Daniel Ellsberg was the first person with this level of privilege to expose (via the Pentagon Papers) the catastrophic public harm his government’s lies were causing. Shortly thereafter, the Vietnam War ended, President Nixon was impeached and the extraordinary charge of espionage laid on Ellsberg, along with theft and conspiracy (a total maximum sentence of 115 years) were dismissed.

I recall Julian Assange saying some years back, that his mother Christine had told him about Daniel Ellsberg when he was a little boy. Wow. I’ve met a lot of adults recently who haven’t heard of him – nor of Sir Tim Berner’s Lee for that matter, who gave us the world wide web, for free, and enabled one and all to take that quantum leap in human communication we call the digital age.

The point of Wikileaks, which Assange would go on to create as a young adult, was to offer whistleblowers like Ellsberg a safe way to continue exposing facts that were in the public interest, but which were being misrepresented or withheld from public debate.

Assange got a lot of support and participation in that endeavour: from citizens, who most crucially disseminated the facts; from many academics; from journalists and politicians; and from the legal community. For the latter, I suppose it sounded very much like “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. We should applaud the organisation’s outstanding diligence in fact-checking the information it received. After 10 years, its reliability still stands at 100% and despite the 2011 claims by US politicians, of Wikileaks having “blood on their hands”, no blood has been sacrificed for the delivery of this free public service.

I have no doubt that Wikileaks will survive, but it’s really looking like curtains for the founder and editor-in-chief. Assange has not been charged with any crime in relation to his work with Wikileaks, but it seems an espionage charge is pending, should he walk out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, and straight into a British prison, for the minor offence of breaching bail when he sought, and obtained political asylum.

Assange’s departure from the embassy is unlikely to happen by choice, even though all communications and contact with friends and family have been terminated for the last 10 weeks. There would be no point, if it were to be taken from this solitary confinement to another, where he would not be able to resume his work. What seems more likely now is that he will be evicted, for breach of an agreement he signed last year, when (only) his internet was cut off, to not say anything of a political nature on Twitter that “put at risk the good relations [Ecuador] has with the UK, the rest of the states of the EU, and other countries”.

Indeed, we the people have the right to do that, and truth protects that right, but not Assange. He knows too much, and he won’t keep his mouth shut. What was once political asylum has now has become solitary confinement. It is a flagrant example of the enforcement of public ignorance.

Berners Lee, Assange and Ellsberg: friends of democracy

Berners Lee, Assange and Ellsberg monumentally facilitated our access to information, for no personal gain and in two of the three cases, at great personal risk. Berners Lee appeared to be politically neutral, and was knighted, but he too is a believer in true democracy. In recent times, he has been explicitly warning us about another quantum leap: in mass surveillance.

We are all being watched, listened to and recorded; both in our homes and workplaces. It chills our free speech, jams our moral compass and – latest phase – is being used in a very targeted way to manipulate our political opinion with false information. Berners Lee is particularly concerned about how AI is being used to analyse our data and profile us for specific messaging that may or may not be truthful. He states:

“Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?”

Sir Tim Berners Lee

If you recall, the dissemination of false information, that would in turn be relayed by the people, was the modus operandi described by the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower, Chris Wylie, in relation to their management of the Trump campaign and involvement in Brexit. Even the heads of “the firm”, Alexander Nix and Mark Turnbull, smugly admitted this in the Channel 4 sting video. Nix described how his company injects information “into the bloodstream of the internet”, disguises its origin and then sits back, to watch their ‘virus’ infect the minds of the populace.

What we’re seeing now is the use of military-grade information operations that were previously used to manipulate other populations, deployed on a country’s own citizens. What they know, it has been realised, can either make of them an ‘enemy’ (speaking truth to power), or an army of unwittingly mendacious sock-puppets.

The problem with Wikileaks was that it was not just a small organisation; its life’s blood was the long chains of citizens, “passing along buckets to put out the fire”, as Assange once put it. That couldn’t be stopped, but it could be perverted. The model could be used even more effectively to spread lies, with the right team of data scientists, spooks, marketing experts, creatives and ‘recruits’. Add to that a comparatively massive budget of a political party, to offer the gate-keepers of social media, and it was only too easy to poison the grass roots.

Moving forward through the 21st century, we need to protect truth like never before. That starts with opposing the fragmentation of the political message via our social networks. There can be no public scrutiny if there is no consensus on what is real in the political offer, and some would argue that the behavioural micro-targeting of voters has already “high-jacked” two democracies.

Hell, we didn’t see that coming, but we must realise now that the facilitator of this dystopian manipulation in the digital-age is mass surveillance, which is largely being used to limit free speech, democracy and even human rights. We must therefore respect and protect whistleblowers, who provide us with a much-needed ‘herd inoculation’ against the lies and deceit that divide us. And finally, we must applaud the generosity and vigilance of Wikileaks, for “keeping the bastards honest”, and all who struggled against corruption alongside them.

click on image to view Facebook event page

I fully endorse the rally on June 17th to protect Julian Assange, and call on our government to negotiate his home-coming to Australia. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, as the lawyer Greg Barnes said: “There is an opportunity…”, and since he is an award-winning journalist, the US must abide by the First Amendment of their Constitution.

Vogan mentioned that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica is fondly known as “MI6 for Hire”. They have specialised in British government and military information operations for over 25 years, and until recently, mostly on other countries. She referred us to research into their filial’s assignment in Trinidad. It was clear that PRISM-level access had been given to Cambridge Analytica for the creation of a national police database, and ironic in retrospect that this shady outfit was scoring every citizen on their propensity to commit a crime.

We have since learned that for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s reformer campaign, SCL created “a psychological road map of the kingdom’s citizenry and its sentiment toward the royal family”. That’s what the spooks associated with Team Trump & ALL the Brexit Leave campaigns do, and by their own admission, under a variety of shell company names. “We ghost in and ghost out”, they say, “without anyone knowing we were ever there”.

This sounds very much like the work Palantir Technologies does. In her 2014 article on Palantir, ‘The Philosopher’s Stoned’, Vogan reports their stated activity is tracking digital footprints in order to predict future behaviour; a somewhat similar brand of ‘Big Brother Meets Big Data / Pre-Crime’ fiction. ‘But it sells!”, she proclaims, and proceeds to tell us their story. Palantir was founded by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the “eccentric philosopher” Alex Karp. Their locale, from where they claim to have hunted down Bin Laden, is a replica of The Shire. Their mentor and client is the CIA. Cambridge Analytica have worked for the Pentagon.

A part of Palantir’s story was their involvement with HBGary Federal, a smaller agency that had allegedly been contracted, a few months after Cablegate, to destroy the reputation of Wikileaks and its supporters. The plan was also to ruin the career of the Guardian journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who had been writing favourable copy about Wikileaks; and who would go on to win a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on the Snowden revelations.

A document leaked by Anonymous from HBGary’s mail server stated:

“Together, Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies bring the expertise and approach needed to combat the WikiLeaks threat effectively.”

Palantir vs Wikileaks. The mission was to bring down the organisation.
Peter Thiel's other company, Paypal, blockaded Wikileaks funding world-wide.

Wired magazine reports back in February 2011, in an exciting account of the doxing of HBGary Federal by Anonymous, the intentions of their analyst, Aaron Barr, in collecting citizen data:

“I will sell it”

Writing for Wired, Nate Anderson from Ars Technica explains:

Barr had been interested in social media for quite some time, believing that the links it showed between people had enormous value when it came to mapping networks of hackers—and when hackers wanted to target their victims. He presented a talk to a closed Department of Justice conference earlier this year on “specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success” through social media.

Barr’s claims of “laser focus” were bogus. The reason he got hacked was that he published a long list of names on cryptome.org (no to the actual link), of people he claimed were members of Anonymous, but the list included a lot of people who were not hackers. They were journalists, artists, musicians and writers, such as Nozomi Hayase, so the actual Anonymous got pretty angry… It came as a total surprise that the plot to destroy Wikileaks and harm both its supporters and a sympathetic journalist was buried in the mix. That was the scoop however that signalled the war on people-power had begun.

Nate Anderson continues:

“[Aaron Barr's] curiosity about teasing out the webs of connections between people grew. By scraping sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, Barr believed he could draw strong conclusions, such as determining which town someone lived in even if they didn’t provide that information. How? By looking at their friends.”

Does this sound familiar? Hardly surprising, when we learn of Palantir Technologies’ involvement in the Trump campaign, alongside Cambridge Analytica. There was even a third agency called Quid, but what of Wikileaks? Is it likely they would be playing ball with Palantir, and its co-founder Peter Thiel? He is also the founder of Paypal, who staged the world-wide blockade of Wikileaks funding. It’s hard to imagine. Slavoj Žižek aptly signals how at odds their agendas are:

“Assange characterised himself as the spy of and for the people: he is not spying on the people for those in power, he is spying on those in power for the people”.

Peter Thiel is also a board-member of Facebook, and was the site’s first major investor. He has harvested a mountain of citizen data, via Paypal and Palantir at least. It was an emissary from Palantir, Sophie Schmidt, daughter of the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who persuaded SCL that there was a lot of lucre to be made in analytics and election services. They formed SCL Elections. It was Steve Bannon who suggested they change the name to Cambridge Analytica.

Žižek offers an interesting perspective on the strict and prolonged silencing of Julian Assange. If his hunch is correct, Assange’s last significant announcement may have been that he would testify to the UK Parliament about Cambridge Analytica. Žižek writes:

“I think one name explains it all: Cambridge Analytica – a name which stands for all Assange is about, for what he fights against; the disclosure of the link between the great private corporations and government agencies…

Žižek continues:
“Remember what a big topic and obsession the Russian meddling in the US elections was – now we know it was not Russian hackers (with Assange) who nudged the people towards Trump, but instead the West’s own data-processing agencies which joined forces with political forces. This doesn’t mean that Russia and its allies are innocent: they probably did try to influence the outcome in the same way that the US does in other countries (only in this case, it is labeled “democracy promotion”). But it means the big bad wolf who distorts our democracy is not in the Kremlin, but walking around the West itself – and this is what Assange was claiming all along.”

As the Cambridge Analytica investigation unravels, it would seem that the Deep State has backed the wrong horse again in the Spooks vs Wikileaks stakes; even if Assange has been nobbled. The Favourite (of the CIA) promised supremacy over enlightened people-power, but such are the ways of the Palantiri Stone(r)s. The “cognitive military complex”, as Žižek calls it, has taken a blow to the pre-frontal from Wylie’s smoking guns. Public trust sinks as low as Facebook shares. Thinking back, we have reason to predict that Assange has more to say… Certainly Wikileaks has more to say, and we need to keep hearing it.

What we already know is that the hedge-fund billionaire, Robert Mercer, is the common factor between Cambridge Analytica, Trump, Bannon, AggregateIQ (his main analytics company for Brexit) and… Siri, for whom his algorithms were used. Siri, who knows our name and is always listening… We also know that Peter Thiel is the common factor between Cambridge Analytica, the CIA groomed Palantir Technologies and last but not least, Facebook.

Meanwhile, still in the red corner according to the hawks, is the Wikileaks-Russian tag team. Over there! Over there! Didn’t Zuckerberg do a sterling job of upgrading Russia’s interference in the US Elections during his testimony to Congress? One imagines “Arms Race” is exactly what both Parties wanted to hear.

Good boy. We know you’re sorry…

Žižek is troubled by what he calls “a well orchestrated character assassination” of the Wikileaks editor-in-chief, and cites gutter-level rumours that he is too smelly for the Ecuadorian Embassy. Žižek also refers to “a disgusting attack” on Assange from the Guardian – in the midst of extensive Cambridge Analytica coverage – which described him as a megalomaniac and a fugitive from justice. Žižek once again jogs our memory, and helps us join the dots:

“…as far they [the journalists] are concerned, write as much as you want about Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon, just don’t dwell on what Assange was drawing our attention to: that the state apparatuses which are now expected to investigate the “scandal” are themselves part of the problem.”

With news emerging that Theresa May was working with SCL as recently as February 2018, Slavoj Žižek may have a point; mighty heads could roll. Or, we could be rolled… back into the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

Cathy Vogan, on the black and white polarity of ‘Spooks vs Wikileaks’, and which future we need for the 21st Century:

For more information, watch Vogan’s Sydney talk last year on how the use of behavioural micro-targeting, big data and psychometrics by Cambridge Analytica got Donald Trump elected, and led to a vote for Brexit.

Cambridge Analytica: how big data-assisted behavioural micro-targeting facilitated the Trump & Brexit victories

Speaking at a Sydney event last month, Cathy Vogan, founder of thing2thing.com and author of ‘The Wikileaks Tapes’, offered a comprehensive view of how the use of behavioural micro-targeting, big data and psychometrics by Cambridge Analytica got Donald Trump elected and led to a vote for Brexit.

Vogan opened by addressing some of the claims made by Hillary Clinton in a 2017 interview on Australia’s ABC TV, giving Julian Assange the right of response to Clinton’s question: “Why doesn’t Wikileaks ever publish anything about Russia?”. Assange’s answer was: “Wikileaks has published over 800,000 documents about Russia, most of them critical”. The ABC journalist had left the question hanging in the air.

Clinton suggested that Wikileaks had been involved in the spread of “awful stories… the worst of which was ‘Pizzagate’”. Vogan cross-cut to John Pilger and Assange discussing the content of the Podesta emails: weapons deals that ended in arming ISIS, pay-for-play with dictators via the Clinton Foundation and the death of tens of thousands of Lybians, which she suggested would help her presidential campaign.

Vogan’s take on the 2016 US elections would not involve Russians or Wikileaks, but perception management by what Slavoj Žižek refers to as a “cognitive-industrial-complex.

There were claims by Micah Lee in ‘The Intercept’ of a ‘Nazi-Soviet Pact’ moment between Assange and the Trump campaign. When Trump Jr made his Twitter communications public, it appeared someone with access to the Wikileaks Twitter handle had communicated with him. Lee, assuming for us that it was the editor-in-chief, wrote:

“An organisation with a sterling reputation for providing the public with accurate information about secret government and corporate activities was used to launder conspiracy theories that helped elect a racist, sexual predator president of the United States.”

Vogan’s exposé on Cambridge Analytica concluded on a similar note. An audience member at their show in Germany pointed out to the CEO, Alexander Nix, that there is no glory in assisting a “misogynist buffoon into power… who is fucking up our lives” [audience cheers].

There was no mention of Pizzagate in the Trump Jr DMs, but the Intercept amplified the accusation Clinton made on ABC Australia, that Wikileaks’ co-orchestrated the spread of “preposterous conspiracy theories”. Lee’s article proved more effective than the Russian narrative in deflecting attention away from the content of Podesta’s emails, since it damaged trust in the organisation, rendered supporters vulnerable to propaganda and turned some into enemies.

He said no, he forgets and I'm saying nothing...

“the hacked emails were used to reverse-engineer preposterous conspiracy theories, like the imaginary pedophilia scandal called Pizzagate”

Hacked means extracted via the internet. Former NSA technical director, William Binney, and his team from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have interpreted the forensic evidence available. They reported that the rate of transfer of the data could only have been on to a USB stick. That suggested the files were copied in-house, not hacked. Ignoring conflicting evidence, Lee adhered to the DNC’s hacking narrative and Clinton’s claim that there was nothing incriminating in the Podesta emails. He also aroused suspicion of ulterior motive behind their release, the editor-in-chief’s alleged partisan allegiance.

The idea of the truth-teller in league with a serial liar was too much for some to assimilate with their values and those of the Wikileaks-inspired transparency movement. In the eyes of many Wikileaks supporters, political chicanery and opportunism was perceived in the (alleged) machiavellian tactics employed by Assange in his support for Trump’s ascendency to the White House. It was sadly reminiscent for them of the cynical act of betrayal in Stalin’s signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact (“The Devil’s Alliance”) in 1939, which had a demoralising effect and also broke up the “movement” of anti-fascist Popular Fronts.

Barrett Brown, one of Wikileaks most heroic and prominent allies, who went to jail for 4 years for co-ordinating the supply of material to Wikileaks, compared their communications with the Trump campaign advisor, to those that preceded the taking over of Poland. He was done with the movement; but there were still people saying: “Why Everyone Should Do What WikiLeaks Did”, offering a broader perspective on the organisation’s activities and a different angle on the Trump Jr DMs.

The Intercept had made a point about Wikileaks ‘sleeping with dogs’, and damaging their support base, but none of this pointed to Russia, or towards the real problem of ‘What Happened’ to two democracies. Oxford & Washington university studies do; Tim Berners Lee does; and so do pending legal proceedings against Cambridge Analytica.

In the longer term, it may not be about who’s supporting whom; or financial corruption; or excess spending – as the current thrusts of Transatlantic political and legal enquiry would suggest. Money issues are simply the most viable way in at the moment. But the freshly-launched British Electoral Commission enquiry, into excessive Leave EU campaign spending and collaboration between multiple campaigns, can at best, only point to everyone spending their money in the same shop. They are not tackling the more serious problem of what that shop is selling.

The case of Professor David Caroll vs Cambridge Analytica takes us much closer to the heart of the problem that ‘we the people’ now have. It concerns an individual’s privacy, and promises to be a landmark case, if sufficiently funded.

Professor David Carroll vs Cambridge Analytica (via SCL parent company)

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Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web, is worried that the democratic platform he gifted humanity with is failing. He lashes out at Facebook & Twitter for facilitating the spread of misinformation and condemns the trafficking of “weaponised AI propaganda”. The term comes from Berit Anderson’s “The Rise of Weaponised AI Propaganda’, which Vogan cites in her exposé of Cambridge Analytica:

“By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion. Many of these technologies have been used individually to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding factor in elections around the world.”

The use of armies of bots has been proven, by Oxford University researchers into computational propaganda, to have had a profound effect in setting the agenda for political debate during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. In fact it “throttled out” the voice of humans and gave such a false sense of source diversity and consensus, they largely followed its lead. Of particular interest in that study, is that the technology is open to anyone. There was a chain reaction to the bots among ordinary citizens.

“… democratisation of online propaganda is also an especially salient issue. While government departments, academics, and journalists continue to search for evidence that campaigns used these means to manipulate public opinion, they tend to ignore the fact that anyone can launch a bot or spread fake news online. It was these citizen-built bots that probably accounted for the largest spread of propaganda, false information, and political attacks during the 2016 election.”

Indeed the ‘hive-mind’ has become The Wild West, and The Law has not yet ridden into town. The Oxford study revealed more inter-connectedness between the Trump campaign and its citizen-generated bot networks, than with those associated with the Clinton campaign. Maybe that was because so many DNC supporters preferred to “Feel the Bern”, and the party was divided – or maybe they were more scrupulous. The study shows, in any case, that citizen recruitment in the spread of false information and propaganda is the principle catalyst for political chaos in the UK and the US.

A foreign power, and Wikileaks, may or may not have influenced the outcomes of the US elections, but domestic armies of bots and bot-meisters did much more so. To focus so much on foreign influence, we risk to assume that anything local is fair game, even when technology is used by Everyman to disinform and persuade. Theoretically, we can all play, but it is no longer an even playing field when humans are being driven or drowned out by armies of propaganda bots. Tim Berners Lee also believes that highly-funded dark political messaging threatens democracy and net neutrality:

“We have these dark ads that target and manipulate me and then vanish because I can’t bookmark them. This is not democracy – this is putting who gets selected into the hands of the most manipulative companies out there,”

Cambridge Analytica boasts the use of ‘dark strategy’ for the Trump campaign – that practice of dividing the political offer on the basis of information obtained about the target’s personality type. On their advice, the Leave EU campaigns did the same, sending a billion psychologically tailored messages to the British public. Both were were focusing on those who were undecided about their vote, and thus ‘persuadable’.

The Russian troll influence has been exposed in the US, via targeted social media advertising – for a very nominal sum of money. Their targeting techniques are being exposed as shocking, but as if they apply uniquely within the Russian context. The elephant in the room is that the Trump and Brexit campaigns spent millions using the same techniques! Figure it out. Is it not our own back yards that been occupied, and that are sorely in need weeding?

Dark Strategy on Facebook - the dividing of the political offer

Considering that the company who persuaded impressionable people to vote Trump and Leave EU, themselves claim to have a 25 year record of performing similar psychological operations on populations for governments around the world, I suggest that ‘What Happened’ in the US and UK is more akin to a military coup, primarily funded by the playful and principled western oligarch – Robert Mercer, and that his ‘MI6 for Hire’ people at SCL need to be stopped, before they break any more democracies.

What we should be examining is the abuse of power, in locating and propagandising impressionable people, and those who could be identified as ignorant of politics. This would have made targets of the BeLeave campaign, who were very young, especially vulnerable to manipulation.

One is suddenly reminded of Assange’s words in 2013, during his Australian Wikileaks Party campaign speech:

“When all of the communications – heart-felt – the inner core of our life – communications between boyfriends and girlfriends – between husbands and wives, sons and daughters – between business partners – even between bureaucracies and states – when all of those communications are swept up, hoovered up, into a vast collection apparatus – indexed and stored for all time – available only to a select few – then we are in a situation where we have a tank on the street of the inner core of our lives – a soldier under the bed, listening…”

It’s not sure Assange anticipated what the “select few” would say back to the masses, after the indexing of that vast collection was complete. He knows now.