Democracy Hijacked: How Foreign Nations are Using Our Own Political System Against Us

In , liberal democracies seemed to be an endangered species, and even within their own borders they were rocked by riots, assassinations, terrorist attacks and fierce ideological battles. While Washington, Paris and Chicago were descending into chaos, Moscow and Leningrad were tranquil, and the Soviet system seemed destined to endure for ever. Yet 20 years later it was the Soviet system that collapsed. The clashes of the s strengthened liberal democracy, while the stifling climate in the Soviet bloc presaged its demise. So we hope liberalism can reinvent itself yet again. But the main challenge it faces today comes not from fascism or communism, and not even from the demagogues and autocrats that are spreading everywhere like frogs after the rains.

This time the main challenge emerges from the laboratories. Liberalism is founded on the belief in human liberty. This is what makes human feelings and human choices the ultimate moral and political authority in the world. Liberalism tells us that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, and that we should think for ourselves and follow our hearts. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.

According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints. This myth has little to do with what science now teaches us about Homo sapiens and other animals.

You cannot decide what desires you have. Humans make choices — but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. This is not abstract theory. You can witness this easily. Just observe the next thought that pops up in your mind.

Where did it come from? Did you freely choose to think it? The myth also carried few costs. If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will. In order to successfully hack humans , you need two things: The Inquisition and the KGB lacked this knowledge and power. But soon, corporations and governments might have both, and once they can hack you, they can not only predict your choices, but also reengineer your feelings.

To do so, corporations and governments will not need to know you perfectly. They will just have to know you a little better than you know yourself. If you believe in the traditional liberal story, you will be tempted simply to dismiss this challenge. Nobody will ever manage to hack the human spirit, because there is something there that goes far beyond genes, neurons and algorithms. Nobody could successfully predict and manipulate my choices, because my choices reflect my free will.

It will just make you more vulnerable to it. It starts with simple things.

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As you surf the internet, a headline catches your eye: You click on it. At exactly the same moment, your neighbour is surfing the internet too, and a different headline catches her eye: She clicks on it. Both headlines are fake news stories, generated perhaps by Russian trolls, or by a website keen on increasing traffic to boost its ad revenues. Both you and your neighbour feel that you clicked on these headlines out of your free will.

But in fact you have been hacked. Propaganda and manipulation are nothing new, of course. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. Now it has become possible to do exactly that. An algorithm can tell that you already have a bias against immigrants, while your neighbour already dislikes Trump, which is why you see one headline while your neighbour sees an altogether different one.

In recent years some of the smartest people in the world have worked on hacking the human brain in order to make you click on ads and sell you stuff. Now these methods are being used to sell you politicians and ideologies, too. In some ways, an intern showing up and referring to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched. A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time.

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future. My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google.

That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica — as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet with a gravity-defying And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law.

The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit?

And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created.

A day later, that online reference vanished. There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. EU, Vote Leave — denied it. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.

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Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. They built our software for us. They held our database. You need to find Chris Wylie. Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. And, now, too, the American defence establishment.

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This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place.

And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends — a process then allowed by the social network. Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals.

It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale. The company also perfectly legally bought consumer datasets — on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel — and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter. Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee.

Foreign electoral intervention

It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence. But does it actually work? Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy? Opinions differ as to the intentional nature of the delay with regard to the outcome of the election. A ten-month investigation by the U. House of Representatives concluded that there was "virtually no credible evidence to support the accusations. In the last months of the presidential election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey , President Lyndon Johnson announced an October surprise , intended to aid Humphrey, by declaring a cessation to bombing in the ongoing Vietnam War and a new round of peace negotiations.

In response, Humphrey's popularity grew, eventually leading Nixon by three percentage points. However, the South Vietnamese government, in consultation with the Nixon campaign, announced three days prior to the election that they would not be participating in the talks, and Nixon went on to win the vote by less than a percentage point.

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Adlai Stevenson II had been the Democratic presidential nominee in and , and the Soviets offered him propaganda support if he would run again for president in , but Stevenson declined to run again. Kennedy in that very close election, against Richard Nixon with whom Krushchev had clashed in the Kitchen Debate. McKone and Freeman B. Krushchev later bragged that Kennedy acknowledged the Soviet help: I admit you played a role in the election and cast your vote for me In October , seeking to derail the reelection of incumbent U.

Roosevelt , the Nazis bribed a U. Leaking the captured Polish government document failed to have its intended effect, and Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie lost the election. From until "at least ," the British Secret Intelligence Service SIS orchestrated what Politico ' s Steve Usdin described as an influence campaign "without parallel in the history of relations between allied democracies" to undermine U. Usdin stated that "SIS From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.



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Bolivian general election, United States intervention in Chile. Chilean presidential election, French presidential election, German federal election, Guinean presidential election, Iranian legislative election, South Korean Constitutional Assembly election, Palestinian legislative election, Togolese presidential election, Russian interference in the Brexit referendum. Russian interference in the United States elections and Timeline of Russian interference in the United States elections.

Special Counsel investigation —present. Iran hostage crisis and October Surprise conspiracy theory. Review of International Studies. Retrieved 12 January For example, the U. The Polarizing Effect of Foreign Intervention". American Journal of Political Science.

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The United States and the Italian Elections of ". Retrieved 11 January Covert Operations in Chile, Journal of Conflict Resolution: Journal of Strategic Security. Check date values in: