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.

After a 20-year hiatus, Australia’s most notorious populist Far Right politician has risen to power again. Pauline Hanson came out of the woodwork in 2016 to run for the Australian Senate, and win 6 seats for the Pauline Hanson One Nation Party.

One Nation has been accused of “xenophobia”, homophobia, climate denial and contempt for Aboriginals, welfare recipients and trade unionists. Hanson’s career began in the mid 1990s, when she asserted that Australia was being overrun by Asians. Today, it’s Muslims, and Senator Hanson’s call for a halt to Muslim immigration has fuelled Islamophobic sentiment around the country, and divided the nation.

‘ We’re coming after you and your jobs’

Pauline has recently declared: ‘”We’re coming after you and your jobs” to the current political leaders of her home-state Queensland, where she has garnered her strongest support to date. The One Nation leader has rallied an army of 36 candidates for the 2017 state election. Given that over half a million Australians voted One Nation in to the Senate at the 2016 Federal election, both of mainstream parties have good reason to quiver in their boots…

Pauline Hanson - she's coming to get you...

An evening of learning, proposed by Federal Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, to keep us safe online. And what an excellent job Dan Bryant did of making both the why and the how clear in his workshop. Dan is a ‘conscientious objector’ systems engineer from the private sector, who joined the Greens to help refugees and keep the internet a fair playing field.

CRYPTOPARTY LIKE IT'S 1984 systems engineer and tutor - DAN BRYANT

The ‘Cryptoparty Like It’s 1984′ event is in 4 parts, and I’ve documented that into 3 films; the fourth being an interaction with the audience (whom I did not film for the entirety of the evening). The first is a preamble from Greens MP Jamie Parker and Senator Scott Ludlam; the second a cyber-security work-shop; and the third a Q&A with Ludlam and NSW Greens Candidate for Newtown, Jenny Leong.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussies… whether or not you like knights and dames, methinks it’s time to castle. With both major parties bull-dozing their way into our private lives, with the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015, on *someone’s* behalf, the sensible reaction is to don the Invisibility Cloak. Go Dark! This trove of Australian metadata will likely become a target for penetration and theft world-wide; so best not to allow one’s own data-set to become vulnerable. Hell knows they haven’t thought it through about how to compensate us, if we all get robbed.

CRYPTOPARTY LIKE IT'S 1984 - Dan explains how TOR works

What I fear is that global surveillance provides a means for a global elite, to learn the ‘Deepest Secret Fear’ of any opponent; and to thwart their every move in advance. Metadata essentially monitors networks of communications, not just individuals; so this power extends over groups of all kinds, be it political parties, unions, journalists or activists defending their water supplies and farmlands.

The Greens are the only large political party opposing this ‘accident waiting to happen’ / totalitarian-corporate take-over. Senator Ludlam has decided to spread the word, far and wide, on how to really protect Australia. Every technique you learn in this workshop is entirely legal, and safe for use. If you can get yourself a decent VPN (virtual private network), it may even speed up your internet connection.

Everyone can hack if they know how, but it is only government intelligence agencies that are afforded true anonymity to do so. If as an individual or group, you have done the right thing by shining the light on crime, corruption, or any backdoor business that is potentially harmful to people or the environment, you deserve help if you get into trouble for doing that. If you have acted in the public interest, communities will most likely support you – and you may have a case that will change history! All you need is a voice…

Free All Arrested Anons from @AnonymousVideo on Vimeo.

Anonymous FreeAnons Press Release

The Anonymous Solidarity Network exists to provide legal, financial and moral support for activists facing prosecution for involvement, alleged or otherwise, in Anonymous actions. The use of information networks to perform community acts of protest is neither a crime nor an act of conspiracy, and should not be prosecuted as such.

When internet activists are getting longer prison sentences than rapists you have to wonder what kind of world we’re leaving for our kids. A world where we see every day how governments, banks and corporations strip away our privacy and freedoms in the name of greed, power and control.

Read about the case of Jonathan Moylan and the #standwithjono campaign

The storm has yet to pass and what ships remain out at sea are desperately seeking refuge from the relentless waves of prosecution but there is one ship sailing alongside these troubled waters…

We are the Anonymous Solidarity Network. We are a collective of Anons and the friends and family of Anons facing prosecution for alleged involvement in Anonymous activities.

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Australian citizens are calling for urgent public support from around the world to send a boat full of journalists and observers out to report on what the Australian Government are doing with asylum seekers at sea. The Abbott government, which may be in breach of international law, has become increasingly secretive over the last year regarding its extreme measures to “Stop the Boats” – a hard-line Border Protection policy that won it the last election, but which has seen it fail to protect the lives of asylum seekers.

The eruption of violence in a detainment facility on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, earlier this year, saw scores of detainees injured by hostile locals, and one man, Reza Berati, beaten to death by staff. Instances of self-harm and attempted suicide among stir-crazy detainees have become alarmingly wide-spread, and mothers of young children on Christmas Island recently announced a suicide pact, in order for their young to be allowed to stay in Australia.

The reaction however from the Abbott government has remained pitiless and grossly insensitive. Besides implementing ongoing Protection of Injury surveillance, it has denounced the intended mass suicide as “emotional blackmail”.

Over the last few months, on-shore detention facilities have been emptied, despite robust protest from concerned Australian citizens, and the detainees whisked off to remote locations where it is difficult for them to have access to legal representation, whose funding in any case has been cut. The ‘policy’ is ostensibly to do nothing with refugees, besides letting them rot in perpetuity in places where Australians are likely to forget about them.

A recently leaked video address to asylum seekers by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison reveals him saying that they will spend “a very long time” in detention, even if deemed to be genuine refugees, and never settled in Australia. These measures have been seen as coercive, to get asylum seekers to opt for returning to their country of origin, rather than facing what may be a life-time of incarceration.

Off-shore detention was implemented by the previous Labor government, and already harsh and seemingly endless, but in a bid to halt the arrival of asylum seeker boats completely, the Liberals mounted a quasi military Operation (Sovereign Borders) to block their passage, and stipulated that these “illegals” would never be admitted to Australia, even if found to be genuine refugees. Their fate would be ‘indefinite’ detention in off-shore camps, in tortuous limbo, while the government ‘processed’ them.

TOO YOUNG TO HOLD: Victorian Legal Aid argues that the original decision to detain four children on Christmas Island was made unlawfully. Picture: AP

An Australian Customs vessel intercepted two boats last week in its “contiguous zone” – not territorial waters – a zone that is not yet Australia, and where right of “innocent passage” should normally apply. One boat contained 41 asylum seekers and the other 153, reportedly all Tamils who were fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka. Citizens, organisations and governments around the world looked on in shock, as the Australian government handed over all 41 asylum seekers on the first boat to the Sri Lanka authorities.

An injunction has now been placed by the Australian High Court – see live updates provided by The Guardian – to prevent further refoulement of the 153 refugees on the second boat. There appears to be doubt that the government’s radical new practice of “enhanced screening” – four questions only, that resulted in 100% negative outcomes for the 41 people – constitutes fair consideration of an asylum-seeker’s’ case.

Sri Lankan asylum seekers sit on the deck of their boat stranded on the water in Pagai Selatan, Mentawai Islands, Indonesia. Picture: AP

Although the interception of these fleeing boatloads happened outside Australian territorial waters, the “prison ship” has now absconded, pirate-fashion, to the high seas. And it would seem that there are legal implications associated with both locations. The government’s legal representative, Gleeson QC, is claiming that since the the asylum seekers were picked up outside of Australia, they can not be afforded protection under the Migration Act. On the other hand, It is also illegal for a government to detain people without disclosing their whereabouts – *somewhere* on the high seas. Refoulement (delivery of refugees to their persecutors) is a violation of international law, and it breaches Australia’s obligations under the Refugee Convention, and of course asylum seekers have the right to fair screening and protection from harm in the interim.

Former liberal candidate, Mark Hoysted, outlines some of the key issues before the court.

The High Court has specified that although none of the 153 asylum seekers can be delivered to Sri Lankan authorities, pending an investigation, they may be transported elsewhere to be processed. Manus Island and Nauru are not looking like the easiest of destinations at the moment, given certain conditions of Maritime Powers Act, but it is unlikely that our government will cede to motions being led by Senator Sarah Hanson Young and human rights groups such as Plan International Australia who are particularly concerned about the children on board, to bring these people to Australia. For the moment, all we know is that they are being detained on the high seas, with conditions aboard unknown.

Articles 31 to 33 of the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees prohibit REFOULEMENT - the return of any refugee 'to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened'

This government needs to be placed under maximum surveillance! Its employees are unlikely to speak out, since they have been threatened with dismissal if they disclose or criticise the government’s “Operational Matters” – a term that has been employed by Prime Minister Abbott to characterise the battle against refugees as a war. It therefore falls upon ordinary citizens and independent journalists to expose the human rights atrocity this government’s actions appear to have become. Please support Operation Transparent Borders by donating generously.

Three-year-old Febrina is among the 153 missing asylum seekers © Tamil Refugee Council

That may sound unreliable… but it sells! Welcome to Big Brother meets Big Data!

Palantir Technologies, is a premium Silicon Valley start-up, whose business it’s been to write clever software to track digital footprints, then ‘join the dots’ to predict who you are and what you might do next. Its directors are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook, and Alex Karp, an “eccentric philosopher” (with a PhD in neoclassical social theory) who turned their Palo Alto* headquarters into a replica of The Shire from ‘Lord of the Rings’. If it sounds like a fairy story, it is not. Palantir’s software has been labelled the Killer App. It was allegedly used to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden.

[Editor's update: In 2020 Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver.]

Palantir is ‘well in’. Its advisors are Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet (ex CIA). It was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm and the CIA became a client of Palantir back in 2004. Other government clients are the NSA, the FBI, the NYPD, and a number of counter terrorism and military agencies.

This baby was valued at five to eight billion dollars in 2013 and predicted to earn another billion in private sector deals in 2014. Forbes Magazine reported:

“Palantir is emerging from the shadow world of spies and special ops to take corporate America by storm. Private-sector deals now account for close to 60% of the company’s revenue.”

[Editor's update: Palantir went public in 2020 as PLTR. As of late April 2026, it has a market capitalization estimated in the range of $300 to $375 billion, largely due to its AI-enabled software platform. Its share value has seen a downturn in 2026, after peaking in 2025.]

The identities of corporate clients are usually kept secret, but in 2014 they have included J.P. Morgan, various hedge funds, News Corp and Bank of America – as some will recall from Palantir’s dealings with H.B Gary Federal in a thwarted plan to destroy Wikileaks and its media partner Glenn Greenwald, who instead went on to report on the disclosures of Edward Snowden. The plan may have succeeded, had not Aaron Barr, an employee of H.B. Gary, bragged about and published a list of alleged members of Anonymous, which in reality was a list of artists, writers and musicians who had taken an interest in the movement. The injustice of this blunder unsurprisingly triggered a revenge attack on H.B. Gary’s servers from real hackers, who uncovered a Powerpoint file outlining the steps the partners would take to discredit Wikileaks and its associates.

When Anonymous gained access to thousands of emails on H.B Gary’s servers, they found that Palantir had worked with HB Gary Federal to develop proposals for attacking WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, blackmailing its supporters and identifying donors. One idea was to submit false information to the organisation’s drop box, which would later be exposed as such. When the plot was exposed, Palantir put an engineer on leave, apologised for his role in the plan, and cut ties with HB Gary. After that they installed a “Batphone” in Karp’s office, allegedly to receive reports about “unethical clients”, and reinstated their engineer.

One might ask at this stage if these people are elves or the Black Riders.

Palantir Technologies is a perhaps a pioneer in an upcoming consumer industry of selling private information for profit, and they are cheap as chips compared to Booz Allen, IBM and Lockheed Martin. But Forbes Magazine suggested Palantir restrict their services to the top end because some people wouldn’t be happy if they went totally public. Quote: “It helps its customers see too much”.

Really? Alex Karp claims his “turn-key” service (as he calls it) helps the Government go after bad guys. Who those bad guys are he often doesn’t know or succeed in finding out.

“It’s tough”, he says, because his targets don’t leave behind any tangible evidence such as fingerprints or DNA.

Whether they actually are bad guys he takes on faith from his Government or whichever client he is working for, and of course the Batphone. According to former employees, Palantir has sought work in Saudi Arabia despite the staff’s misgivings about human rights abuses in the kingdom, but Karp doesn’t seemed to have picked up on any calls about that issue.

In an interview on the Palantir website, Karp assures us that Palantir are the good guys and he showcases a high profile project where they chased the infiltrators of the Dalai Lama’s computer. He stumbles however when asked who it was and has to admit that it wasn’t really clear in the end whether it was a foreign government or teenagers. That’s a pretty wide margin of error.

Palantir’s so-called predictions hinge on assumptions and probabilities – no light, just shadow – and as it turns out, the “bad guys” are not always bad guys. Sometimes they’re activists; sometimes journalists. Karp loves to drop in the word “turn-key” when he’s selling his crystal ball kit. The irony he doesn’t see is that it is the perfect tool for turn-key totalitarianism. You put all of this surveillance into place and then someone, a new President or Prime Minister, flips the switch to tyranny.

Click! Suddenly the technology is not being used as intended. Click! Anti-war activists are raided by the FBI. Click! Refugee activists are threatened by the Department of Immigration and Border ‘Protection’.

[Editor's update: In 2026 a Palantir AI-powered platform called ImmigrationOS is used for identifying, tracking and removing deportation targets - so that an officer can green light a raid, generate a warrant and trigger deportation within a few clicks.]

Alex Karp claims to be an advocate for civil liberties. He assured a talk-show host that innocent people would not be “swept into the dragnet”; that the “patterns” his software detects only relate to the activities of terrorists. He says that the data Palantir supplies is “tagged” for one use only, giving the impression that his company has control over who sees what, or how the information will be used.

The US Justice Department’s Inspector General, in a series of reports on FBI practices found systematic disregard for the required procedures for demanding records. False statements in affidavits to telecommunications companies and the FISA Court; improper acquisition of journalists’ phone records; use of national security authorities in cases unrelated to national security; and attempts by superiors to retroactively conceal these improprieties. Speaking of patterns, a pattern of failure to report potential violations to the proper oversight board was also “noted”.

William Binney, a former NSA official, who led a team to develop ThinThread, the agency’s selective and effective pre-911 surveillance tool, resigned because he saw the whole thing spin out of control and his country turn into a police state. Binney baulked when he saw that NSA data was being used to prosecute petty crime, and not many terrorists. Not many at all. Palantir’s director admits that real terrorists are apt to change their patterns and cut their ties as soon as anyone in their circle is arrested. Going after ordinary citizens, on the other hand, is a much more fruitful, easy and lucrative process.

FBI Director Robert Mueller argued that the entire body of phone records is “relevant to an investigation” because it plausibly contains records that will be relevant to some investigation at some point in time. Since these investigations were not only being used to pursue petty criminals but dissidents too, Binney realised that his Government’s actual use of data gathered through spying had become “a Totalitarian Process”. The American Civil Liberties Union describes Palantir as “a true totalitarian nightmare”.

Julian Sanchez from the CATO Institute articulated a problem that possibly none of the hobbits from The Shire had foreseen:

“Such an architecture of surveillance, once established, would be difficult to dismantle and prove too potent a tool of control if it ever fell into the hands of people who — whether through panic, malice, or a misguided confidence in their own ability to secretly judge the public good — would seek to use it against us.”

Unscathed by the plot to destroy his career, Glenn Greenwald worked with Edward Snowden to reveal that this architecture is in place. Mass surveillance of all citizens, an unprecedented level of eavesdropping, with all the dirt ready if your name comes up, to prosecute you for any kind of crime or misdemeanour. And if you happen to be living in ‘The Lucky Country’ of Australia, you might already be getting into strife for criticising your Government, even if you use a pseudonym because you happen to work for it.

The more innocent citizens are spied upon and intimidated, if they get lippy, the more secretive Governments must become to get away with it. Besides an erosion of civil liberties that inevitably becomes unconstitutional, there’s another ‘technical’ issue that makes the whole process dubious:

Evidence stops being ‘forensic’ when it’s only a digital footprint.

Alex Karp admits that and one can only conclude that his company sells nothing but hunches, and that around these hunches his clients have cultivated a devout belief in the stoned philosopher’s Palantiri – and word has it he often is stoned. A cloud of secrecy then prevents sceptics, lawyers and moralists from reality-checking the ‘vision’, and inducing them to assume that a well-paid, well-hidden job is being well done. Copies of NSA documents are not even allowed to be passed on for analysis by another Palantir client, the NYPD. And thus, the circle of trust is hermetically sealed, around an irrational, self-serving seat of power that is frightened of mere shadows.

Peter Jackson should make a film about that!

Sydney PRISM-BREAK protest - Photo Jarek Gasiorek

What they get up to here in Australia, not even a Senator may know, nor hold to account.

Our Intelligence Facility at Pine Gap is jointly run, and shares its SIGINT (signals intelligence) with another nation: the US. It’s supposed to be an open exchange, not only with the US, but other countries that form the 5 Eyes group: Canada, the UK and New Zealand. But history has shown that exchange to be uneven in nature, with the US Executive ultimately deciding what information will be shared. By contrast, our Prime Ministers have never been allowed to enter the building at Pine Gap.

One ex Prime Minister however, Malcolm Fraser, has recently declared that we may have a serious problem with that situation, and warns that we may be charged for war crimes:

“Initially Pine Gap was [used for] collecting information … it’s now targeting weapons systems, and very much involved in the targeting of drones… Americans involved in those programs are given legal cover under the War Powers Resolution passed after 9/11, which gives totally unlimited power, no geographic limits, no time limits, using any means available or that might become available to American presidents to do so. But that resolution gives no legal cover to Australians operating out of Pine Gap who are complicit in finding, identifying, and locating the so-called target.”

Mr Fraser’s warning followed a week-long Peace Convergence in Canberra, involving a world-record breaking series of protests – 28 in one day by WACA [the Australian Whistleblowers, Activists & Citizen Alliance] – that spanned across weapons manufacturers, embassies, government departments, military bases and Intelligence organisations. There were also a few private companies on the list, who profit well from invading our privacy and serving the US’s corporate war machine.

The Australian Signals Directorate is basically a spy outpost for America’s National Security Agency [NSA], as revealed through whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks. The ASD are heavily involved in the PRISM and the XKeyscore surveillance programs. PRISM is a top-secret $20m-a-year NSA surveillance program, offering the agency access to information on its targets from the servers of some of the USA’s biggest technology and social media companies: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, PalTalk and Yahoo. The UK’s spy agency GCHQ, also has access to PRISM data.

The NSA receives intelligence from four key facilities in Australia that are part of the XKeyscore program. They include the jointly controlled Pine Gap base near Alice Springs, and the Australian Signals Directorate’s intercept stations located outside Geraldton in Western Australia; at Shoal Bay near Darwin, and in a new centre at HMAS Harman Navy base in Canberra. Some say that NSA means “Never Say Anything”, and somewhat ironically, it was born of a desire from the Pentagon to: “expand its worldwide communications network” and establish a ”Global Information Grid”, according to a Dept. of Defence report.

The NSA’s computing Cloud is the Utah Data Centre, a 1 million square foot Data Collection Centre that opened September 2013, under the auspices of Operation Stellar Wind, to intercept, decipher, analyse, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications, from satellites, underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. These are near-bottomless databases collecting all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails, such as your parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter’.

As well as your confidential personal communications, the centre also grabs financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets and legal documents – all of which are heavily encrypted of course. But the NSA can break unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also business rivals and many average computer users.

Everyone is a target. Everyone is probed. Everyone is powerless, and everyone should be concerned.

“The internet has been turned into a Militarily Occupied State. When all of our private 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 the situation where we have a tank on the streets of the inner core of our lives, where we have a soldier under our bed; listening to everything that a husband and wife say to each other, when they are communicating on email or SMS. The penetration of the digital of civilian life, is also the penetration of the military of civilian life.”

Julian Assange

I was shocked to discover that the Wikileaks Party’s long-awaited, and recently released Independent Review FAILED to mention a hefty submission made by the former Council member and national spokesperson for the WLP, Sam Castro.

For the record, a number of WLP members, including myself, were carbon copied on that submission on 23/09/13. Sam Castro sent it directly to Stuart Bell of Bell Campbell Auditing, after having spoken at length with him on the phone.

Sam related from their first conversation, that Bell, whom she described as a “a very sincere person”, was surprised to hear from her, since he himself had not seen the Review’s Terms of Reference [TORs]. He was more surprised to learn that they were already published on the party website, with his company’s name attached.

In a follow-up email to Bell, Castro confirmed:

“I noted that the TORs on the WLP website, that you had not seen, are so narrow they do not cover what happened prior to or after the GVT submission on Saturday 17th Sept, which obviously does not include the time frame in which the revelation of the corruption and coverup led to our resignations.”

When Castro asked whose communications he was supposed to look at, Bell replied that he could not say, but admitted that no one who had resigned from the Party was on the list of ‘Preference Decision-Makers’, supplied to him by the Party CEO, John Shipton.

NOT a candidate, not 4 National Council Members, not a Social Media Coordinator or a National Volunteer Co-Ordinator, 5 of whom were ‘Preference Decision-Makers’. The communications of the following people were to be ignored: NC members Sam Castro, Kaz Cochrane, Dan Matthews and Luke Pearson and Victorian Candidate Leslie Cannold.

During their first contact, Stuart Bell had openly acknowledged to Castro that he, the ‘independent’ reviewer, was actually a member of the WLP, and an accountant who had already offered his services to the Party – a fact she immediately made public.

This was denied by a senior Party member on Twitter late last year, but has now been admitted by Bell himself – as a disclaimer? – within the ‘Independent’ Review.

Stuart Bell kept very quiet however, about the burying of Sam Castro’s submission. He states:

“The author and/or staff have not had opportunity to personally interview current and former National Council members, except for John Shipton. Cassie Findlay rang on 2 separate occasions and provided substantial information of meetings, conversations and exchange of information between National Council members. Written and verbal submissions were received from the following National Council members:

 John Shipton
 Cassie Findlay
 Greg Barns
 Kellie Tranter
 Gail Malone
 Omar Todd “

Bell does not mention any of his discussions with Sam Castro, or her written submission, which he should have received twice. His lamenting of an “inability or access to all relevant information and WLP personnel.” is a smoke-screen. Bell did interview someone other than John Shipton and is not disclosing this.

Was there a “No Access to Sam Castro” directive issued to the WLP member Stuart Bell of Bell Auditing? Is that what he is really whinging about? Then he should come come clean about that too, because what Bell seems to have collaborated in is a highly biased omission of evidence and the suppression of a witness from an ‘Independent’ Review. Not good, considering the reputation his company has to maintain. I heard Bell did the job pro bono – “for the public good”. One could offer the opinion that the public is better with the whole truth (names redacted where necessary to protect lives…) and with information that is reliable.

Castro also copied me on the final day for submissions, September 29th, when she reluctantly sent her material to/via the Wikileaks Party as well – as per their objectionable ‘filtering’ conditions – just to be sure it would be included!

.
The author of the Independent Review specifies as “Background” to his report:

“The author was approached by John Shipton, to assess information provided by Preference Decision-Makers and make recommendations”

But despite her extended efforts as a ‘Preference Decision-Maker’ to contribute information to the assessment, the submission of the Party’s former National Spokeswoman was not entered into the public record. Like the minutes of those last meetings, which would have documented what Dan Matthews just reminded us was the final, “binding resolution” of the National Council – it’s apparently shredded wheat…

Yet tagged on to Bell Auditing’s report, presumably by the Wikileaks Party, was an isolated email – a solitary “A” without a sequel – dating from one week before the time-frame specified within their own Terms of Reference.

Its contents give quite the opposite impression of where the National Council stood, but according to Dan Matthews and others who resigned, this position was completely superseded and overturned by majority vote in the week that followed.

Actually there’s another WLP “Uncensored” Review floating round; one that gives a much clearer picture of what happened just before the WLP preferences were submitted. It contains an email thread that was circulated between four people (only) the morning after the National Council’s “binding decision”, and reveals their “tweaks” of the Party’s GVTs. The subject of the email is: “Version 2 tweaked” and the message: “Sorry, more Tweaks coming soon”, but the other Preference Decision-Makers are not copied in on the communications. Even Julian Assange, it would appear, was not copied in on all of the communications regarding preferencing in WA…

The film also leaks phone discussions on the day of the mass resignations. Juicy!

.
Sam Castro was asked to comment soon after she had read Bell’s review, and replied:

“I’ll have to think for a few days about what course of action I’m going to take, but my immediate reaction is that I hate what they are doing.”

“They”? Who’s left? Looking at the WLP website today, I noticed that another 3 National Council members – Cassie Findlay, Kellie Tranter and Niraj Lal – have left, presumably exiting quietly via the back door… A shame that all of the heroic and tireless “Wiki-women”, bar one, have resigned now from the Party’s executive. Most of them however, including Sam Castro, remain to this day paid up members of the Wikileaks Party.

Check your local Anonymous postings for where to meet on November 5th…
Anonymous Sydney will assemble at Martin Place, 2pm

Million Mask March Australia stands in solidarity with the global collective movement!

Recently, the largest mass gatherings in the history of the world have occurred globally, yet mainstream media has remained silent on this matter. What little has been reported, has been given political spin, and/or largely discredited, and misrepresented.

WE ARE MARCHING AGAINST MAINSTREAM MEDIA BLACKOUTS, AND WHITEWASHING OF CURRENT WORLD ISSUES, THAT THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD ARE ADDRESSING PEACEFULLY, UNITING AGAINST CORRUPTION!

WE ARE ANONYMOUS!
WE DO NOT SUPPORT TYRANY OR TERRORISM IN ANY FORM!
WE ARE THE HUMANITY THAT IS NOT BEING REPRESENTED.

Each one of us has our own path, but each share the same goal!
A free humanity!

Every being has an in-alienable right to their own ideas and expressions, and censorship of the Internet and Mainstream Media will not be tolerated by the 99%!

In DIRECT NON VIOLENT PEACEFUL RESISTANCE the people of the world wish to restore justice in the rule of law, and stand united in educating and raising awareness against tyrannical ideology, and practices of government agencies and corporations, the organised criminal class.

The power of the people stands against the corrupt corporate actions of the 1%, whom having the combined income of the 99% of humanity, use illegally acquired resources to fund scheming systems that do not benefit humanity as a whole, but have instead indebted the citizens of the world into hunger, wars, poverty, and slavery, while raping and pillaging earth’s natural resources, for the purpose of profiteering.

The purpose of the global Million Mask March is on one hand, to ensure open source social dialogues, free from censorship, helping to inform, educate and raise awareness on a variety of inter-related topics and events that are currently occurring around the globe, and which are being censored by mainstream media, and its corporate agenda.

On the other hand, Anonymous Internet activist culture is no longer confined to a virtual platform and has extended and incorporated performance art into its arsenal on the streets. We wish to familiarise people who have fallen prey to media vilification of dissenters and activists, with the true purpose of Anonymous: peace and unity.

We are not an official organisation! We are a collective and a movement! We are an ‘Idea’ that is freely shared and supported by humanity, whose solidarity lies within Love, Peace, Equality, Freedom and Justice for all!

The Million Mask March will high-light the following injustices that have and are still taking place:

Mainstream Corporate Media, working with its own corporate agendas, censoring and creating media black outs concerning serious world issues that impact the lives of the majority of humanity, the 99%!

Genocide of all indigenous cultures around the globe, whose sacred land we walk on. We stand against the continual white-washing of such history, and the continual injustices indigenous people face today, as voiced by the current movement ‘IDLE NO MORE’!

WAR in all forms from all sanctions! The military industrial complex and its subversive actions, that have no transparency; whose lies and false intelligence serve to protect corrupt corporate government tactics, orchestrated military invasions and sanctions that are killing innocent civilians globally for the purpose of profit, and stealing resources.

The illegal detention and mistreatment of WHISTLE-BLOWERS, such as Chelsea Manning and others who have sought to expose illegal operations.

Banking Cartels and Austerity measures that turn us into debt slaves, while being protected by government bail-outs when they fail.

Inflicted Homelessness, as a direct result of Austerity measures, and crippling debt structures, designed to fail.

Monsanto patenting of nature’s seed banks, attacks on farmers, stealing their lands, manipulation of our foods via G.M.O., chemical technologies and pesticides that are a health hazard and threaten extinction of nature’s plants, foods, and bees.

The N.S.A. and PRISM government programs that spy on citizens globally, taking away all privacy rights via warrant-less searches, and infiltration of the people’s use of the Internet and social media.

Police corruption and brutality! Police now operate in ‘Asymmetrical Policing’, no longer protecting the rights of the people but of corporate interests. They support schemes designed to raise revenue and profits. They engage in the racial profiling of minorities and activists in general, and interfere with the political rights of protestors and movements, by following a corrupt chain of command!

The T.P.P.A, or Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, that takes away people’s rights and powers, by supporting a large variety of controversial topics, related to the aforementioned points, but also, the patenting of medicine and censorship of Internet. It is nothing more than a corporate bill of rights that allows international signatories to hold power over any country, and dictate industry markets according to the 1%

The Coalition’s ‘War on Terror’, and the extended use of the word “Terrorism’, in order to portray and discredit any individual or entity that dissents against government and corporate criminal actions, which are nothing short of terrorist actions themselves! The people have long demanded a real investigation and inquiry into the actions that have been used to justify invasions, wars, and the cultural profiling of dissenters as terrorists.

These are issues a citizen cannot fight alone. These are issues that citizens of every country must battle together, as one unified voice: Anonymous, to save our eco-system; Anonymous, to protect Human Rights; Anonymous, for the rule of law; Anonymous, for UNITY, EQUALITY AND PEACE on Earth.

Join the Million Mask March on November 5th, and let the 1% see just how much they can…

EXPECT US!