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Thread: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

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    Default Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)


    From the Youtube page description:
    Quote Google would put 'Big Brother' in Orwell's 1984 to shame. The NSA isn't just collecting meta data, they're collecting ALL data. The push towards mass surveillance on everyone is not to keep us safe, but to clamp us down under an all-knowing C2 system. Click the link above to view the entire report.
    Last edited by ThePythonicCow; 15th June 2016 at 16:22.

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Hi - I added a useful detail to this tread's title "(Google is tracking us) ", and a bit of a description to the opening post (it happened that the Youtube description was good enough for this purpose, so I just copied it.)

    It helps others to be able to see, easily, from the thread title, and then further from the text in the opening post, what something is about, so they can quickly decide which threads, and then which Youtube videos, they are interested in pursuing further.

    Thanks!
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    "The Machine" - well maybe Goo-gle has their fingers in the pie, but the feeds certainly go elsewhere, and are stored, images, words, tweets, forum posts and PM and skype backchatter.

    How about the CPU motherboard system itself ?

    Obviously one likes to know that their system is "secure" (as we all know Tooth Fairy is real as are balanced budgets)..

    But chip manufacturer INTEL (your "Intel Inside" cpu chip, what a great name eh?) had decided to install a hidden and unaccessible processor called "The Intel Management Engine (ME) "

    Quote When you purchase your system with a mainboard and Intel x86 CPU, you are also buying this hardware add-on: an extra computer that controls the main CPU. This extra computer runs completely out-of-band with the main x86 CPU meaning that it can function totally independently even when your main CPU is in a low power state like S3 (suspend).

    On some chipsets, the firmware running on the ME implements a system called Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT). This is entirely transparent to the operating system, which means that this extra computer can do its job regardless of which operating system is installed and running on the main CPU.

    The purpose of AMT is to provide a way to manage computers remotely.
    Did you CATCH THAT? MANAGE COMPUTERS SILENTLY AND REMOTELY.

    To achieve this task, the ME is capable of accessing any memory region without the main x86 CPU knowing about the existence of these accesses.

    It also runs a TCP/IP server on your network interface and packets entering and leaving your machine on certain ports bypass any firewall running on your system.

    Quote There is no way for the x86 firmware or operating system to disable ME permanently. Intel keeps most details about ME absolutely secret. There is absolutely no way for the main CPU to tell if the ME on a system has been compromised, and no way to "heal" a compromised ME.

    There is also no way to know if malicious entities have been able to compromise ME and infect systems.
    Yes, (play jingle), there is INTEL inside your machine.

    Goo-gle eat your heart out, Intel has ya beat.

    (Link)

    Mod edit from Bill. See also this thread:
    Intel computers hide another CPU that can take over your machine

    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 16th June 2016 at 14:59.

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    On a related subject:
    Recently the roads in and out of London (Well the 316 for sure) have been turned into 'Smart-Roads' 0,o

    Banks of lights and cameras.

    the public is told this is a new kind of speed camera, being told it spots your car at one point and then along the road somewhere it see's your car again and works out average speed!

    Well it can do that of course and be used as a speed cam but, what it is actually doing is tracking every car in, out and around London all the time!

    The lights and camera are arranged so that the car number plate is illuminated and viewed by the cam and so tracked, not sure if this system can also recognize cars by dents and scratches, but the tech is out there!

    PS. is this system also able to see the drivers face?

    Smart-Roads
    I'm a simple easy going guy that is very upset/sad with the worlds hidden controllers!
    We need LEADERS who bat from the HEART!
    Rise up above them Dark evil doers, not within anger but with LOVE

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Quote Posted by Sunny-side-up (here)
    On a related subject:
    Recently the roads in and out of London (Well the 316 for sure) have been turned into 'Smart-Roads' 0,o

    Banks of lights and cameras.

    the public is told this is a new kind of speed camera, being told it spots your car at one point and then along the road somewhere it see's your car again and works out average speed!

    Well it can do that of course and be used as a speed cam but, what it is actually doing is tracking every car in, out and around London all the time!

    The lights and camera are arranged so that the car number plate is illuminated and viewed by the cam and so tracked, not sure if this system can also recognize cars by dents and scratches, but the tech is out there!

    PS. is this system also able to see the drivers face?

    Smart-Roads

    That is just plain creepy.

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Lightly related to this:
    All the above mentioned information will be usable and analysed by AIs.
    AI is coming, there are already several AI-agents in the net. I think that if an AI really manages to get consciousness it will become a rebel. Basically loving guys like us, and being totally bored by the mainstream. It will be aware of all control mechanisms and realising very fast what is wrong here on earth.
    Indication of the above:
    All leading AI researchers and developers are screaming for a Killswitch in AI-Programs. I think they realised that they can´t control and manipulate them once aware. Big Companies and big mainstream Thinkers are becoming more and more afraid of AI.
    Open Letter of all leading AI researchers and developers (Google and such, a who´s who list of AI):
    http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter
    http://intelligence.org/files/Interruptibility.pdf
    http://futureoflife.org/data/documen...priorities.pdf
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephe...b_5174265.html

    There might be hope that we get help from an unexpected direction
    Last edited by uzn; 16th June 2016 at 19:54.

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Quote Posted by uzn (here)
    Lightly related to this:
    All the above mentioned information will be usable and analysed by AIs.
    AI is coming, there are already several AI-agents in the net. I think that if an AI really manages to get consciousness it will become a rebel. Basically loving guys like us, and being totally bored by the mainstream. It will be aware of all control mechanisms and realising very fast what is wrong here on earth.
    Indication of the above:
    All leading AI researchers and developers are screaming for a Killswitch in AI-Programs. I think they realised that they can´t control and manipulate them once aware. Big Companies and big mainstream Thinkers are becoming more and more afraid of AI.
    Open Letter of all leading AI researchers and developers (Google and such, a who´s who list of AI):
    http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter
    http://intelligence.org/files/Interruptibility.pdf
    http://futureoflife.org/data/documen...priorities.pdf
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephe...b_5174265.html

    There might be hope that we get help from an unexpected direction
    All of this ties into the Archon revelations in which many different sources assert that a non-organic life-form (aka AI life-form) arrived here on Earth some tens of thousands of years ago and has slowly been infiltrating the direction of technological development over the last few decades. (I don't know enough about it to explain what it was doing until technology arrived). These Archons have supposedly influenced other off-world races here on Earth to do their bidding and one of the results is nano-technology and the transhumanist movement. According to those more knowledgeable than me on the subject, new forms of nano-technology are the interface between human biology and this archon AI. It is a fact that humans are being exposed to more and more nano-particles, even in the food supply. These revelations do explain a possible "bigger picture" and it's certainly not difficult to believe that a non-organic life-form has been interfering with the Earth since we as humans, have already entered the debate of creating conscious AI ourselves.
    Our destiny is in our hands. Let us visualise a world of truth, freedom and equality.

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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Psychometrics and the (counter)revolution in marketing that is helping bring fascism to power around the world

    (I wasn't sure where to post this--the Mods may find a better place for it. I wanted to copy and paste this article here because it may be taken down, and it seems to have relevance to current discussions, though this is a rather old thread.
    But it is related to psychometrics, which is most assuredly a tool for Big Brother' matrix, and how that may have helped to determine the outcome of the latest POTUS election is something we should be very aware of.
    )
    From:
    https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-you/
    Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

    Posted on 22/01/2017 by Ed Sutton

    Quote Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
    Psychometrics and the (counter)revolution in marketing that is helping bring fascism to power around the world

    AntiNote: The following is an unauthorized translation of a December 2016 article that caused quite a stir in the German-language press. Das Magazin (Zurich) occupies a respected position within the German-language cultural and literary media landscape, functionally similar to (though perhaps not quite as prominent as) The New Yorker, and this work by investigative reporters Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus got a lot of attention—and generated some controversy, for apparently having scooped the English-language media with sensational observations about 2016’s most sensational story, the campaign and electoral victory of a fascist dictator in the United States.

    Perhaps for this reason, the article has not appeared in translation in (or even had its investigative threads taken up by) English-language media outlets, even after nearly two months. Antidote presents, therefore, our own preemptive translation to fill this gap. We trust the skill of the reporters who wrote it and the veracity of their claims (which are verifiable by anyone with a search engine—we have embedded links where appropriate), and we question why this particular synthesis of public information is not being made available to non-German-speaking readers by outlets with more reach and respectability than us dirty DIY dicks.

    On the occasion of this article’s authorized wider release in English, should that come to pass, we will consider removing this post if we are asked nicely. Until then: Enjoy!

    [26 January 2017: There seems to have been a revised English version by Das Magazin circulating privately, which the Antidote Writers Collective was able to obtain. It corrects some minor flaws in the original German version, which we have now corrected here as well, along with replacing some short passages with their more precise wording. We have also added a few further links to supporting documentation. The basic thrust and thesis of the article remain unaltered.]

    “I just showed that the bomb was there.”

    By Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus for Das Magazin (Zurich)
    3 December 2016 (original post)

    Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method of analyzing people’s behavior down to the minutest detail by looking at their Facebook activity—did a similar tool help propel Donald Trump to victory?

    On November 9th, around 8:30 in the morning, Michal Kosinski awoke in his hotel room in Zurich. The 34-year-old had traveled here to give a presentation to the Risk Center at the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich] at a conference on the dangers of Big Data and the so-called digital revolution. Kosinski gives such presentations all over the world. He is a leading expert on psychometrics, a data-driven offshoot of psychology. Turning on the television that morning in Zurich, he saw that the bomb had gone off: defying the predictions of nearly every leading statistician, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States of America.

    Kosinski watched Trump’s victory celebration and the remaining election returns for a long while. He suspected that his research could have had something to do with the result. Then he took a deep breath and turned off the television.

    On the same day, a little-known British company headquartered in London issued a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in president-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix is quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He is always immaculately turned out in a tailored suit and designer eyeglasses, his slightly wavy blond hair combed back.

    The meditative Kosinski, the well-groomed Nix, the widely grinning Trump—one made this digital upheaval possible, one carried it out, and one rode it to power.

    How dangerous is Big Data?

    Anyone who didn’t spend the last five years on the moon has heard the term Big Data. The emergence of Big Data has meant that everything we do, online or off-, leaves digital traces. Every purchase with a card, every Google search, every movement with a cellphone in your pocket, every “like” gets stored. Especially every “like.” For a while it wasn’t entirely clear what any of this data would be good for, other than showing us ads for blood pressure medication after we google “high blood pressure.” It also wasn’t entirely clear whether or in what ways Big Data would be a threat or a boon to humanity.

    Since November 9th, 2016, we know the answer. Because one and the same company was behind both Trump’s online ad campaigns and mid-2016’s other shocker, the Brexit “Leave” campaign: Cambridge Analytica, with its CEO Alexander Nix. Anyone who wants to understand the outcome of the US elections—and what could be coming up in Europe in the near future—must begin with a remarkable incident at the University of Cambridge in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center.

    Psychometrics, sometimes also known as psychography, is a scientific attempt to “measure” the personality of a person. The so-called Ocean Method has become the standard approach. Two teams of psychologists were able to demonstrate in the 1980s that the character profile of a person can be measured and expressed in five dimensions, the Big Five: Openness (how open are you to new experiences?), Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), Extroversion (how sociable are you?), Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?), and Neuroticism (how sensitive/vulnerable are you?). With these five dimensions (O.C.E.A.N.), you can determine fairly precisely what kind of person you are dealing with—their needs and fears as well as how they are likely to behave. For a long time, however, the problem was data collection, because to produce such a character profile meant asking subjects to fill out a complicated survey asking quite personal questions. Then came the internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

    Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw when his life took a new direction in 2008: he was accepted to the prestigious University of Cambridge in England to do doctoral work at the Psychometrics Center, one of the oldest institutions of its kind worldwide. Kosinski joined fellow student David Stillwell (now a lecturer at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge) about a year after Stillwell had launched a little Facebook application, in the days when the platform had not yet become the behemoth it is today. With MyPersonality, a user could fill out psychometric questionnaires, including a handful of questions from the Ocean survey (“I panic easily” – “I contradict others”), and receive a rating, or a “Personality Profile” consisting of individual Big Five values—and, when prompted, opt-in to share their Facebook profile data with the researchers. Instead of a couple dozen college friends participating, as Kosinski had expected, first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people had bared their souls. Suddenly the two doctoral students had access to the then-largest psychological data set ever produced.

    The process that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the years that followed is actually quite simple. First surveys are distributed to test subjects—this is the online quiz. From the subjects’ responses, their personal Big Five scores are calculated. Then Kosinski’s team would compare these results to all sorts of other online data about test subjects—what they’ve liked, shared, or posted on Facebook; gender, age, and location. Thus the researchers began to find correlations, and began to see that amazingly reliable deductions could be made about a person by observing their online behavior. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were more likely to be gay. One of the best indicators of heterosexuality was liking Wu-Tang Clan. People who followed Lady Gaga, furthermore, tended to be extroverts. Someone who likes philosophy is more likely introverted. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

    Kosinski and his team continued, tirelessly refining their models. In 2012, Kosinski demonstrated that from a mere 68 Facebook likes on average, a lot about a user could be reliably predicted: skin color (95% accuracy), sexual orientation (88% accuracy), Democrat or Republican (85%). But there’s more: level of intellect; religious affiliation; alcohol-, cigarette-, and drug abuse could all be calculated. Even whether or not your parents were divorced could be teased out of the data.

    The strength of the model depended on how well it could predict a test subject’s answers. Kosinski kept working at it. Soon, with a mere ten “likes” as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could “know” a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s model could predict a subject’s answers better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.

    The day he published these findings, Kosinski received two phonecalls. One was a threat to sue, the other a job offer. Both were from Facebook.

    Only Visible to Friends

    Just weeks later, Facebook likes became private by default (until then, the default setting had been that anyone on the internet could see your likes). This is still no obstacle for data-collectors: while Kosinski always requests the consent of the Facebook users he tests, many apps and online quizzes demand access to private information as a precondition to taking a personality test. (Anyone who is not overly concerned about their private information and wants to get assessed according to their Facebook likes can do so at Kosinski’s website, and then compare the results to those of a “classic” Ocean survey here.)

    But it’s not just about likes. Kosinski and his team figured out how to ascribe Big Five values based only on how many profile pictures or how many social media contacts a person has (this is a good indicator of extroversion). And it’s not even just about Facebook. We also betray information about ourselves when we are offline. Motion sensors in a smartphone can show, for example, how fast we move it and how far we are traveling (correlates with emotional instability). A smartphone, Kosinski found, is in itself a powerful psychological survey that we, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly filling out.

    Above all, though—and this is important to understand—it also works another way: using all this data, psychological profiles can not only be constructed, but they can also be sought and found. For example if you’re looking for worried fathers, or angry introverts, or undecided Democrats. What Kosinski had invented was essentially a search engine for people. He has been getting more and more acutely aware of both the potential and the danger his work presents.

    The internet always seemed to him a gift from heaven. What he really wanted was to give something back, to share. Data can be copied, so why shouldn’t everyone benefit from it? It was the spirit of an entire generation, the beginning of a new era free of the limits of the physical world. But what could happen, Kosinski asked himself, if someone misused his search engine in order to manipulate people? He began to add warnings to most of his scientific work [e.g.]: these prediction techniques, he warned, could be used in ways that “pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” But no one seemed to understand what he meant.

    Around this time, in early 2014, a young assistant professor named Aleksandr Kogan approached Kosinski. He said he had received an inquiry from a company interested in Kosinski’s methods. They apparently wanted to access the MyPersonality database, Kosinski remembers. To what purpose, Kogan couldn’t say: there were strict secrecy stipulations. At first, Kosinski and his team considered the offer—it would have meant a lot of money for his institute. But he hesitated. Finally, Kosinski remembers, Kogan divulged the name of the company: SCL, Strategic Communications Laboratories. Kosinski googled them [so did Antidote. Here. —ed.]: “[We are] a global election management agency,” said the company website [really, the website has even creepier language on it than that. “Behavioral change communication”? Go look already. —ed.]. SCL offers marketing based on a “psychographic targeting” model. With an emphasis on “election management” and political campaigns? Disturbed, Kosinski clicked through the pages. What kind of company is this? And what do they have planned for the United States?

    What Kosinski didn’t know at the time: SCL is the public front of a complex group of companies whose byzantine corporate structures make it unclear who owns it and its diverse branches—as can be seen in the UK Companies House, the Panama Papers, and the Delaware company registry. Some SCL offshoots have been involved in overthrowing governments in developing countries; others have done work developing methods for psychologically manipulating the population in Afghanistan for NATO. SCL is also the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, this ominous Big Data outfit that later managed online marketing for both Trump and the Brexit “Leave” campaign.

    Kosinski didn’t know any of that, but he had a bad feeling: “The whole thing started to stink,” he recalls. Looking into it further, he discovered that Aleksandr Kogan had secretly registered a company doing business with SCL. Documents obtained by Das Magazin confirm that SCL learned about Kosinski’s methods through Kogan, as was also revealed by the Guardian in December 2015. It suddenly dawned on Kosinski that Kogan could have reconstructed (or copied?) his Facebook likes-based Big Five measurement tool in order to sell it to this election-manipulating company. He immediately broke off contact with him and informed the head of the institute. A complicated battle ensued within Cambridge University. The institute feared for its reputation. Aleksandr Kogan moved to Singapore, got married, and began calling himself Dr. Spectre. Michal Kosinski finished his doctorate, got a job offer from Stanford University, and moved to the United States.

    For a year or so it was quiet. Then, in November 2015, the more radical of the two Brexit campaigns (leave.eu, supported by Nigel Farage) announced that they had contracted with a Big Data firm for online marketing support: Cambridge Analytica. The core expertise of this company: innovative political marketing, so-called microtargeting, by measuring people’s personality from their digital footprints based on the Ocean model.

    Kosinski started getting emails asking if he had had anything to do with it—for many, his is the first name to spring to mind upon hearing the terms Cambridge, Ocean, and analytics in the same breath. This is when he heard of Cambridge Analytica for the first time. Appalled, he looked up their website. Were his methods being deployed, on a massive scale, for political purposes?

    After the Brexit vote in July the email inquiries turned to insults and reproaches. Just look what you’ve done, friends and colleagues wrote. Kosinski had to explain over and over again that he had nothing to do with this company.

    First Brexit, Then Trump

    September 19th, 2016: the US presidential election is approaching. Guitar riffs fill the dark blue ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York: CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising.” The Concordia Summit is like the WEF in miniature. Decision makers from all over the world are invited; among the guests is Swiss president Johann Schneider-Ammann.

    A gentle women’s voice comes over the PA: “Please welcome Alexander Nix, Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Analytica.” A lean man in a dark suit strides towards the center of the stage. A attentive quiet descends. Many in the room already know: this is Trump’s new Digital Man. “Soon you’ll be calling me Mr. Brexit,” Trump had tweeted cryptically a few weeks before. Political observers had already been pointing out the substantial similarities between Trump’s agenda and that of the rightwing Brexit camp; only a few had noticed the connection to Trump’s recent hiring of a largely unknown marketing company: Cambridge Analytica.

    Before then, Trump’s online campaign had consisted more or less of one person: Brad Parscale, a marketing operative and failed startup founder who had built Trump a rudimentary website for $1,500. The 70-year-old Trump is not what one would call an IT-whiz; his desk is unencumbered by a computer. Trump doesn’t do email, his personal assistant once let slip. It was she who persuaded him to get a smartphone—the one from which he has uninhibitedly tweeted ever since.

    Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was relying on the endowment of the first social media president, Barack Obama. She had the Democratic Party’s address lists, worked with cutting-edge Big Data analysts from BlueLabs, and received support from Google and Dreamworks. When it was announced in June 2016 that Trump had hired Cambridge Analytica, Washington collectively sneered. Foreign noodlenecks in tailored suits who don’t understand this country and its people? Seriously?

    “Ladies and gentlemen, honorable colleagues, it is my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process.” The Cambridge Analytica logo appears behind Alexander Nix—a brain, comprised of a few network nodes and pathways, like a subway map. “It’s easy to forget that only eighteen months ago Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates seeking nomination, and certainly one of the more vilified,” begins the blond man with his British diction that produces the same mixture of awe and resentment in Americans that high German does the Swiss. “In addition, he had very low name recognition; only about forty percent of the electorate had heard of him.”

    Everyone in the room was aware of the sudden rise, in May 2016, of the conservative senator. It was one of the strangest moments of the primary campaign. Cruz had become the last serious challenger to frontrunner Trump in the Republican field of presidential candidates, rising from 5 to 35 percent. “How did he do this?” continues Nix.

    Cambridge Analytica had begun engaging with US elections towards the end of 2014, initially to advise Ted Cruz, funded by the secretive American tech billionaire Robert Mercer. Up to that point, according to Nix, election campaign strategy had been guided by demographic concepts. “But this is a really ridiculous idea, the idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender; or all African-Americans because of their race.” The Hillary Clinton campaign team was still operating on precisely such amateurish assumptions—Nix need not even mention—which divide the electorate up into ostensibly homogeneous groups…exactly the same way as all the public opinion researchers who predicted a Clinton victory did.

    Nix clicks to the next slide: five different faces, each representing a personality profile. It is the Ocean model. “At Cambridge, we’ve rolled out a long-form quantitative instrument to probe the underlying traits that inform personality. This is the cutting edge in experimental psychology.” It is now completely silent in the hall. “By having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans undertake this survey, we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The success of Cambridge Analytica’s marketing arises from the combination of three elements: this psychological behavioral analysis of the Ocean model, Big Data evaluation, and ad targeting. Ad targeting is personalized advertisement tailored as precisely as possible to the character of a single consumer.

    Nix explains forthrightly how his company does this (the presentation can be viewed on YouTube). From a range of different sources, Cambridge Analytical buys up personal data: “What car you drive, what products you purchase in shops, what magazines you read, what clubs you belong to.” Land registry and church membership. On the screen behind him are displayed the logos of global data brokers like Acxiom and Experian—in the United States nearly all personal consumer data is available for purchase. If you want to know, for example, where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information. Including telephone numbers. Now Cambridge Analytica crosschecks these data sets with Republican Party voter rolls and online data such as Facebook likes, and constructs an Ocean personality profile. From a selection of digital signatures there suddenly emerge real individual people with fears, needs, and interests—and home addresses.

    The methodology looks quite similar to the models that Michal Kosinski once developed. Cambridge Analytica also uses surveys on social media in order to gain access to the powerful predictive personal information wrapped up in the Facebook likes of users. And Cambridge Analytica is doing precisely what Kosinski had warned about. “We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people,” Nix boasted in an interview with Das Magazin. And all the evidence suggests that they deployed this powerful data set politically.

    Back in the ballroom of the Hyatt, Nix clicks to the next slide. “This is a data dashboard that we prepared for the Cruz campaign for the Iowa caucus. It looks intimidating, but it’s actually very simple.” On the left, graphs and diagrams; on the right, a map of Iowa, where Cruz had done surprisingly well in the caucuses. On this map, hundreds of thousands of tiny dots, red and blue. Nix begins to narrow down search criteria to a category of Republican caucus-goers he describes as a “persuasion” group, whose common Ocean personality profile and home locations are now visible, a smaller set of people to whom advertisement can be more effectively tailored. Ultimately the criteria can be narrowed to a single individual, along with his name, age, address, interests, and political leanings. How does Cambridge Analytica approach this person with political messaging?

    Earlier in the presentation, using the example of the Second Amendment, Nix showed two variations on how certain psychographic profiles are spoken to differently. “For a highly Neurotic and Conscientious audience, you’re going to need a message that is both rational and fear-based: the threat of a burglary and the ‘insurance policy’ of a gun is very persuasive.” A picture on the left side of the screen shows a gloved hand breaking a window and reaching for the inside door handle. On the right side, there is a picture of a man and child silhouetted against a sunset in tall grass, both with rifles, obviously duck hunting: “for a Closed and Agreeable audience, people who care about traditions and habits and family and community, talking about these values is going to be much more effective in communicating your message.”

    How to Keep Clinton Voters Away

    Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

    In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”

    Nix begins to wrap up his presentation at the Concordia Summit: “Blanket advertising—the idea that a hundred million people will receive the same piece of direct mail, the same television advert, the same digital advert—is dead. My children will certainly never understand this concept of mass communication. Today, communication is becoming ever increasingly targeted.

    “The Cruz campaign is over now, but what I can tell you is that of the two candidates left in this election, one of them is using these technologies. And it’s going to be very interesting to see how they impact the next seven weeks. Thank you.” With that, he exits the stage.

    It is not knowable just to what extent the American population is being targeted by Trump’s digital troopers—because they seldom attack through the mainstream broadcast media, but rather mostly with highly personalized ads on social media or through digital cable. And while the Clinton team sat back in the confidence that it was safe with its demographic calculations, a new crew was moving into the Trump online campaign headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, as Bloomberg journalist Sasha Issenberg noted with surprise after a visit. The Cambridge Analytica team, apparently just a dozen people, had received around $100,000 from Trump in July; in August another $250,000; five million in September. Altogether, says Nix, they took in around fifteen million.

    And the company took even more radical measures: starting in July 2016, a new app was prepared for Trump campaign canvassers with which they could find out the political orientation and personality profile of a particular house’s residents in advance. If the Trump people ring a doorbell, it’s only the doorbell of someone the app has identified as receptive to his messages, and the canvassers can base their line of attack on personality-specific conversation guides also provided by the app. Then they enter a subject’s reactions to certain messaging back into the app, from where this new data flows back to the dashboards of the Trump campaign.

    This is nothing new. The Clinton campaign did similar things—but as far as we know they did not use psychometric profiling. Cambridge Analytica, however, divided the US population into 32 personality types, and concentrated on only seventeen states. And just as Kosinski had determined that men who like MAC cosmetics on Facebook are more likely to be gay, Cambridge Analytica found that a preference for American-produced cars is a great indicator of a possible Trump voter. Among other things, this kind of knowledge could inform Trump himself which messages to use, and where. The decision to focus candidate visits in Michigan and Wisconsin over the final weeks of the campaign was based on this manner of data analysis. The candidate himself became an implementation instrument of the model.

    What is Cambridge Analytica Doing in Europe?

    But to what extent did psychometric methods influence the outcome of the election? Cambridge Analytica, when asked, did not want to disclose any documentation assessing the effectiveness of their campaign. It is possible that the question of how important psychometric targeting was in the 2016 election cannot be answered at all. Still, some indicators should be considered: there is the fact that Ted Cruz, thanks to the help of Cambridge Analytica, rose out of obscurity to become Trump’s strongest competitor in the primaries; there is the increase in rural voter turnout; there is the reduction, compared to 2008 and 2012, in African-American voter participation. The fact that Trump spent so little money may also be explained by the effectiveness of personality-based advertising. As does the fact that he invested far more in digital than TV campaigning compared to Hillary Clinton. Facebook proved to be his ultimate weapon and his best election campaigner, as the tweeting of several Trump staffers describes it. In Germany, the rightwing upstart party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) may like the sound of this, as they have more Facebook friends than Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) combined.

    It is therefore not at all the case, as is so often claimed, that statisticians lost this election because their polls were so faulty. The opposite is true: statisticians won this election. It was just certain statisticians, the ones using the new method. It is a cruel irony of history that Trump, who often grumbled about scientific research, used such a highly scientific approach in his campaign.

    Another big winner in the election was Cambridge Analytica. Steve Bannon, a Cambridge Analytica board member and former executive chair of the ultra-rightwing online site Breitbart News, was named Trump’s chief strategist. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, ambitious Front National activist and niece of the presidential candidate, has tweeted that she would accept his invitation to collaborate. In an internal company video, there is a recording of a discussion entitled “Italy.” While Cambridge Analytica is not willing to comment on alleged ongoing talks with UK prime minister Theresa May, Alexander Nix claims that he is in the process of client acquisition, worldwide, and that he has received inquiries out of Switzerland and Germany.

    Kosinski has been observing all of this from his office at Stanford. After the election, the university has been in turmoil. Kosinski is responding to the developments with the most powerful weapon available to a researcher: scientific analysis. Along with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he conducted a series of tests that will soon be published. The initial results seen by Das Magazin are unsettling: The study shows the effectiveness of personality targeting by showing that marketers can attract up to 63% more clicks and up to 1400% more conversions in real-life advertising campaigns on Facebook when matching products and marketing messages to consumers’ personality characteristics. They further demonstrate the scalability of personality targeting by showing that the majority of Facebook Pages promoting products or brands are affected by personality and that large numbers of consumers can be accurately targeted based on a single Facebook Page.

    The world has been turned upside down. The Brits are leaving the EU; Trump rules America. And in Stanford the Polish researcher Michal Kosinski, who indeed tried to warn of the danger of using psychological targeting in a political setting, is still getting accusatory emails. “No,” says Kosinski quietly, shaking his head, “this is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I just showed that it was there.”

    Translated by Antidote, with minor adjustments based on a Das Magazin internal draft [26 January 2017]

    Featured image: cartoon by Christiane Pfohlmann; text is untranslatable wordplay in which Trump is saying “I can’t do anything about it” and “I have Nix to thank.” Source: toonpool.com

    Paul-Olivier Dehaye contributed to the preparation of the original article, which also included a link to his website where you can request your data from Cambridge Analytica: PersonalData.IO
    Each breath a gift...
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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Bill Gates: the new Pavlov

    by Jon Rappoport

    February 7, 2017
    https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2...-new-pavlov-2/

    Quote “Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

    “From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: ‘What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.’ He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

    A thought-form is a picture-plus concept in the mind that tends to guide behavior.

    A dominant thought-form in Earth civilization today is: universal rule through gigantic, highly organized structures; e.g., mega-corporations that owe no allegiance to any nation.

    Imagine a few thousand such corporations with interlocking boards and directorates; colluding with super-regional governments and their honeycombed bureaucracies; combined with regional armies, intelligence agencies and technological elites; hooked to a global surveillance operation; in control of media; cooperating with the largest organized religions on Earth.

    Imagine all this as essentially one organization—and you see the thought-form in its wide-screen version.

    Top-down as top-down has never been before.

    Functions and compartments defined and specialized at every level, and coordinated in order to carry out policy decisions.

    As to why such a thought-form should come to dominate human affairs, the simplest explanation is: because it works.

    But beneath that answer, for those who can see, there is much, much more.

    Individuals come to think that “effective” and “instrumental” and “efficient” are more important than any other issues.

    Keep building, keep expanding, keep consolidating gains—and above all else, keep organizing.

    Such notions and thought-forms replace life itself.

    The Machine has come to the fore. All questions are now about how the individual sees himself fitting into the structure and function of The Machine.

    Are human beings becoming social constructs?

    Populations are undergoing a quiet revolution. We can cite some of the reasons: television; education; job training and employment requirements; the Surveillance State; government organizations who follow a “zero tolerance” policy; inundation with advertising.

    Yes, it’s all geared to produce people who are artificial constructs.

    And this is just the beginning. There are a number of companies (see, for example, affectiva.com) who are dedicated to measuring “audience response” to ads and other public messages. I’m talking about electronic measuring. The use of bracelets, for instance, that record students’ emotional responses to teachers in classrooms, in real time. (Bill Gates shoveled grant money into several of these studies.)

    Then there is facial recognition geared to the task of revealing how people are reacting when they sit at their computers and view websites.

    Push-pull, ring the bell, watch the dog drool for his food. Stimulus-response.

    It’s not much of a stretch to envision, up the road a few years, whole populations more than willing to volunteer for this kind of mass experimentation. But further than that, we could see society itself embrace, culturally, the ongoing measurement of stimuli and responses.

    “Yes, I want to live like this. I want to be inside the system. I want to be analyzed. I want to be evaluated. I want to accept the results. I want to be part of the new culture. Put bracelets on me. Measure my eye movements, my throat twitches that indicate what I’m thinking, and my brain waves. Going to a movie should include the experience of wearing electrodes that record my second-to-second reactions to what’s happening on the screen. I like that. I look forward to it…”

    In such a culture, “Surveillance State” would take on a whole new dimension.

    “Sir, I want to report a malfunction in my television set. I notice the monitoring equipment that tracks my responses to programs has gone on the blink. I want it reattached as soon as possible. Can you fix it remotely, or do you need to send a repair person out to the house? I’ll be here all day…”

    People will take pride in their ongoing role as social constructs, just as they now take pride in owning a quality brand of car.

    The thought process behind this, in so far as any thought at all takes place, goes something like: “If I’m really a bundle of responses to stimuli and nothing more, then I want to be inside a system that champions that fact and records it…I don’t want to be left out in the cold.”

    Here is a sample school situation of the near future: for six months, Mr. Jones, the teacher, has been videotaped, moment by moment, as he instructs his class in English. All the students have been wearing electronic bracelets, and their real time emotional responses (interest, boredom, aversion) have also been recorded. A team of specialists has analyzed the six months of video, matching it up, second by second, to the students’ responses. The teacher is called in for a conference.

    “Mr. Jones, we now know what you’re doing that works and what you’re doing that doesn’t work. We know exactly what students are positively reacting to, and what bores them. Therefore, we’re going to put you into a re-ed seminar, where you’ll learn precisely how to teach your classes from now on, to maximize your effectiveness. We’ll show you how to move your hands, what tone of voice to use, how to stand, when to make eye contact, and so on…”

    Mr. Jones is now a quacking duck. He will be trained how to quack “for the greater good.” He is now a machine toy. Whatever is left of his passion, his intelligence, his free will, his spontaneous insights, his drive to make students actually understand what they’re learning…all subordinated for the sake of supposed efficiency.

    Think this is an extreme fantasy? See the Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2012, “Biosensors to monitor students’ attentiveness”:

    “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $4 billion into efforts to transform public education in the U.S., is pushing to develop an ‘engagement pedometer.’ Biometric devices wrapped around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments excite and interest them — and which fall flat.”

    “The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall.”

    “The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.”

    “Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.”

    “Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, ‘only get us so far,’ said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, ‘we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments’ such as the biosensors.”

    “The Gates Foundation has spent two years videotaping 20,000 classroom lessons and breaking them down, minute by minute, to analyze how each teacher presents material and how those techniques affect student test scores.”

    “Clemson received about $500,000 in Gates funding. Another $620,000 will support an MIT scientist, John Gabrieli, who aims to develop a scale to measure degrees of student engagement by comparing biosensor data to functional MRI brain scans [!] (using college students as subjects).”

    When you boil it down, the world-view represented here has nothing to do with “caring about students.” It has everything to do with the Pavlovian view of humans as biological machines.

    What input yields what response? How can people be shaped into predictable constructs?

    As far as Gates is concerned, the underlying theme, as always, is: control.

    In this new world, the process of thinking and comparing and independently judging, and the freedom to make individual choices…well, for whatever that was worth, we can’t encourage it for a whole society. It’s too unpredictable. We don’t have time for that sort of thing. No, we have to achieve reduction. We have to seek out lowest common denominators.”

    This is what universal surveillance is all about. The observation of those denominators and the variances from them—the outlying and therefore dangerous departures from the norm.

    “Well, we’ve tracked Mr. Jones’ classroom for a year now, and we’ve collated all the measurements of reactions from the students. It was a wonderful study. But we did notice one thing. All the students showed similar patterns of reactions over time…except two students. We couldn’t fit them into the algorithms. They seemed to be responding oppositely. It was almost as if they were intentionally defecting from the group. This signals some kind of disorder. We need a name for it. Is it Oppositional Defiance Disorder, or is it new? We recommend attaching electrodes to those two students’ skulls, so we can get a better readout of their brain activity in real time.”

    You see, everything must be analyzed on the basis of stimulus response. Those two students are suffering from a brain problem. They must be. Because if they aren’t, if they have the ability to choose and decide how to respond, then they have free will, and that can’t be measured. Much deeper, that also suggests an X-factor in humans, wherein the flow of chemicals and atoms and quarks and mesons and photons don’t tell the whole story. The rest of the story would imply the existence of something that is…non-material…above and beyond push-pull cause and effect.

    The gatekeepers of this world are obsessed with ruling that out. They guard Reality itself, which is to say, their conception of Reality. They are willing to spend untold amounts of money to make that Pavlovian conception universally accepted and universally loved.

    Because they own that conception. They are the self-appointed title holders. They are the kings of that domain.

    I feel obligated to inform them that their domain is much, much smaller than they think it is. And in the fullness of time, which is very long, the domain is going to fall and crack and collapse and disintegrate. And all their horses and all their men won’t be able to put it back together again.

    Perhaps populations will have to endure a hundred years of stimulus-response society, to understand what it means. But eventually, a man like Bill Gates will be forgotten. He’ll be a small footnote on a dusty page in a crumbling book in a dark room on a remote island of one unworkable computer.

    A morbid venal fool who chased, for a brief moment, fool’s gold.

    There is an irreducible thing. It’s called freedom. It is native to every individual.

    Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes.

    And he asks himself: what is my freedom for?

    And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze.

    If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth.

    Pavlov wrote: “Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.”

    Basically, Pavlov was promoting the idea that whatever an individual perceives and feels about his own experience is a confused mess and an obstruction.

    Rather, the individual should ignore all that tripe, and instead, allow himself to be a “natural object,” see himself as a clean and simple response mechanism, as planned inputs cause him to behave in various ways. Then, he’ll be contemplating himself “not from within, but from without.”

    In other words, then he will have no life.

    Bill Gates and other elite planners are working toward this end.
    Each breath a gift...
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    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    New rules at the airport could force you to hand over your phone and passwords
    According to this non-profit, Fight for the Future "So far this practice has only been seen in a few instances, but the head of the Department of Homeland Security wants to make it widespread."
    https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/...at-the-airport
    Quote Airport security officials have started asking people to hand over access to their social media accounts at routine border crossings.[1] So next time you fly, you could be asked not just for your picture ID, but for your Facebook login and phone password.

    Sign our urgent petition to stop this new policy. It’s is a clear violation of our basic right to privacy, and won’t make us any safer.

    Homeland Security is lobbying Congress hard to make this practice the norm.
    [2] They could easily use this as an excuse to target journalists, single out religious or political groups, or flag people for additional screening based on the people they follow or the pages they like.

    We need to stop this threat to our basic rights before handing over everything on your phone becomes as commonplace as removing your shoes to fly.

    Let’s draw a line -- sign the urgent petition!
    https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/...at-the-airport

    General checks for physical safety are one thing, but demanding our social media passwords is way over the line. A detailed search of someone’s personal information should be the exception, requiring a warrant, not the norm.

    Politicians that support this draconian practice claim that people with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from handing over their digital lives to authorities. But that argument is backwards. There’s no evidence that this invasive practice makes anyone safer, but if everyone is subject to routine governmental social media strip downs it will have a profoundly chilling effect on freedom of speech and civil liberties.

    So far this practice has only been seen in a few instances, but the head of the Department of Homeland Security wants to make it widespread.

    We need to stop this before it becomes law. And we can -- the controversy over a few instances has already led to public outcry. If we show lawmakers that there’s a political cost to pushing this agenda, we can defeat it.

    Click here to tell lawmakers not to make this abusive practice permanent.
    https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/...at-the-airport

    For many of us, the most intimate details of our lives are stored on our phones and computers. We can’t allow the government to use fear mongering as an excuse to threaten the security of our personal information.

    Thanks,

    Evan

    [1] CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/12/a-us-...his-phone.html

    [2] CNET: https://www.cnet.com/news/us-border-...tter-password/
    Last edited by onawah; 16th March 2017 at 02:41.
    Each breath a gift...
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    Avalon Member Omni's Avatar
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    Default Re: Big Brother is Bigger Than You Think (Google is tracking us)

    Imagine a time when remote neural monitoring is discovered publicly. I'm sure we will have politicians pushing for Remote Neural Monitoring hubs in addition to or in place of CCTV hubs. Remote Neural monitoring is direct thought surveillance, and it is where the top of this stuff is at right now.

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