All of this Facebook hubub and broad public outcry is really all owed to the election of Trump. If Trump handnt leveraged CA, we’d still all be happy and fat on out individual bliss boxes – patting ourselves on the back – because our side [a la Obama] was smart enough to use this technology to our advantage.
Now when the enemy has (and use) the same technology, we’re forced to cry foul. Demand oversight. Demand regulation.
The greater public is OK with this technology. They’re Ok with sweeping data collection (Snowden Files). They’re OK with mining personal data (Facebook, Google, etc). Thy’re OK with 1984, so long as it’s their sides version of 1984.
It takes a Trump for your side to realize how shitty things got while you were enamored with charisma on your bliss box.
I think the best thing that has come out of the election of Donald Trump is that many people are now excited about the idea of constitutionally limiting the power of the executive branch. That idea seemed to have been forgotten for the past few administrations. Even when I agreed with Obama or Bush, I was very disappointed when they would use innovative methods to single-handedly override the will of congress or the judiciary.
Not really. Remember that whole, "Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes" thing.. Yet instead of actually doing this, they continue to essentially outsource their power, and responsibility to the administrative state. I mean DT almost blatantly came out and said, well these new tariffs aren't exactly because of national security..
Don't kid yourself, both parties are essentially the same, who feeds them just look different. On top of that, Congress continues to cede more powers to the administrative state.. It becomes all about control really..
The primary reason no one should have been worried when DT got elected is that for a great many years, the system was designed that no matter who is driving the ship, they won't sink it because they don't have that power (same goes for BO & GWB). But for years we've been pushing for more centralized authority with power resting at the figurehead, that really ramped up after '01, and later BO put it on steroids.
As private institutions fall away for newer generations, the govt becomes "something we all do together", and the primary solution for having someone else take care of societal problems for us, after all, it's what we pay taxes for...
Congress keeps outsourcing it's responsibilities to the president, no matter what letter, R or D is behind the name on the office door. Tariffs, wars, weaponized govt agencies, privacy rights, drone strikes, surveillance, and on and on...
This isn't a problem of the system, it's merely a symptom of the current state of our society and I personally don't think whether it's tariffs or privacy, little will change in a direction that we would like. The people want easy solutions, they want someone to take care of problems for them. That's exactly what we are getting.
I wasn’t. If Congress is being obstructionist and petty, as they undoubtedly were during the Obama years, the executive branch still needs to do its job, which is to lead the country forward.
That said, I agree with the spirit of your post, which is that every now and then we should scale that power back.
Are you sure about that? People were not happy with Wikileaks revelations and Obama was forced to end or strip down some NSA programs.
Also, your whole argument says “People are not happy with what’s going on only because they are facing the consequences of it”.
Duh?
It was never easy to explain why privacy matters, the argument that if you are not doing anything bad then you don’t have anything to hide was good enough for many.
Now, things are different. We have demonstrable implications of the privacy violations.
I think it’s not a Trump thing, if Hillary was the smarter one to use computational propaganda we would probably still have an expose considering that the population of Democrats and Republicans are roughly the same and all have been done by a state funded British TV anyway.
I don’t think that you’re claiming victimhood rightfully. The privacy discussions didn’t start with Trump.
>The outleash regarding collecting personal data for election fiddling started with Trump and Brexit
Definitely false, Apple even built business model around it and actively promoting it's privacy as a selling point over Android.
But surely Trump amplified it because, unlike Obama, he is very divisive.
Anyway, if you happen to have a time machine I will happily jump in with you and go back in time and warn against the dangers of data hoarding and privacy violations but I doubt that it will be effective because it's Obama and his campaign wasn't divisive so we will end up with the argument that if you didn't do anything wrong there's nothing to hide.
We wouldn't be able to demonstrate that with privacy violations you can divide a continent(Brexit) or make Trump a president.
Besides, I'm really not happy to approach the problem from the "What about Obama" angle. Is "what about" even a useful argument? What's to be achieved if you are right that Obama indeed did the exact same thing? Should we just go ahead and fill out the missing information on our Facebook profiles because Obama did it too?
To clarify, the general public outlash started after Trump and Brexit.
I reacted back in 2012 to the fact that Obama's campaign bragged openly about doing same thing. Back then the problem statement was a bit newer to me, I guess I was a bit more sensitive to back then.
The few articles back then praised them about this.
Disclosure: I don't really mind that Trump became president or that UK decided to leave EU - wouldn't have cared if the outcome was the opposite either. It's just different approaches of running countries with different pros and cons.
Look, using data to target audience is nothing new. That's the promise of... everyone in marketing? Does Nielsen ring any bells?
"Obama and Trump both used user data" is equal to "Reddit and Hacker News are the same, both use upvotes".
The way that data is used is what all matters. The risk is to hoard and distribute data, the disaster is to use that data to manipulate the population to do something horrible(I'm not necessarily saying that Trump is horrible but there are many people who see it that way).
And...
>To clarify, the general public outlash started after Trump and Brexit.
You'll need to prove that one because we had multiple products and a giant corporation(Apple) targeting privacy cautious audience before all this happened.
While the criticism directed at social media is certainly warranted. I feel compelled to take exception with your reliance on false equivalence. It's kinda qualitatively different when you're actively engaging in illegal activity while working hand in glove with a clandestine foreign intelligence service to undermine your own countries democratic elections on behalf of an adversarial foreign nation state. If you can't see the difference, then keep at it. I assure you it's there. But if you already know that then you go ahead and keep explaining to folks how apples and oranges are the same things because they're both round fruit.
Not really, it's common knowledge. There are a pile of dead Russians ex-IC people all over Europe, the existing Mueller indictments, the Crowdstrike DNC Russian APT attributions, all of our own lying eyes...
Funny, I must have missed the Mueller indictments relating to collusion or coordination of any kind (it's coming any day now, though, right?). I've seen a number of process charges. I've seen a handful of Russians charged with, essentially, social media ads and trolling and setting up a Michael Moore rally in NYC. And, of course, Manafort, who is dirty AF (right up there with the Podestas, the Clintons and the rest), but nothing relating to the Trump campaign. And if dead men do tell tales, as you seem to imply, I would think Seth Rich would have quite a story indeed.
>"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
But your opponent is correct. Manafort indictment is about laundering money he made in Ukraine before 2014. It really has nothing to do with him being a campaign manager in 2016. Moreover, I bet this activities as a campaign manager were examined under microscope, and nothing shady was found, otherwise he would be indicted.
Both of those are specific legal definitions. Could you please elaborate on what your point is?
We can only speculate, but if you lie to the FBI, I would assume it's very likely that you have something to hide. Whether those plea deals led further down the rabbit hole to people who were guilty of further crimes we don't know. Maybe a few of them were on that list. Maybe some will get revealed later. I'm hopeful we will uncover the truth in time.
In late September 2016, Cambridge and other data vendors were submitting bids to the Trump campaign. Then-candidate Trump's campaign used Cambridge Analytica during the primaries and in the summer because it was never certain the Republican National Committee would be a willing, cooperative partner. Cambridge Analytica instead was a hedge against the RNC, in case it wouldn't share its data.
The crucial decision was made in late September or early October when Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump's digital guru on the 2016 campaign, decided to utilize just the RNC data for the general election and used nothing from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica's, and when it was clear the RNC would be a willing partner, Mr. Trump's campaign was able to rely solely on the RNC.
That might be technically correct, but CA was unquestionably working with SuperPACs[1] behind the scenes to get Trump elected in November. CA was particularly proud of it's crooked Hillary campaign ("the OO of crooked was a pair of handcuffs").
Did you mean to reply some other comment? I never volunteered my opinion on SuperPACs one way or the other (for you to agree with). In that light your comment is an off-topic non-sequitur.
Among other things, CA and Bannon tested out slogans such as "deep state" "drain the swamp" on the Facebook accounts in 2014 to see what would be most effective in motivating voters for Clinton opponents and discouraging Clinton voter from going to the polls. This shows that one should not be limiting a query to when they started working for Trump.
Obviously CA was not infallible, they could only get Ted Cruz to second against Trump among GOP candidates in that initial mad scrum, Cruz thought he could win with only evangelical voters in the primaries based on what they looked at with previous GOP primaries and was blindsided by Trump coming at the primaries from a different angle.
What's ironic is that Trump didn't use CA to win the election. CA was used a bit in the primaries but after that the campaign only solicited a bid as a hedge in case the RNC didn't share its data. CA wasn't used for the general election.
On the other hand, the Obama campaign used sneaky Terms and Conditions to suck up friend lists and create a national social graph for the sole purpose of winning the General Election.
Where did you get that information? Channel4 is reporting that Mercer donated to the Trump campaign on the condition that he would take on Steve Bannon and hire CA. Steven Bannon joined the Trump campaign in August 2016, after Trump won the primaries in May.
They did hire CA in order to get Mercer's support and donations - they just didn't actually use their data once Trump had access to the more accurate (and more old-fashioned) central RNC database, and apparently never used the psychographic data at the heart of the controversy at all. See e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o...
Like, I know the news media have spun the fact that one of Trump's big, important donors made them hire CA as proof they relied on CA to win the election, but really it should be the opposite - it should call into question whether their hiring was justified by what they offered the campaign.
I have no idea who could conceivably be taking issue with your concise and correct post (given the apparent downvotes). The dates don't lie. What was Felix Sater's role at that point, too?
Are you saying the tweets in the article are not genuine or the article is untrue? It would probably be better if you engaged with the content of the story rather than virtue signal.
I agree somehow with you, but Obama didn't push it that far though (probably because that wasn't possible yet at the time).
This is typically what I cannot stand anymore in American politics, it has become so much "We" against "them" that each side gets the pitchfork out for things they would be perfectly fine to do if their side did it
Are you saying the tweets in the article are not genuine or the article is untrue? It would probably be better if you engaged with the content of the story rather than virtue signal.
Did you even read the story? It contains screenshots of tweets from the Carol Davidsen, Media Director at Obama for America. Do those screenshots magically become true when reproduced on a different website? The fact that you can only complain about the website I linked to, rather than the substance of the story, only proves my point.
The data collection isn't the concern. The criminal concern is federal election finance laws potentially being broken, as well as foreigners working for the campaign. There are very real and very serious potential issues here that are being brought up.
With all due respect, I think you are missing the point altogether. Tools are created for most part with good intentions. What you do with those tools is what separates good from bad. Obama used the same tools to inspire a generation. Deeper penetration of technology is inevitable and there will continue to be bad actors who will exploit those tools to their benefit. Unfortunately, the negative narrative won over inpiration this time. Making tools the scapegoat is not the solution. We need to be more connected as a society than ever before. We have a bigger fish to fry, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity and without being connected it will be impossible to work together.
But he didn’t use the same tools. Obama had people via an app that was a campaign app, so people understood what they were installing. CA took a psychological test admin’d over mechanical turk, expanded it to people beyond those they paid, and ran with that. No one knew it had a political purpose.
Now when the enemy has (and use) the same technology, we’re forced to cry foul. Demand oversight. Demand regulation.
The greater public is OK with this technology. They’re Ok with sweeping data collection (Snowden Files). They’re OK with mining personal data (Facebook, Google, etc). Thy’re OK with 1984, so long as it’s their sides version of 1984.
It takes a Trump for your side to realize how shitty things got while you were enamored with charisma on your bliss box.
Edit: typing on my phone. Fixing grammar.