Trump/Russia/SDNY investigation

The frustrating thing I find is how this is/isn't being reported. Lot of generic talk about indictments against Russians and Trump's reaction. Not as much explaining how the details show how the viewing public was targeted and used. If you want more people to care, make the headlines and details reflect precisely what they are alleged to have done and how this *is* an attack on Americans rather than just a Trump/Hillary thing.
 
shabadu84 said:
The frustrating thing I find is how this is/isn't being reported. Lot of generic talk about indictments against Russians and Trump's reaction. Not as much explaining how the details show how the viewing public was targeted and used. If you want more people to care, make the headlines and details reflect precisely what they are alleged to have done and how this *is* an attack on Americans rather than just a Trump/Hillary thing.
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I suppose the problem is that people generally have an ignorance about how influence works the human mind and refuse to believe that they personally could've been affected or duped by what they see and read on a daily basis.

Echo chambers, propaganda, misleading headlines, etc are all genuine things with a huge amount of research about how they affect our views and perceptions but people think it's all mumbo jumbo.

Attempt to cover this stuff and all you'll get back is "Russians couldn't possibly have affected me, I hate Hillary, I'm not gonna tell you why because I don't know why or when I started but I hate her and proudly voted for Trump!'

Flip that for the other side and so on.

We hardly know what our real feelings are on things because they're just constructs based on the messages we receive and we never dig deeper than our base instincts.
 
matherto said:
Just look on Fox News and you'll see it works.
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I do see a softening of the stance by some on Fox. While they're still pleading Trump's case, they're also more carefully choosing their language on this. I don't think they'll bury their head in the sand forever and will eventually have to acknowledge and cut bait on Trump. But they will never move off the things and people they hate and will move quickly to chastise everyone for not moving on and supporting Pence or whomever.
 
matherto said:
I suppose the problem is that people generally have an ignorance about how influence works the human mind and refuse to believe that they personally could've been affected or duped by what they see and read on a daily basis.

Echo chambers, propaganda, misleading headlines, etc are all genuine things with a huge amount of research about how they affect our views and perceptions but people think it's all mumbo jumbo.

Attempt to cover this stuff and all you'll get back is "Russians couldn't possibly have affected me, I hate Hillary, I'm not gonna tell you why because I don't know why or when I started but I hate her and proudly voted for Trump!'

Flip that for the other side and so on.

We hardly know what our real feelings are on things because they're just constructs based on the messages we receive and we never dig deeper than our base instincts.
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How could massive influxes of opinion have an influence on a democracy? Oh, wait.....
 
Pexbo said:
Boris and Rees Mogg too.
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That would be too good. Think they'd get protected by the Tories in any case. But Farages attachment to the Trump/Russia/Brexit thing is undeniable. He was even tweeting anti FBI sentiment minutes before the indictments were released.
 
Presumably the US government would have to request the extradition of Russian nationals who live in Russia who've been named in these indictment papers? I know that Russia may not have an extradition arrangement with the US but if Trump refuses to allow the government to set the wheels in motion for a request then surely that itself represents an obstruction of justice all by itself?
 
Oscie said:
Presumably the US government would have to request the extradition of Russian nationals who live in Russia who've been named in these indictment papers? I know that Russia may not have an extradition arrangement with the US but if Trump refuses to allow the government to set the wheels in motion for a request then surely that itself represents an obstruction of justice all by itself?
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He won’t block it, he has no reason to as it won’t put any pressure on Putin because they don’t have an extradition agreement. It just means there is about 10 countries left they can visit in the world, probably less when you consider they’d need to get connecting flights to some of them.
 
Pexbo said:
He won’t block it, he has no reason to as it won’t put any pressure on Putin because they don’t have an extradition agreement. It just means there is about 10 countries left they can visit in the world, probably less when you consider they’d need to get connecting flights to some of them.
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Putin has nothing to lose, if anything he'd surely enjoy watching a US President squirm, albeit one he helped elect to office, by simply acquiescing to the request.
 
Oscie said:
Putin has nothing to lose, if anything he'd surely enjoy watching a US President squirm, albeit one he helped elect to office, by simply acquiescing to the request.
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I don’t understand what you mean? That Putin will order Trump to block it?
 
Pexbo said:
I don’t understand what you mean? That Putin will order Trump to block it?
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No, that Trump will fear Putin agreeing to the request so therefore will try to find a way to somehow try to block/delay it.
 
Oscie said:
No, that Trump will fear Putin agreeing to the request so therefore will try to find a way to somehow try to block/delay it.
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Trump will have absolutely zero worry about that. Russia is not going to extradite Russian Citizens who had been carrying out Russian government agenda.

You really think Putin would actually grant the US Intelligence community access to these people?
 
It's a trap. Within a trap. The thriller that documents and makes sense of the goings on will be the fattest book ever, a six season TV series.
 
Pexbo said:
https://www.theguardian.com/politic...gel-farage-may-have-given-julian-assange-data
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...t-meetings-us-congress-evidence-a8168506.html

Worth noting that Cambridge Analytica is the data mining company behind both (illegally) Brexit campaigns and the Trump campaign and it's owned by Robert Mercer who also owns Breitbart.
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I don't think they are data mining. AFAIK what they do is:
1. Buy data connected to voters (e.g. from Facebook, the actual data miner)
2. Rank them into a five factor model (big five)
3. Group them
4. Target ads specifically on each group

I don't think that this is illegal in the US based on current privacy law. It certainely would be under the GDPR framework the EU is going to adopt in May 2018, if it was during Brexit I have no idea since EU legislation was only a directive and each country then issued their own regulation.
 
Javi said:
I don't think they are data mining. AFAIK what they do is:
1. Buy data connected to voters (e.g. from Facebook, the actual data miner)
2. Rank them into a five factor model (big five)
3. Group them
4. Target ads specifically on each group

I don't think that this is illegal in the US based on current privacy law. It certainely would be under the GDPR framework the EU is going to adopt in May 2018, if it was during Brexit I have no idea since EU legislation was only a directive and each country then issued their own regulation.
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No, Facebook collect data. They mine it for themselves and use it for their advertising algorithms but they don't sell raw data to anyone.

What CA do is collect data from a huge number of sources from publicly available data to data collected by private companies (websites and apps mostly) and using their own bots to web scrape.

Once they've collected that data, they use very sophisticated algorithms to build a psychological model of the demographic they are targeting and then use that model to craft very specific adverts designed to trigger a specific emotional response and influence opinion.


The term data mining doesn't refer to the collection of data as a raw material, it refers to data being the landscape and information being the raw material. What CA do is design and implement sophisticated algorithms to plough through huge sets of data looking for specific elements or trends.

The reason it was illegal in the UK is because both Brexit campaigns were being driven by the same company and person, Robert Mercer. Backing two campaigns is illegal, masking that is illegal and accepting funds from a non-UK citizen is illegal.

The reason it might have been illegal in the Trump Campaign is because of how the data was collected. The data for huge numbers of voters was acquired through hacking and coincidentally Cambridge Analytica used their sophisticated algorithms to target very specific areas with very specific adverts to influence votes in key states.


Now here's where I think things could get very interesting. A comparison between the specific demographics Cambridge Analytica were targeting and the specific demographics the Internet Research Agency targeted. I have a feeling that both CA and IRA were targeting their propaganda campaigns at the same targets because they were either working from the same data sets or they were colluding.
 
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