict that narrative — revealing internal correspondence about the use of a UKIP dataset to create voter profiles to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU.

They also show CA staff raising concerns about the legality of the plan to model UKIP data to enable Leave.EU to identify and target receptive voters with pro-Brexit messaging.

The UK’s 2016 in-out EU referendum saw the voting public narrowing voting to leave — by 52:48.

New evidence from Brittany Kaiser

The evidence, which includes emails between key Cambridge Analytica, employees of Leave.EU and UKIP, has been submitted to the DCMS committee by Brittany Kaiser — a former director of CA (who you may just have seen occupying a central role in Netflix’s The Great Hack documentary, which digs into links between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign).

We have just published new evidence from Brittany Kaiser relating to Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and Leave EU – you can read them all here @CommonsCMS https://t.co/2LjfJiozO6 #TheGreatHack

— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) July 30, 2019

“As you can see with the evidence… chargeable work was completed for UKIP and Leave.EU, and I have strong reasons to believe that those datasets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Phase 1 payable work engagement… were later used by the Leave.EU campaign without Cambridge Analytica’s further assistance,” writes Kaiser in a covering letter to committee chair, Damian Collins, summarizing the submissions.

Kaiser gave oral evidence to the committee at a public hearing in April last year.

At the time she said CA had been undertaking parallel pitches for Leave.EU and UKIP — as well as for two insurance brands owned by Banks — and had used membership survey data provided by UKIP to built a model for pro-brexit voter personality types, with the intention of it being used “to benefit Leave.EU”.

“We never had a contract with Leave.EU. The contract was with the UK Independence party for the analysis of this data, but it was meant to benefit Leave.EU,” she said then.

The new emails submitted by Kaiser back up her earlier evidence. They also show there was discussion of drawing up a contract between CA, UKIP and Leave.EU in the fall before the referendum vote.

In one email — dated November 10, 2015 — CA’s COO & CFO, Julian Wheatland, writes that: “I had a call with [Leave.EU’s] Andy Wigmore today (Arron’s right hand man) and he confirmed that, even though we haven’t got the contract with the Leave written up, it’s all under control and it will happen just as soon as [UKIP-linked lawyer] Matthew Richardson has finished working out the correct contract structure between UKIP, CA and Leave.”

Another item Kaiser has submitted to the committee is a separate November email from Wigmore, inviting press to a briefing by Leave.EU — entitled “how to win the EU referendum” — an event at which Kaiser gave a pitch on CA’s work. In this email Wigmore describes the firm as “the worlds leading target voter messaging campaigners”.

In another document, CA’s Wheatland is shown in an email thread ahead of that presentation telling Wigmore and Richardson “we need to agree the line in the presentations next week with regards the origin of the data we have analysed”.

“We have generated some interesting findings that we can share in the presentation, but we are certain to be asked where the data came from. Can we declare that we have analysed UKIP membership and survey data?” he then asks.

UKIP’s Richardson replies with a negative, saying: “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest” — adding that he has a meeting with Wigmore to discuss “all of this”, and ending with: “We will have a plan by the end of that lunch, I think”.

In another email, dated November 10, sent to multiple recipients ahead of the presentation, Wheatland writes: “We need to start preparing Brittany’s presentation, which will involve working with some of the insights David [Wilkinson, CA’s chief data scientist] has been able to glean from the UKIP membership data.”

He also asks Wilkinson if he can start to “share insights from the UKIP data” — as well as asking “when are we getting the rest of the data?”. (In a later email, dated November 16, Wilkinson shares plots of modelled data with Kaiser — apparently showing the UKIP data now segmented into four blocks of brexit supporters, which have been named: ‘Eager activist’; ‘Young reformer’; ‘Disaffected Tories’; and ‘Left behinds’.)

In the same email Wheatland instructs Jordanna Zetter, an employee of CA’s parent company SCL, to brief Kaiser on “how to field a variety of questions about CA and our methodology, but also SCL. Rest of the world, SCL Defence etc” — asking her to liaise with other key SCL/CA staff to “produce some ‘line to take’ notes”.

Another document in the bundle appears to show Kaiser’s talking points for the briefing. These make no mention of CA’s intention to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU — merely saying it will conduct “message testing and audience segmentation”.

“We will be working with the campaign’s pollsters and other vendors to compile all the data we have available to us,” is another of the bland talking points Kaiser was instructed to feed to the press.

“Our team of data scientists will conduct deep-dive analysis that will enable us to understand the electorate better than the rival campaigns,” is one more unenlightening line intended for public consumption.

But while CA was preparing to present the UK media with a sanitized false narrative to gloss over the individual voter targeting work it actually intended to carry out for Leave.EU, behind the scenes concerns were being raised about how “national microtargeting” would conflict with UK data protection law.

Another email thread, started November 19, highlights internal discussion about the legality of the plan — with Wheatland sharing “written advice from Queen’s Counsel on the question of how we can legally process data in the UK, specifically UKIP’s data for Leave.eu and also more generally”. (Although Kaiser has not shared the legal advice itself.)

Wilkinson replies to this email with what he couches as “some concerns” regarding shortfalls in the advice, before going into detail on how CA is intending to further process the modelled UKIP data in order to individually microtarget brexit voters — which he suggests would not be legal under UK data protection law “as the identification of these people would constitute personal data”.

He writes:

I have some concerns about what this document says is our “output” – points 22 to 24. Whilst it includes what we have already done on their data (clustering and initial profiling of their members, and providing this to them as summary information), it does not say anything about using the models of the clusters that we create to extrapolate to new individuals and infer their profile. In fact it says that our output does not identify individuals. Thus it says nothing about our microtargeting approach typical in the US, which I believe was something that we wanted to do with leave eu data to identify how each their supporters should be contacted according to their inferred profile.

For example, we wouldn’t be able to show which members are likely to belong to group A and thus should be messaged in this particular way – as the identification of these people would constitute personal data. We could only say “group A typically looks like this summary profile”.

Wilkinson ends by asking for clarification ahead of a looming meeting with Leave.EU, saying: “It would be really useful to have this clarified early on tomorrow, because I was under the impression it would be a large part of our product offering to our UK clients.” [emphasis ours]

Wheatland follows up with a one line email, asking Richardson to “comment on David’s concern” — who then chips into the discussion, saying there’s “some confusion at our end about where this data is coming from and going to”.

He goes on to summarize the “premises” of the advice he says UKIP was given regarding sharing the data with CA (and afterwards the modelled data with Leave.EU, as he implies is the plan) — writing that his understanding is that CA will return: “Analysed Data to UKIP”, and then: “As the Analysed Dataset contains no personal data UKIP are free to give that Analysed Dataset to anyone else to do with what they wish. UKIP will give the Analysed Dataset to Leave.EU”.

“Could you please confirm that the above is correct?” Richardson goes on. “Do I also understand correctly that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on Leave.EU’s legitimately acquired data to infer (interpolate) profiles for each of their supporters so as to better control the messaging that leave.eu sends out to those supporters?

“Is it also correct that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on publicly available data to infer (interpolate) which members of the public are most likely to become Leave.EU supporters and what messages would encourage them to do so?

“If these understandings are not correct please let me know and I will give you a call to discuss this.”

About half an hour later another SCL Group employee, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown, joins the discussion to back up Wilkinson’s legal concerns.

“The [Queen’s Counsel] opinion only seems to be an analysis of the legality of the work we have already done for UKIP, rather than any judgement on whether or not we can do microtargeting. As such, whilst it is helpful to know that we haven’t already broken the law, it doesn’t offer clear guidance on how we can proceed with reference to a larger scope of work,” she writes without apparent alarm at the possibility that the entire campaign plan might be illegal under UK privacy law.

“I haven’t read it in sufficient depth to know whether or not it offers indirect insight into how we could proceed with national microtargeting, which it may do,” she adds — ending by saying she and a colleague will discuss it further “later today”.

It’s not clear whether concerns about the legality of the microtargeting plan derailed the signing of any formal contract between Leave.EU and CA — even though the documents imply data was shared, even if only during the scoping stage of the work.

“The fact remains that chargeable work was done by Cambridge Analytica, at the direction of Leave.EU and UKIP executives, despite a contract never being signed,” writes Kaiser in her cover letter to the committee on this. “Despite having no signed contract, the invoice was still paid, not to Cambridge Analytica but instead paid by Arron Banks to UKIP directly. This payment was then not passed onto Cambridge Analytica for the work completed, as an internal decision in UKIP, as their party was not the beneficiary of the work, but Leave.EU was.”

Kaiser has also shared a presentation of the UKIP survey data, which bears the names of three academics: Harold Clarke, University of Texas at Dallas & University of Essex; Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent; and Paul Whiteley, University of Essex, which details results from the online portion of the membership survey — aka the core dataset CA modelled for targeting Brexit voters with the intention of helping the Leave.EU campaign.

(At a glance, this survey suggests there’s an interesting analysis waiting to be done of the choice of target demographics for the current blitz of campaign message testing ads being run on Facebook by the new (pro-brexit) UK prime minister Boris Johnson and the core UKIP demographic, as revealed by the survey data… )

[gallery ids="1862050,1862051,1862052"]

Call for Leave.EU probe to be reopened

Ian Lucas, MP, a member of the DCMS committee has called for the UK’s Electoral Commission to re-open its investigation into Leave.EU in view of “additional evidence” from Kaiser.

The EC should re-open their investigation into LeaveEU in view of the additional evidence from Brittany Kaiser via @CommonsCMS

— Ian Lucas MP (@IanCLucas) July 30, 2019

We reached out to the Electoral Commission to ask if it will be revisiting the matter.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “We are considering this new information in relation to our role regulating campaigner activity at the EU referendum. This relates to the 10 week period leading up to the referendum and to campaigning activity specifically aimed at persuading people to vote for a particular outcome.

“Last July we did impose significant penalties on Leave.EU for committing multiple offences under electoral law at the EU Referendum, including for submitting an incomplete spending return.”

Last year the Electoral Commission also found that the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits. It channelled money to a Canadian data firm linked to Cambridge Analytica to target political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with a youth-focused Brexit campaign, BeLeave.

Six months ago the UK’s data watchdog also issued fines against Leave.EU and Banks’ insurance company, Eldon Insurance — having found what it dubbed as “serious” breaches of electronic marketing laws, including the campaign using insurance customers’ details to unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages.

A spokeswoman for the ICO told us it does not have a statement on Kaiser’s latest evidence but added that its enforcement team “will be reviewing the documents released by DCMS”.

The regulator has been running a wider enquiry into use of personal data for social media political campaigning. And last year the information commissioner called for an ethical pause on its use — warning that trust in democracy risked being undermined.

And while Facebook has since applied a thin film of ‘political ads’ transparency to its platform (which researches continue to warn is not nearly transparent enough to quantify political use of its ads platform), UK election campaign laws have yet to be updated to take account of the digital firehoses now (il)liberally shaping political debate and public opinion at scale.

It’s now more than three years since the UK’s shock vote to leave the European Union — a vote that has so far delivered three years of divisive political chaos, despatching two prime ministers and derailing politics and policymaking as usual.

Many questions remain over a referendum that continues to be dogged by scandals — from breaches of campaign spending; to breaches of data protection and privacy law; and indeed the use of unregulated social media — principally Facebook’s ad platform — as the willing conduit for distributing racist dogwhistle attack ads and political misinformation to whip up anti-EU sentiment among UK voters.

Dark money, dark ads — and the importing of US style campaign tactics into UK, circumventing election and data protection laws by the digital platform backdoor.

This is why the DCMS committee’s preliminary report last year called on the government to take “urgent action” to “build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system”.

The very same minority government, struggling to hold itself together in the face of Brexit chaos, failed to respond to the committee’s concerns — and has now been replaced by a cadre of the most militant Brexit backers, who are applying their hands to the cheap and plentiful digital campaign levers.

The UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, is demonstrably doubling down on political microtargeting: Appointing no less than Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the official Vote Leave campaign, as a special advisor.

At the same time Johnson’s team is firing out a flotilla of Facebook ads — including ads that appear intended to gather voter sentiment for the purpose of crafting individually targeted political messages for any future election campaign.

So it’s full steam ahead with the Facebook ads…

Yet this ‘democratic reset’ is laid right atop the Brexit trainwreck. It’s coupled to it, in fact.

Cummings worked for the self same Vote Leave campaign that the Electoral Commission found illegally funnelled money — via Cambridge Analytica-linked Canadian data firm AggregateIQ — into a blitz of microtargeted Facebook ads intended to sway voter opinion.

Vote Leave also faced questions over its use of Facebook-run football competition promising a £50M prize-pot to fans in exchange for handing over a bunch of personal data ahead of the referendum, including how they planned to vote. Another data grab wrapped in fancy dress — much like GSR’s thisisyourlife quiz app that provided the foundational dataset for CA’s psychological voter profiling work on the Trump campaign.

The elevating of Cummings to be special adviser to the UK PM represents the polar opposite of an ‘ethical pause’ in political microtargeting.

Make no mistake, this is the Brexit campaign playbook — back in operation, now with full-bore pedal to the metal. (With his hands now on the public purse, Johnson has pledged to spend £100M on marketing to sell a ‘no deal Brexit’ to the UK public.)

Kaiser’s latest evidence may not contain a smoking bomb big enough to blast the issue of data-driven and tech giant-enabled voter manipulation into a mainstream consciousness, where it might have the chance to reset the political conscience of a nation — but it puts more flesh on the bones of how the self-styled ‘bad boys of Brexit’ pulled off their shock win.

In The Great Hack the Brexit campaign is couched as the ‘petri dish’ for the data-fuelled targeting deployed by the firm in the 2016 US presidential election — which delivered a similarly shock victory for Trump.

If that’s so, these latest pieces of evidence imply a suggestively close link between CA’s experimental modelling of UKIP supporter data, as it shifted gears to apply its dark arts closer to home than usual, and the models it subsequently built off of US citizens’ data sucked out of Facebook. And that in turn goes some way to explaining the cosiness between Trump and UKIP founder Nigel Farage…

So Donald Trump wants Nigel Farage on any trade negotiating team?

Maybe this is how #Brexit will end? Not with a bang, not with a cliff edge, but with a great Tory shriek of revulsion?#nodealbrexit #ridge #marr #bbcbh #farage pic.twitter.com/iCn6hd9eka

— carol hedges (@carolJhedges) July 28, 2019

  Kaiser ends her letter to DCMS writing: “Given the enormity of the implications of earlier inaccurate conclusions by different investigations, I would hope that Parliament reconsiders the evidence submitted here in good faith. I hope that these ten documents are helpful to your research and furthering the transparency and truth that your investigations are seeking, and that the people of the UK and EU deserve”.

Banks and Wigmore have responded to the publication in their usual style, with a pair of dismissive tweets — questioning Kaiser’s motives for wanting the data to be published and throwing shade on how the evidence was obtained in the first place.

You mean the professional whistleblower who’s making a career of making stuff up with a book deal and failed Netflix film! The witch-hunt so last season !! https://t.co/f2rsPfoDdT

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) July 30, 2019

Desperate stuff @DamianCollins lol

know one cares – oh and are those emails obtained illegally – computer misuse act – tut tut stolen data, oh the irony https://t.co/BNWxUJmwoQ

— Andy Wigmore (@andywigmore) July 30, 2019

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/315tAbu Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[dizzedcom]

A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation, it was told by both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and the main financial backer of the Leave.EU campaign, the businessman Arron Banks, that Cambridge Analytica did no work for the Leave.EU campaign.

Documents published today by the committee clearly contradict that narrative — revealing internal correspondence about the use of a UKIP dataset to create voter profiles to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU.

They also show CA staff raising concerns about the legality of the plan to model UKIP data to enable Leave.EU to identify and target receptive voters with pro-Brexit messaging.

The UK’s 2016 in-out EU referendum saw the voting public narrowing voting to leave — by 52:48.

New evidence from Brittany Kaiser

The evidence, which includes emails between key Cambridge Analytica, employees of Leave.EU and UKIP, has been submitted to the DCMS committee by Brittany Kaiser — a former director of CA (who you may just have seen occupying a central role in Netflix’s The Great Hack documentary, which digs into links between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign).

We have just published new evidence from Brittany Kaiser relating to Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and Leave EU – you can read them all here @CommonsCMS https://t.co/2LjfJiozO6 #TheGreatHack

— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) July 30, 2019

“As you can see with the evidence… chargeable work was completed for UKIP and Leave.EU, and I have strong reasons to believe that those datasets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Phase 1 payable work engagement… were later used by the Leave.EU campaign without Cambridge Analytica’s further assistance,” writes Kaiser in a covering letter to committee chair, Damian Collins, summarizing the submissions.

Kaiser gave oral evidence to the committee at a public hearing in April last year.

At the time she said CA had been undertaking parallel pitches for Leave.EU and UKIP — as well as for two insurance brands owned by Banks — and had used membership survey data provided by UKIP to built a model for pro-brexit voter personality types, with the intention of it being used “to benefit Leave.EU”.

“We never had a contract with Leave.EU. The contract was with the UK Independence party for the analysis of this data, but it was meant to benefit Leave.EU,” she said then.

The new emails submitted by Kaiser back up her earlier evidence. They also show there was discussion of drawing up a contract between CA, UKIP and Leave.EU in the fall before the referendum vote.

In one email — dated November 10, 2015 — CA’s COO & CFO, Julian Wheatland, writes that: “I had a call with [Leave.EU’s] Andy Wigmore today (Arron’s right hand man) and he confirmed that, even though we haven’t got the contract with the Leave written up, it’s all under control and it will happen just as soon as [UKIP-linked lawyer] Matthew Richardson has finished working out the correct contract structure between UKIP, CA and Leave.”

Another item Kaiser has submitted to the committee is a separate November email from Wigmore, inviting press to a briefing by Leave.EU — entitled “how to win the EU referendum” — an event at which Kaiser gave a pitch on CA’s work. In this email Wigmore describes the firm as “the worlds leading target voter messaging campaigners”.

In another document, CA’s Wheatland is shown in an email thread ahead of that presentation telling Wigmore and Richardson “we need to agree the line in the presentations next week with regards the origin of the data we have analysed”.

“We have generated some interesting findings that we can share in the presentation, but we are certain to be asked where the data came from. Can we declare that we have analysed UKIP membership and survey data?” he then asks.

UKIP’s Richardson replies with a negative, saying: “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest” — adding that he has a meeting with Wigmore to discuss “all of this”, and ending with: “We will have a plan by the end of that lunch, I think”.

In another email, dated November 10, sent to multiple recipients ahead of the presentation, Wheatland writes: “We need to start preparing Brittany’s presentation, which will involve working with some of the insights David [Wilkinson, CA’s chief data scientist] has been able to glean from the UKIP membership data.”

He also asks Wilkinson if he can start to “share insights from the UKIP data” — as well as asking “when are we getting the rest of the data?”. (In a later email, dated November 16, Wilkinson shares plots of modelled data with Kaiser — apparently showing the UKIP data now segmented into four blocks of brexit supporters, which have been named: ‘Eager activist’; ‘Young reformer’; ‘Disaffected Tories’; and ‘Left behinds’.)

In the same email Wheatland instructs Jordanna Zetter, an employee of CA’s parent company SCL, to brief Kaiser on “how to field a variety of questions about CA and our methodology, but also SCL. Rest of the world, SCL Defence etc” — asking her to liaise with other key SCL/CA staff to “produce some ‘line to take’ notes”.

Another document in the bundle appears to show Kaiser’s talking points for the briefing. These make no mention of CA’s intention to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU — merely saying it will conduct “message testing and audience segmentation”.

“We will be working with the campaign’s pollsters and other vendors to compile all the data we have available to us,” is another of the bland talking points Kaiser was instructed to feed to the press.

“Our team of data scientists will conduct deep-dive analysis that will enable us to understand the electorate better than the rival campaigns,” is one more unenlightening line intended for public consumption.

But while CA was preparing to present the UK media with a sanitized false narrative to gloss over the individual voter targeting work it actually intended to carry out for Leave.EU, behind the scenes concerns were being raised about how “national microtargeting” would conflict with UK data protection law.

Another email thread, started November 19, highlights internal discussion about the legality of the plan — with Wheatland sharing “written advice from Queen’s Counsel on the question of how we can legally process data in the UK, specifically UKIP’s data for Leave.eu and also more generally”. (Although Kaiser has not shared the legal advice itself.)

Wilkinson replies to this email with what he couches as “some concerns” regarding shortfalls in the advice, before going into detail on how CA is intending to further process the modelled UKIP data in order to individually microtarget brexit voters — which he suggests would not be legal under UK data protection law “as the identification of these people would constitute personal data”.

He writes:

I have some concerns about what this document says is our “output” – points 22 to 24. Whilst it includes what we have already done on their data (clustering and initial profiling of their members, and providing this to them as summary information), it does not say anything about using the models of the clusters that we create to extrapolate to new individuals and infer their profile. In fact it says that our output does not identify individuals. Thus it says nothing about our microtargeting approach typical in the US, which I believe was something that we wanted to do with leave eu data to identify how each their supporters should be contacted according to their inferred profile.

For example, we wouldn’t be able to show which members are likely to belong to group A and thus should be messaged in this particular way – as the identification of these people would constitute personal data. We could only say “group A typically looks like this summary profile”.

Wilkinson ends by asking for clarification ahead of a looming meeting with Leave.EU, saying: “It would be really useful to have this clarified early on tomorrow, because I was under the impression it would be a large part of our product offering to our UK clients.” [emphasis ours]

Wheatland follows up with a one line email, asking Richardson to “comment on David’s concern” — who then chips into the discussion, saying there’s “some confusion at our end about where this data is coming from and going to”.

He goes on to summarize the “premises” of the advice he says UKIP was given regarding sharing the data with CA (and afterwards the modelled data with Leave.EU, as he implies is the plan) — writing that his understanding is that CA will return: “Analysed Data to UKIP”, and then: “As the Analysed Dataset contains no personal data UKIP are free to give that Analysed Dataset to anyone else to do with what they wish. UKIP will give the Analysed Dataset to Leave.EU”.

“Could you please confirm that the above is correct?” Richardson goes on. “Do I also understand correctly that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on Leave.EU’s legitimately acquired data to infer (interpolate) profiles for each of their supporters so as to better control the messaging that leave.eu sends out to those supporters?

“Is it also correct that CA then intend to use the Analysed Dataset and overlay it on publicly available data to infer (interpolate) which members of the public are most likely to become Leave.EU supporters and what messages would encourage them to do so?

“If these understandings are not correct please let me know and I will give you a call to discuss this.”

About half an hour later another SCL Group employee, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown, joins the discussion to back up Wilkinson’s legal concerns.

“The [Queen’s Counsel] opinion only seems to be an analysis of the legality of the work we have already done for UKIP, rather than any judgement on whether or not we can do microtargeting. As such, whilst it is helpful to know that we haven’t already broken the law, it doesn’t offer clear guidance on how we can proceed with reference to a larger scope of work,” she writes without apparent alarm at the possibility that the entire campaign plan might be illegal under UK privacy law.

“I haven’t read it in sufficient depth to know whether or not it offers indirect insight into how we could proceed with national microtargeting, which it may do,” she adds — ending by saying she and a colleague will discuss it further “later today”.

It’s not clear whether concerns about the legality of the microtargeting plan derailed the signing of any formal contract between Leave.EU and CA — even though the documents imply data was shared, even if only during the scoping stage of the work.

“The fact remains that chargeable work was done by Cambridge Analytica, at the direction of Leave.EU and UKIP executives, despite a contract never being signed,” writes Kaiser in her cover letter to the committee on this. “Despite having no signed contract, the invoice was still paid, not to Cambridge Analytica but instead paid by Arron Banks to UKIP directly. This payment was then not passed onto Cambridge Analytica for the work completed, as an internal decision in UKIP, as their party was not the beneficiary of the work, but Leave.EU was.”

Kaiser has also shared a presentation of the UKIP survey data, which bears the names of three academics: Harold Clarke, University of Texas at Dallas & University of Essex; Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent; and Paul Whiteley, University of Essex, which details results from the online portion of the membership survey — aka the core dataset CA modelled for targeting Brexit voters with the intention of helping the Leave.EU campaign.

(At a glance, this survey suggests there’s an interesting analysis waiting to be done of the choice of target demographics for the current blitz of campaign message testing ads being run on Facebook by the new (pro-brexit) UK prime minister Boris Johnson and the core UKIP demographic, as revealed by the survey data… )

Call for Leave.EU probe to be reopened

Ian Lucas, MP, a member of the DCMS committee has called for the UK’s Electoral Commission to re-open its investigation into Leave.EU in view of “additional evidence” from Kaiser.

The EC should re-open their investigation into LeaveEU in view of the additional evidence from Brittany Kaiser via @CommonsCMS

— Ian Lucas MP (@IanCLucas) July 30, 2019

We reached out to the Electoral Commission to ask if it will be revisiting the matter.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “We are considering this new information in relation to our role regulating campaigner activity at the EU referendum. This relates to the 10 week period leading up to the referendum and to campaigning activity specifically aimed at persuading people to vote for a particular outcome.

“Last July we did impose significant penalties on Leave.EU for committing multiple offences under electoral law at the EU Referendum, including for submitting an incomplete spending return.”

Last year the Electoral Commission also found that the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits. It channelled money to a Canadian data firm linked to Cambridge Analytica to target political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with a youth-focused Brexit campaign, BeLeave.

Six months ago the UK’s data watchdog also issued fines against Leave.EU and Banks’ insurance company, Eldon Insurance — having found what it dubbed as “serious” breaches of electronic marketing laws, including the campaign using insurance customers’ details to unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages.

A spokeswoman for the ICO told us it does not have a statement on Kaiser’s latest evidence but added that its enforcement team “will be reviewing the documents released by DCMS”.

The regulator has been running a wider enquiry into use of personal data for social media political campaigning. And last year the information commissioner called for an ethical pause on its use — warning that trust in democracy risked being undermined.

And while Facebook has since applied a thin film of ‘political ads’ transparency to its platform (which researches continue to warn is not nearly transparent enough to quantify political use of its ads platform), UK election campaign laws have yet to be updated to take account of the digital firehoses now (il)liberally shaping political debate and public opinion at scale.

It’s now more than three years since the UK’s shock vote to leave the European Union — a vote that has so far delivered three years of divisive political chaos, despatching two prime ministers and derailing politics and policymaking as usual.

Many questions remain over a referendum that continues to be dogged by scandals — from breaches of campaign spending; to breaches of data protection and privacy law; and indeed the use of unregulated social media — principally Facebook’s ad platform — as the willing conduit for distributing racist dogwhistle attack ads and political misinformation to whip up anti-EU sentiment among UK voters.

Dark money, dark ads — and the importing of US style campaign tactics into UK, circumventing election and data protection laws by the digital platform backdoor.

This is why the DCMS committee’s preliminary report last year called on the government to take “urgent action” to “build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system”.

The very same minority government, struggling to hold itself together in the face of Brexit chaos, failed to respond to the committee’s concerns — and has now been replaced by a cadre of the most militant Brexit backers, who are applying their hands to the cheap and plentiful digital campaign levers.

The UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, is demonstrably doubling down on political microtargeting: Appointing no less than Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the official Vote Leave campaign, as a special advisor.

At the same time Johnson’s team is firing out a flotilla of Facebook ads — including ads that appear intended to gather voter sentiment for the purpose of crafting individually targeted political messages for any future election campaign.

So it’s full steam ahead with the Facebook ads…

Yet this ‘democratic reset’ is laid right atop the Brexit trainwreck. It’s coupled to it, in fact.

Cummings worked for the self same Vote Leave campaign that the Electoral Commission found illegally funnelled money — via Cambridge Analytica-linked Canadian data firm AggregateIQ — into a blitz of microtargeted Facebook ads intended to sway voter opinion.

Vote Leave also faced questions over its use of Facebook-run football competition promising a £50M prize-pot to fans in exchange for handing over a bunch of personal data ahead of the referendum, including how they planned to vote. Another data grab wrapped in fancy dress — much like GSR’s thisisyourlife quiz app that provided the foundational dataset for CA’s psychological voter profiling work on the Trump campaign.

The elevating of Cummings to be special adviser to the UK PM represents the polar opposite of an ‘ethical pause’ in political microtargeting.

Make no mistake, this is the Brexit campaign playbook — back in operation, now with full-bore pedal to the metal. (With his hands now on the public purse, Johnson has pledged to spend £100M on marketing to sell a ‘no deal Brexit’ to the UK public.)

Kaiser’s latest evidence may not contain a smoking bomb big enough to blast the issue of data-driven and tech giant-enabled voter manipulation into a mainstream consciousness, where it might have the chance to reset the political conscience of a nation — but it puts more flesh on the bones of how the self-styled ‘bad boys of Brexit’ pulled off their shock win.

In The Great Hack the Brexit campaign is couched as the ‘petri dish’ for the data-fuelled targeting deployed by the firm in the 2016 US presidential election — which delivered a similarly shock victory for Trump.

If that’s so, these latest pieces of evidence imply a suggestively close link between CA’s experimental modelling of UKIP supporter data, as it shifted gears to apply its dark arts closer to home than usual, and the models it subsequently built off of US citizens’ data sucked out of Facebook. And that in turn goes some way to explaining the cosiness between Trump and UKIP founder Nigel Farage…

So Donald Trump wants Nigel Farage on any trade negotiating team?

Maybe this is how #Brexit will end? Not with a bang, not with a cliff edge, but with a great Tory shriek of revulsion?#nodealbrexit #ridge #marr #bbcbh #farage pic.twitter.com/iCn6hd9eka

— carol hedges (@carolJhedges) July 28, 2019

  Kaiser ends her letter to DCMS writing: “Given the enormity of the implications of earlier inaccurate conclusions by different investigations, I would hope that Parliament reconsiders the evidence submitted here in good faith. I hope that these ten documents are helpful to your research and furthering the transparency and truth that your investigations are seeking, and that the people of the UK and EU deserve”.

Banks and Wigmore have responded to the publication in their usual style, with a pair of dismissive tweets — questioning Kaiser’s motives for wanting the data to be published and throwing shade on how the evidence was obtained in the first place.

You mean the professional whistleblower who’s making a career of making stuff up with a book deal and failed Netflix film! The witch-hunt so last season !! https://t.co/f2rsPfoDdT

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) July 30, 2019

Desperate stuff @DamianCollins lol know one cares – oh and are those emails obtained illegally – computer misuse act – tut tut stolen data, oh the irony https://t.co/BNWxUJmwoQ

— Andy Wigmore (@andywigmore) July 30, 2019

Brittany Kaiser dumps more evidence of Brexit’s democratic trainwreck A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica.

[digital-strategy]

https://ift.tt/2qBK2PM

The UK’s data watchdog has warned that Facebook must overhaul its privacy-hostile business model or risk burning user trust for good.

Comments she made today have also raised questions over the legality of so-called lookalike audiences to target political ads at users of its platform.

Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham was giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee in the UK parliament this morning. She’s just published her latest report to parliament, on the ICO’s (still ongoing) investigation into the murky world of data use and misuse in political campaigns.

Since May 2017 the watchdog has been pulling on myriad threads attached to the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse scandal — to, in the regulator’s words, “follow the data” across an entire ecosystem of players; from social media firms to data brokers to political parties, and indeed beyond to other still unknown actors with an interest in also getting their hands on people’s data.

Denham readily admitted to the committee today that the sprawling piece of work had opened a major can of worms.

“I think we were astounded by the amount of data that’s held by all of these agencies — not just social media companies but data companies like Cambridge Analytica; political parties the extent of their data; the practices of data brokers,” she said.

“We also looked at universities, and the data practices in the Psychometric Centre, for example, at Cambridge University — and again I think universities have more to do to control data between academic researchers and the same individuals that are then running commercial companies.

“There’s a lot of switching of hats across this whole ecosystem — that I think there needs to be clarity on who’s the data controller and limits on how data can be shared. And that’s a theme that runs through our whole report.”

“The major concern that I have in this investigation is the very disturbing disregard that many of these organizations across the entire ecosystem have for personal privacy of UK citizens and voters. So if you look across the whole system that’s really what this report is all about — and we have to improve these practices for the future,” she added. “We really need to tighten up controls across the entire ecosystem because it matters to our democratic processes.”

Asked whether she would personally trust her data to Facebook, Denham told the committee: “Facebook has a long way to go to change practices to the point where people have deep trust in the platform. So I understand social media sites and platforms and the way we live our lives online now is here to stay but Facebook needs to change, significantly change their business model and their practices to maintain trust.”

“I understand that platforms will continue to play a really important role in people’s lives but they need to take much greater responsibility,” she added when pressed to confirm that she wouldn’t trust Facebook.

A code of practice for lookalike audiences

In another key portion of the session Denham confirmed that inferred data is personal data under the law.(Although of course Facebook has a different legal interpretation of this point.)

Inferred data refers to inferences made about individuals based on data-mining their wider online activity — such as identifying a person’s (non-stated) political views by examining which Facebook Pages they’ve liked. Facebook offers advertisers an interests-based tool to do this — by creating so-called lookalike audiences comprises of users with similar interests.

But if the information commissioner’s view of data protection law is correct, it implies that use of such tools to infer political views of individuals could be in breach of European privacy law. Unless explicit consent is gained beforehand for people’s personal data to be used for that purpose.

“What’s happened here is the model that’s familiar to people in the commercial sector — or behavioural targeting — has been transferred, I think transformed, into the political arena,” said Denham. “And that’s why I called for an ethical pause so that we can get this right.

“I don’t think that we want to use the same model that sells us holidays and shoes and cars to engage with people and voters. I think that people expect more than that. This is a time for a pause, to look at codes, to look at the practices of social media companies, to take action where they’ve broken the law.”

She told MPs that the use of lookalike audience should be included in a Code of Practice which she has previously called for vis-a-vis political campaigns’ use of data tools.

Social media platforms should also disclose the use of lookalike audiences for targeting political ads at users, she said today — a data-point that Facebook has nonetheless omitted to include in its newly launched political ad disclosure system.

“The use of lookalike audiences should be made transparent to the individuals,” she argued. “They need to know that a political party or an MP is making use of lookalike audiences, so I think the lack of transparency is problematic.”

Asked whether the use of Facebook lookalike audiences to target political ads at people who have chosen not to publicly disclose their political views is legal under current EU data protection laws, she declined to make an instant assessment — but told the committee: “We have to look at it in detail under the GDPR but I’m suggesting the public is uncomfortable with lookalike audiences and it needs to be transparent.”

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

Links to known cyber security breaches

The ICO’s latest report to parliament and today’s evidence session also lit up a few new nuggets of intel on the Cambridge Analytica saga, including the fact that some of the misused Facebook data — which had found its way to Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre — was not only accessed by IP addresses that resolve to Russia but some IP addresses have been linked to other known cyber security breaches.

“That’s what we understand,” Denham’s deputy, James Dipple-Johnstone told the committee. “We don’t know who is behind those IP addresses but what we understand is that some of those appear on lists of concern to cyber security professionals by virtue of other types of cyber incidents.”

“We’re still examining exactly what data that was, how secure it was and how anonymized,” he added saying “it’s part of an active line of enquiry”.

The ICO has also passed the information on “to the relevant authorities”, he added.

The regulator also revealed that it now knows exactly who at Facebook was aware of the Cambridge Analytica breach at the earliest instance — saying it has internal emails related to it issue which have “quite a large distribution list”. Although it’s still not been made public whether or not Mark Zuckerberg name is on that list.

Facebook’s CTO previously told the committee the person with ultimate responsibility where data misuse is concerned is Zuckerberg — a point the Facebook founder has also made personally (just never to this committee).

When pressed if Zuckerberg was on the distribution list for the breach emails, Denham declined to confirm so today, saying “we just don’t want to get it wrong”.

The ICO said it would pass the list to the committee in due course.

Which means it shouldn’t be too long before we know exactly who at Facebook was responsible for not disclosing the Cambridge Analytica breach to relevant regulators (and indeed parliamentarians) sooner.

The committee is pressing in this because Facebook gave earlier evidence to its online disinformation enquiry yet omitted to mention the Cambridge Analytica breach entirely. (Hence its accusation that senior management at Facebook deliberately withheld pertinent information.)

Denham agreed it would have been best practice for Facebook to notify relevant regulators at the time it became aware of the data misuse — even without the GDPR’s new legal requirement being in force then.

She also agreed with the committee that it would be a good idea for Zuckerberg to personally testify to the UK parliament.

Last week the committee issued yet another summons for the Facebook founder — this time jointly with a Canadian committee which has also been investigating the same knotted web of social media data misuse.

Though Facebook has yet to confirm whether or not Zuckerberg will make himself available this time.

How to regulate Internet harms?

This summer the ICO announced it would be issuing Facebook with the maximum penalty possible under the country’s old data protection regime for the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

At the same time Denham also called for an ethical pause on the use of social media microtargeting of political ads, saying there was an urgent need for “greater and genuine transparency” about the use of such technologies and techniques to ensure “people have control over their own data and that the law is upheld”.

She reiterated that call for an ethical pause today.

She also said the fine the ICO handed Facebook last month for the Cambridge Analytica breach would have been “significantly larger” under the rebooted privacy regime ushered in by the pan-EU GDPR framework this May — adding that it would be interesting to see how Facebook responds to the fine (i.e. whether it pays up or tries to appeal).

“We have evidence… that Cambridge Analytica may have partially deleted some of the data but even as recently as 2018, Spring, some of the data was still there at Cambridge Analytica,” she told the committee. “So the follow up was less than robust. And that’s one of the reasons that we fined Facebook £500,000.”

Data deletion assurances that Facebook had sought from various entities after the data misuse scandal blew up don’t appear to be worth the paper they’re written on — with the ICO also noting that some of these confirmations had not even been signed.

Dipple-Johnstone also said it believes that a number of additional individuals and academic institutions received “parts” of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data-set — i.e. additional to the multiple known entities in the saga so far (such as GSR’s Aleksandr Kogan, and CA whistleblower Chris Wylie).

“We’re examining exactly what data has gone where,” he said, saying it’s looking into “about half a dozen” entities — but declining to name names while its enquiry remains ongoing.

Asked for her views on how social media should be regulated by policymakers to rein in data abuses and misuses, Denham suggested a system-based approach that looks at effectiveness and outcomes — saying it boils down to accountability.

“What is needed for tech companies — they’re already subject to data protection law but when it comes to the broader set of Internet harms that your committee is speaking about — misinformation, disinformation, harm to children in their development, all of these kinds of harms — I think what’s needed is an accountability approach where parliament sets the objectives and the outcomes that are needed for the tech companies to follow; that a Code of Practice is developed by a regulator; backstopped by a regulator,” she suggested.

“What I think’s really important is the regulators looking at the effectiveness of systems like takedown processes; recognizing bots and fake accounts and disinformation — rather than the regulator taking individual complaints. So I think it needs to be a system approach.”

“I think the time for self regulation is over. I think that ship has sailed,” she also told the committee.

On the regulatory powers front, Denham was generally upbeat about the potential of the new GDPR framework to curb bad data practices — pointing out that not only does it allow for supersized fines but companies can be ordered to stop processing data, which she suggested is an even more potent tool to control rogue data-miners.

She also said suggested another new power — to go in and inspect companies and conduct data audits — will help it get results.

But she said the ICO may need to ask parliament for another tool to be able to carry out effective data investigations. “One of the areas that we may be coming back to talk to parliament, to talk to government about is the ability to compel individuals to be interviewed,” she said, adding: “We have been frustrated by that aspect of our investigation.”

Both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, and Kogan, the academic who built the quiz app used to extract Facebook user data so it could be processed for political ad targeting purposes, had refused to appear for an interview with it under caution, she said today.

On the wider challenge of regulating a full range of “Internet harms” — spanning the spread of misinformation, disinformation and also offensive user-generated content — Denham suggested a hybrid regulatory model might ultimately be needed to tackle this, suggesting the ICO and communications regular Ofcom might work together.

“It’s a very complex area. No country has tackled this yet,” she conceded, noting the controversy around Germany’s social media take down law, and adding: “It’s very challenging for policymakers… Balancing privacy rights with freedom of speech, freedom of expression. These are really difficult areas.”

Asked what her full ‘can of worms’ investigation has highlighted for her, Denham summed it up as: “A disturbing amount of disrespect for personal data of voters and prospective voters.”

“The main purpose of this [investigation] is to pull back the curtain and show the public what’s happening with their personal data,” she added. “The politicians, the policymakers need to think about this too — stronger rules and stronger laws.”

One committee member suggestively floated the idea of social media platforms being required to have an ICO officer inside their organizations — to grease their compliance with the law.

Smiling, Denham responded that it would probably make for an uncomfortable prospect on both sides.

via TechCrunch

[theinvinciblenoob]

The UK’s data watchdog has warned that Facebook must overhaul its privacy-hostile business model or risk burning user trust for good.

Comments she made today have also raised questions over the legality of so-called lookalike audiences to target political ads at users of its platform.

Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham was giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee in the UK parliament this morning. She’s just published her latest report to parliament, on the ICO’s (still ongoing) investigation into the murky world of data use and misuse in political campaigns.

Since May 2017 the watchdog has been pulling on myriad threads attached to the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse scandal — to, in the regulator’s words, “follow the data” across an entire ecosystem of players; from social media firms to data brokers to political parties, and indeed beyond to other still unknown actors with an interest in also getting their hands on people’s data.

Denham readily admitted to the committee today that the sprawling piece of work had opened a major can of worms.

“I think we were astounded by the amount of data that’s held by all of these agencies — not just social media companies but data companies like Cambridge Analytica; political parties the extent of their data; the practices of data brokers,” she said.

“We also looked at universities, and the data practices in the Psychometric Centre, for example, at Cambridge University — and again I think universities have more to do to control data between academic researchers and the same individuals that are then running commercial companies.

“There’s a lot of switching of hats across this whole ecosystem — that I think there needs to be clarity on who’s the data controller and limits on how data can be shared. And that’s a theme that runs through our whole report.”

“The major concern that I have in this investigation is the very disturbing disregard that many of these organizations across the entire ecosystem have for personal privacy of UK citizens and voters. So if you look across the whole system that’s really what this report is all about — and we have to improve these practices for the future,” she added. “We really need to tighten up controls across the entire ecosystem because it matters to our democratic processes.”

Asked whether she would personally trust her data to Facebook, Denham told the committee: “Facebook has a long way to go to change practices to the point where people have deep trust in the platform. So I understand social media sites and platforms and the way we live our lives online now is here to stay but Facebook needs to change, significantly change their business model and their practices to maintain trust.”

“I understand that platforms will continue to play a really important role in people’s lives but they need to take much greater responsibility,” she added when pressed to confirm that she wouldn’t trust Facebook.

A code of practice for lookalike audiences

In another key portion of the session Denham confirmed that inferred data is personal data under the law.(Although of course Facebook has a different legal interpretation of this point.)

Inferred data refers to inferences made about individuals based on data-mining their wider online activity — such as identifying a person’s (non-stated) political views by examining which Facebook Pages they’ve liked. Facebook offers advertisers an interests-based tool to do this — by creating so-called lookalike audiences comprises of users with similar interests.

But if the information commissioner’s view of data protection law is correct, it implies that use of such tools to infer political views of individuals could be in breach of European privacy law. Unless explicit consent is gained beforehand for people’s personal data to be used for that purpose.

“What’s happened here is the model that’s familiar to people in the commercial sector — or behavioural targeting — has been transferred, I think transformed, into the political arena,” said Denham. “And that’s why I called for an ethical pause so that we can get this right.

“I don’t think that we want to use the same model that sells us holidays and shoes and cars to engage with people and voters. I think that people expect more than that. This is a time for a pause, to look at codes, to look at the practices of social media companies, to take action where they’ve broken the law.”

She told MPs that the use of lookalike audience should be included in a Code of Practice which she has previously called for vis-a-vis political campaigns’ use of data tools.

Social media platforms should also disclose the use of lookalike audiences for targeting political ads at users, she said today — a data-point that Facebook has nonetheless omitted to include in its newly launched political ad disclosure system.

“The use of lookalike audiences should be made transparent to the individuals,” she argued. “They need to know that a political party or an MP is making use of lookalike audiences, so I think the lack of transparency is problematic.”

Asked whether the use of Facebook lookalike audiences to target political ads at people who have chosen not to publicly disclose their political views is legal under current EU data protection laws, she declined to make an instant assessment — but told the committee: “We have to look at it in detail under the GDPR but I’m suggesting the public is uncomfortable with lookalike audiences and it needs to be transparent.”

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

Links to known cyber security breaches

The ICO’s latest report to parliament and today’s evidence session also lit up a few new nuggets of intel on the Cambridge Analytica saga, including the fact that some of the misused Facebook data — which had found its way to Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre — was not only accessed by IP addresses that resolve to Russia but some IP addresses have been linked to other known cyber security breaches.

“That’s what we understand,” Denham’s deputy, James Dipple-Johnstone told the committee. “We don’t know who is behind those IP addresses but what we understand is that some of those appear on lists of concern to cyber security professionals by virtue of other types of cyber incidents.”

“We’re still examining exactly what data that was, how secure it was and how anonymized,” he added saying “it’s part of an active line of enquiry”.

The ICO has also passed the information on “to the relevant authorities”, he added.

The regulator also revealed that it now knows exactly who at Facebook was aware of the Cambridge Analytica breach at the earliest instance — saying it has internal emails related to it issue which have “quite a large distribution list”. Although it’s still not been made public whether or not Mark Zuckerberg name is on that list.

Facebook’s CTO previously told the committee the person with ultimate responsibility where data misuse is concerned is Zuckerberg — a point the Facebook founder has also made personally (just never to this committee).

When pressed if Zuckerberg was on the distribution list for the breach emails, Denham declined to confirm so today, saying “we just don’t want to get it wrong”.

The ICO said it would pass the list to the committee in due course.

Which means it shouldn’t be too long before we know exactly who at Facebook was responsible for not disclosing the Cambridge Analytica breach to relevant regulators (and indeed parliamentarians) sooner.

The committee is pressing in this because Facebook gave earlier evidence to its online disinformation enquiry yet omitted to mention the Cambridge Analytica breach entirely. (Hence its accusation that senior management at Facebook deliberately withheld pertinent information.)

Denham agreed it would have been best practice for Facebook to notify relevant regulators at the time it became aware of the data misuse — even without the GDPR’s new legal requirement being in force then.

She also agreed with the committee that it would be a good idea for Zuckerberg to personally testify to the UK parliament.

Last week the committee issued yet another summons for the Facebook founder — this time jointly with a Canadian committee which has also been investigating the same knotted web of social media data misuse.

Though Facebook has yet to confirm whether or not Zuckerberg will make himself available this time.

How to regulate Internet harms?

This summer the ICO announced it would be issuing Facebook with the maximum penalty possible under the country’s old data protection regime for the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

At the same time Denham also called for an ethical pause on the use of social media microtargeting of political ads, saying there was an urgent need for “greater and genuine transparency” about the use of such technologies and techniques to ensure “people have control over their own data and that the law is upheld”.

She reiterated that call for an ethical pause today.

She also said the fine the ICO handed Facebook last month for the Cambridge Analytica breach would have been “significantly larger” under the rebooted privacy regime ushered in by the pan-EU GDPR framework this May — adding that it would be interesting to see how Facebook responds to the fine (i.e. whether it pays up or tries to appeal).

“We have evidence… that Cambridge Analytica may have partially deleted some of the data but even as recently as 2018, Spring, some of the data was still there at Cambridge Analytica,” she told the committee. “So the follow up was less than robust. And that’s one of the reasons that we fined Facebook £500,000.”

Data deletion assurances that Facebook had sought from various entities after the data misuse scandal blew up don’t appear to be worth the paper they’re written on — with the ICO also noting that some of these confirmations had not even been signed.

Dipple-Johnstone also said it believes that a number of additional individuals and academic institutions received “parts” of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data-set — i.e. additional to the multiple known entities in the saga so far (such as GSR’s Aleksandr Kogan, and CA whistleblower Chris Wylie).

“We’re examining exactly what data has gone where,” he said, saying it’s looking into “about half a dozen” entities — but declining to name names while its enquiry remains ongoing.

Asked for her views on how social media should be regulated by policymakers to rein in data abuses and misuses, Denham suggested a system-based approach that looks at effectiveness and outcomes — saying it boils down to accountability.

“What is needed for tech companies — they’re already subject to data protection law but when it comes to the broader set of Internet harms that your committee is speaking about — misinformation, disinformation, harm to children in their development, all of these kinds of harms — I think what’s needed is an accountability approach where parliament sets the objectives and the outcomes that are needed for the tech companies to follow; that a Code of Practice is developed by a regulator; backstopped by a regulator,” she suggested.

“What I think’s really important is the regulators looking at the effectiveness of systems like takedown processes; recognizing bots and fake accounts and disinformation — rather than the regulator taking individual complaints. So I think it needs to be a system approach.”

“I think the time for self regulation is over. I think that ship has sailed,” she also told the committee.

On the regulatory powers front, Denham was generally upbeat about the potential of the new GDPR framework to curb bad data practices — pointing out that not only does it allow for supersized fines but companies can be ordered to stop processing data, which she suggested is an even more potent tool to control rogue data-miners.

She also said suggested another new power — to go in and inspect companies and conduct data audits — will help it get results.

But she said the ICO may need to ask parliament for another tool to be able to carry out effective data investigations. “One of the areas that we may be coming back to talk to parliament, to talk to government about is the ability to compel individuals to be interviewed,” she said, adding: “We have been frustrated by that aspect of our investigation.”

Both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, and Kogan, the academic who built the quiz app used to extract Facebook user data so it could be processed for political ad targeting purposes, had refused to appear for an interview with it under caution, she said today.

On the wider challenge of regulating a full range of “Internet harms” — spanning the spread of misinformation, disinformation and also offensive user-generated content — Denham suggested a hybrid regulatory model might ultimately be needed to tackle this, suggesting the ICO and communications regular Ofcom might work together.

“It’s a very complex area. No country has tackled this yet,” she conceded, noting the controversy around Germany’s social media take down law, and adding: “It’s very challenging for policymakers… Balancing privacy rights with freedom of speech, freedom of expression. These are really difficult areas.”

Asked what her full ‘can of worms’ investigation has highlighted for her, Denham summed it up as: “A disturbing amount of disrespect for personal data of voters and prospective voters.”

“The main purpose of this [investigation] is to pull back the curtain and show the public what’s happening with their personal data,” she added. “The politicians, the policymakers need to think about this too — stronger rules and stronger laws.”

One committee member suggestively floated the idea of social media platforms being required to have an ICO officer inside their organizations — to grease their compliance with the law.

Smiling, Denham responded that it would probably make for an uncomfortable prospect on both sides.

via TechCrunch