Information Weapons News Today

Both sides and the president s side, the Special Counsel side had a facetoface meeting last week. A rare facetoface meeting after weeks of informal discussions and were told by a source familiar myself, my colleague that Robert Muellers Team Provided more granularity on the topics they would like to discuss with the president in a possible interview under the umbrella of the firing of james comey as well as the firing of the former National Security adviser Michael Flynn. The specifics include t...

Says was happening at cambridge analytica. watch this. >> joining me is a former research director who blew the whistle on the firm. thank you so much for joining us. are you doing okay? >> thanks for having me. its been a long day. but im okay. >> you describe what you billed as psycho logical warfare. a psychological warfare weapon. something you say steve bannon wanted. the ability to play with the psychology of an entire country. how did that work? talk to us about that. >> yeah. so steve ca...

Uk to help set up those information weapons. and so what we worked on at scl and later at cambridge analytica is data harvesting programs where we pull data from users of apps and all the friend networks and run that data through algorithms that can profile the psychological attributes so we would know what information we need to feed to online platforms o to exploitmental vulnerabilities that are algorithms showed they had. >> this goes beyond just sort of programming advertisement toward a cer...

So steve came to sel because he believes in something called the breitbart doctrine, which is that in order to change politics, you first have to change culture because politics is downstream from culture. and in order to fight a culture war, you need an arsenal of information weapons. and who better to go to than a company like sel, which is a military contractor based in the uk, to help set up those information weapons. and so what we worked on at scl and later at cambridge analytica, was data...

Thats how the company started. >> yeah. there was no data before that point. so we went from no data to harvesting all of this data off of facebook and then combining it with all this consumer data sets -- >> at the behest of steve ba bannon? >> yeah. the company got funded in the spring of 2014 and he wanted to be able to have functioning program in time for the mid terms. so we had sort of a steve bannon and a billionaire breathing down our necks saying where is the data? where is the algorith...

A -- you know, steve bannon and a billionaire breathing down our necks to go where is the data? where are the algorithms? where is our information weapons? and thats where alexander kogan, the professor at cambridge, who offered the use of this app that had special permissions granted by facebook to pull data not only from the app user from but from all of the friends of that user. that meant for every one user, we were collecting on average, 200, 300 friends data, and that scaled really quickly...

Core of the companys activities was the access facebook provided. >> so we went from no data to, you know, harvesting all of this -- this data off of facebook and then combining it with all this -- you know, the consumer data sets and voter data sets. so, you know, we had sort of a steve bannon and a billionaire breathing down our necks going, wheres the data? wheres the algorithms? wheres our information weapons? and thats where kogan came along, alexander kogan, the professor at cambridge. >> ...

But christopher wylie, the former uk-based cambridge analytica employee-turned whistle-blower said that the core of the companys activities was the access facebook provided. >> so we went from no data to, you know, harvesting all of this -- this data off of facebook and then combining it with all this -- you know, the consumer data sets and voter data sets. so, you know, we had sort of a steve bannon and a billionaire breathing down our necks going, wheres the data? wheres the algorithms? wheres...