Opposition leaders and shadow ministries not getting enough air-time in traditional media, means that they’re unable to do their job keeping governments, ministers, and portfolios to account. We aren’t a democracy without their contributions. A prime example of this is NSW Opposition leader Chris Minns. Last week when NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, made the shock announcement about the daily Covid pressers, Minns announced his own presser for the vacated timeslot. Despite Berejiklian saying that Sunday was her last presser she held another one yesterday.

Minns held his short presser yesterday at 11am via Facebook with his Shadow Health Minister, Ryan Park. The lack of dead corporate language used as well as their to-the-point communication style was refreshing. Key points made were about the need for the NSW government to do daily pressers with clear communication, and the need for the opportunity to scrutinise decisions that they make. Other points made were about our healthcare system being in crisis, for Berejiklian to be accountable, and for other people in her Covid management team to do the pressers if she can not.

For today’s presser Minns was joined by his Shadow Minister for IR, Work, Health & Safety, Sophie Cotsis, and Dr Jamal Rifi at Belmore Park, the home of the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs. Cotsis explained how the community-led response there has boosted their vaccination rate from 20 percent to closer to 90 percent, for the first vaccine dose in 2 months.

Minns then thanked Dr Rifi for his “amazing work on behalf of the people of NSW, his care for his community and the innovative way that he approaches medicine and community care. Putting up a tent in your front yard in order to make sure that vaccinations were distributed to so many people is an example of Australian ingenuity and world class care.”

Next on the agenda was Minns calling for NSW Parliament to be brought back so that the government can explain the reasons for their policies, and how they impact millions of people in NSW. Minns also reasoned that daily pressers were needed not for “gotchas” or “politicking” but to clear up confusion about local health orders.

Dr Rifi then relayed the good news about his drive-through vaccination clinic at the Bulldogs sports ground being approved by the Commonwealth Department of Health, for the next 6-weeks. It will operate 3-days a week as of this week on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Dr Rifi explained that people were safer being vaccinated in their cars rather than indoors where exposure to Covid is higher. As well as the benefits of vaccinating kids with their families, and whole families being immunised at once.

Dr Rifi also said that if NSW Health gave them more vaccines on top of what the federal government has given them, they could operate 7-days a week because demand there far outweighs supply. The problem is a lot of workers there work long hours and can’t get their second jabs on weekends, but if they lift the curfew hours it will make it easier for workers to use the drive-through after hours at night. Kudos to Canterbury-Bankstown Council, Bulldogs League Club and the SES volunteers for helping to make all of this happen, heroes really don’t wear capes.

The presser wraps up with Minns reiterating that we need daily pressers from the NSW government because “you can’t make up rules that affect 7 million people, and then not explain the application of these rules over the coming weeks.”

The NSW Labor leader also had this to say about the NSW Parliament sitting idle: “If we’re sending 15 and 16-year old kids off to Coles and Woolworths to work to keep supermarkets open, then politicians should be going back to work.”

After watching these illuminating pressers it’s clear South West Sydney and Western Sydney are not being treated fairly. Curfews do need to be assessed and a clear explanation provided for why they still need to be in place in all areas especially those with low case numbers. Every effort should be made to help communities there to get their second dose without losing their income. It’s clearly not a case of people in these postcodes not wanting to be vaccinated, Delta made that call for them and many of us months ago. They don’t need more ‘get the jab’ messaging they just need more vaccines.

YouTube link for Monday’s presser with Chris Minns and Ryan Park.

YouTube link for Tuesday’s presser with Chris Minns, and Shadow Minister for IR, Work, Health & Safety, Sophie Cotsis, and Dr Jamal Rifi.

Link for Australian Story about Dr Rifi last night.

This article was originally published on MelMac Politics – Shining a light on politics.

Murdochtopus has many arms that work in unison with News Corp, one of those arms is a think tank called the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). When Tony Abbott became Prime Minister the IPA wrote a list of 75 ideas for Abbott to think about which included:

50. Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function.

51. Privatise SBS. 

The Abbott government and coalition government’s since, have cut funding to the tune of $783 million. By 2023 the cuts to the ABC will amount to $1 billion. Surveys continually show that the ABC and SBS are the most trusted news brands in Australia.

Australia’s concentrated media ownership is one of the highest of the world

News Corp owns nearly 60% of the metropolitan and national print media markets by readership. The Nine Entertainment Co. and Fairfax merger in 2018, means that Nine is now the second largest media owner with a combined readership share of 23%.

80% of Australian free-to-air and subscription TV revenues are collected by three corporations: News Corp, Nine, and Seven Media Holdings.

Nearly 90% of the nation’s radio licences are controlled by News Corp, Nine, and Southern Cross Media (including their associated entities).

Why we need an independent media and newswire

News Corp, Nine and Seven controlling our information isn’t healthy let alone democratic. Our public broadcasters, independent media and the Australian Associated Press Newswire (AAP), fill the public interest journalism voids that commercial media can’t fill. Independent media focuses on audiences that get left behind, the issues that go unreported, holding power to account, and local issues that keep rural audiences informed and connected.

News Corp’s regional newspaper takeover in 2016 didn’t just add to his news monopoly, it gave him the power to close them down completely or to force people to buy digital subscriptions. This is exactly what happened last May. Some rural areas now have no source of news at all, some have bought News Corp subscriptions only to find that they‘re filled wih city-centric news not relevant to them, or their communities.

The AAP had a near death experience during the Covid lockdown in March last year when their two major shareholders, News Corp and Nine, decided to close it down. The reasoning for their decision was that the AAP couldn’t compete with free information from the Internet. The AAP was saved at the last minute by a group of philanphropists. Three-months later it became clear as to why they kept the profitable arms of the AAP for themselves, they were setting up their own newswire, NCA NewsWire, in direct competition with the AAP.

To nearly lose the AAP like that is alarming, we need our national newswire to tell all of our stories, not just those deemed of importance by the media giants. The AAP released the details of their Charter of Independence a month after relaunching as a not-for-profit news service last year. News Corp doesn’t have one, and it’s been 3-years since the Fairfax merged with Nine and they still haven’t signed one. These charters are vital for public interest journalism.

Media ownership report

I recommend reading the “Who controls our media” report. The report explains in laymen terms why it’s important for everyone to know about how media ownership such as ours, is not only unprecedented but dangerous for our democracy.

“I have two young daughters and I work as a registered nurse and a nurse educator. Murdoch [controlled News Corp] recently purchased the one local newspaper on the Sunshine Coast, The Sunshine Coast Daily. Now Murdoch can provide one side of a story without any competition or opposition.” Sarah – Sunshine Coast, QLD.

Sky News Australia has more YouTube reach than the ABC

The distribution of content across all media platforms to reach as many people as possible is where the real power exists. Sky News Australia subscriptions have been climbing since their 2019 distribution deals with YouTube, Microsoft, Facebook and Taboola. Sky News YouTube subscriptions are currently at 1.6 million and climbing whereas the ABC has 1.35 million, and let’s not forget that Sky News is broadcast 24/7 in places such as airports, hotels, and Parliament House.

News Corp is also the most distributed news brand on Facebook. Even if you don’t read Murdoch content, or watch Sky News, or listen to 2GB on the radio, the power of Murdochtopus means that you most likely will, in some shape or form. When only a few players exist, they set the agenda and their reach and amplification means that they set the agenda of all of the other media, including social media.

Patience is a virtue, but lobbying and power gets the job done

In 2006 Murdoch got a taste of Google revenue via an advertising deal with his newly acquired MySpace that was worth $900 million. MySpace was taken over by Facebook in 2009 due to his focusing on monetisation of the platform rather than innovation. From then on Murdoch complained that Google was stealing from him by displaying snippets and links to his content.

In 2019, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) found that Google’s use of snippets and links was not theft. By 2021 the much-hyped mandatory Media Bargaining Code of Conduct for Facebook and Google, bore fruit with paid partnership deals for all three of the media giants. This monetary advantage penalises smaller media players that have genuine concerns that the new deals will push News Corp content to the top rather than that of experts, especially in areas such as climate change.

NewsFlash app by Foxtel set to launch in the last quarter of 2021

NewsFlash will livestream content from news services that include Sky News, and Fox News, and will be cheaper than a Foxtel subscription. The app is also a handy way to keep rural audiences of commentators such as Andrew Bolt, after regional broadcaster, Win TV, ended their historic broadcast deal with News Corp and Sky News, by signing a 7-year deal with Nine.

Where to from here?

The petition created by former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was the largest e-petition in Australia’s parliamentary history. Over 500,000 people signed it for a Murdoch Royal Commission. The petition led to a Senate inquiry into media diversity that is ongoing and creating momentum.

There is the voluntary Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation but the code isn’t mandatory and unfortunately has no teeth. So far Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tik Tok and Redbubble have signed up.

Lastly, we can get behind and support the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI). The PIJI have done research that found that a not-for-profit (NFP) news sector might be a viable solution. An NFP approach could help to increase media diversity, as well as to build sustainable new financial models.

“News is an essential service – as highlighted by successive national emergencies. Its diversity and coverage are essential to inform our citizens, strengthen our community and safeguard our democracy.” PIJI.

This article was originally MelMac Politics – Shining a light on politics.

In 2013 former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott commissioned Andrew Forrest to do a review about Indigenous training and employment services. Creating Parity – The Forrest Review, was released in 2014.

It was overseen and authored by Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, the big four banks, Coles, Woolworths, and many others. In 2017 while the calls for a banking royal commission were getting louder, the Minderoo Foundation invited senior executives from the banking and retail sectors, to attend a CDC Innovation Day.

This was primarily “to create a roadmap for the development and implementation of an ‘item-level (SKU) blocking’ solution, and to solve other issues hindering the card’s acceptance, functionality and scalability.”

The Innovation Day participants formed a working group to help Andrew Forrest produce his Cashless Debit Card Technology Report. If you read through the report it’s clear that it’s a meticulous plan for the government to implement.

A large scale rollout of the cashless debit card has always been the plan. This was made very clear in the review and the report. The cashless debit card (CDC), trials in regional areas to date have been managed by Indue Ltd, to give banks and retailers time to get their systems ready. The biggest problem for them to circumnavigate was the blocking technology. There has been so much focus on Indue, and the alcohol and drug narrative, that the banks taking over social security payments hasn’t received enough attention.

It was only in September last year (seven months after the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, release), that the government started to mention them when they said that they were, “working with banks and business to iron out issues with the card’s use in stores, improve mobile phone payment technology and to merge the quarantined cash system with regular bank cards.” It’s only been two months or so since the latest bank scandal was revealed, this time it was Westpac accused of over twenty-three million breaches of anti-money laundering laws.

Social Security Laws

Before we go any further, it’s important to remember that because of the changes to social security laws to allow the CDC trials to occur in the first place, the eighty percent of the social security payment that currently goes to Indue to dole out, makes it the legal property of Indue. If we allow the banks to take over, billions of dollars will be technically owned by them. Activating the CDC is considered consenting to the trial, whether you want to or not, you have to have a contractual relationship with Indue, and agree to their terms and conditions. Because Indue is technically not a bank, legality wise, how will this work if the banks take over? Indue aren’t signatories to the Centrelink Code of Operation or the ePayments code, does the legislative tweak for Indue also cover the banks?

The latest CDC Bill is attempting to pass legislation that is alarming 

The key points of the new changes are –

• Extension of the CDC in trial regions from June 2020 to 2021.
• Extension of the CDC policy into Cape York and all of the Northern Territory (NT).
• The inclusion the Age Pension and Distant Education Payments as mandatory income managed payments, within the Social Security Act for the first time.
• Allowing the minister (Anne Ruston), to act by ‘notifiable instrument’ to sanction income management support payments up to one-hundred percent in the NT. Should a minister have the power to intervene directly into people’s lives with no parliamentary oversight? There are also no protections in the bill for people from the potential abuse of this power.
• The removal the CDC numbers cap, opening it up for a national rollout.
• The removal of independent oversight from within the CDC policy framework, and the removal of the evaluation reporting time limit of six months, at the end of the legislated trial period.

The last two points mean that the government is not even pretending that they’re trials anymore, that’s what the evaluations and reports are for. It also makes it easier to rollout across the country.

The push is on…

At first the narrative peddled by the government and much of the media was that the CDC trials were to tackle alcohol and drug addictions, then it morphed into unemployment. Now that the push is on to roll it out into the cities, it’s being promoted as a “financial literacy tool”.

Link to Part 1: The Cashless Debit Card is part of Authoritarian creep, which affects us all

This article was originally published on MelMac Politics.

For those that don’t know much about the cashless debit cards (CDC), or income management, here is an article that I wrote with some history about income management in Australia, and how the BasicsCard came about, and here is my most recent one about the Indue card here. For readers that have already read these articles, please know that I have updated and edited them to reflect changes since writing them, and so that they can be read consecutively. We can also forget about the propaganda relating to the government doing it out of love for those with drug or alcohol problems. Why? Because there is already a government program set up for vulnerable people that have these problems, and yet they’re exempt from the CDC trials. Now that you have this background knowledge, let’s look at the bigger picture, and what it means for every single one of us if these types of policies continue.

Scratch the surface

What’s really happening is that the role of governing, and the public monies that fund governing, are being handed to the private sector piece by piece. Think about this, a private company, Indue, has not only been handed the power to dole out security payments for people, but also to decide what they can and can not buy, even whether to suspend or cancel a payment. Compare this with what is happening with human services that used to be run by the government, such as: job service providers, the ParentsNext scheme, the NDIS debacle, Centrelink call centres, even PaTH Internships. We must also consider how private consultants are taking over the role of public servants, as well as the outcome of the privatisation of: major banks, airports, toll roads, the NBN, the energy sector, detention centres in Nauru and Manus, public transport, prisons, and private security companies, et al, to really see the full picture.

The transfer of power over the people from government, to the private sector, is the corporatisation of governing by stealth. I say stealth because governments have rarely taken these issues to elections, nor asked what the people want, they’ve done the bidding of lobbyists, donors, and corporations. This has been done very successfully in America since the 1980s, especially so with private security companies, it partly explains why they’re perpetually at war with other countries, there’s money to be made.

The cashless society push

Yes, society is increasingly going cashless but we will always need cash as a backup plan with never-ending online bank outages, emergency events such as bushfires, and because we’re not all digitally literate or connected, across such a vast continent. In 2016 Germany ended up deciding against introducing a €5,000 cash transaction limit. It’s also of note that early this year the International Monetary Fund (IMF), suggested that to keep central banks relevant and to make negative interest rates work, cash would need to be phased out. Imagine paying to keep your cash in the bank. Meanwhile our own government is currently pushing to ban cash transactions over $10,000 or more, this is being done under the guise of going after the ‘black economy’, despite IMF studies finding that our black economy has almost halved over the past 20-years. There are even  fines and a gaol sentence on the table by our government if you don’t comply. Quite the punishment when we consider continual corporate tax evasion, and the latest scandal by another one of the big banks, Westpac, which broke anti-money laundering laws 23 million times. All of this despite the Banks Royal Commission.

Last month Dr Johannes Beermann, Member of the Executive Board of Germany’s central bank, made some valid points where he promoted the importance of cash in his speech to the Payment Asia Summit in China, stating that:

“Cash offers an easy way out” from being locked into electronic payment systems; cash gives “independence from social control and data collection”; and “Cash is the obvious choice of payment method when it comes to personal privacy. This strengthens individual freedom.”

People should be able to have the freedom to do what they like with their finances, humans need autonomy to function healthily, it’s a human right of which the CDC and a cashless society takes away.

CDC trial merchant expects cards to be rolled out for ‘all’ social security payments

In case the screenshots are hard to read, here is the text from them, I can’t provide a link as the blog was pulled down once it started to get attention by CDC activists:

“We are currently looking to extend the number of sites so if you are interested in participating. We are very interested in talking

In some areas now, over 60% of the people have these new debit cards. For most of them, it is their only financial means. If you are in these areas, if you cannot accept these cards, you cannot make much trade with these people.

Soon it is expected that the number of these cards will rapidly increase. It is likely that within two years, these cards will be Australia Wide as these will be I expect the primary means of paying social security.

By numbers, depending on how you count between 33% to about 50% of Australian households get social security payments and with our ageing population, this is likely to increase in the future.

Plus I can also see many people with drug and gambling problems volunteering to go on these cards and the courts enforcing these cards too on people with problems.

If you want to look at it in dollar terms, we pay about $180 billion now in social security a year of which at least 80% plus will probably go through these cards. The adult population of Australia is around 18.2 million, so just with that, we are looking at about $9,000 a person a year.

For many retailers now these cards are significant and I am sure soon for many more

I feel very proud that in our market place we were selected to do these trials.”

Final thoughts

Is this person privy to information that the public is not? Time will tell. What we do know is that neoliberalism and ‘dole bludger’ propaganda, has over time, dramatically changed how many Australians view social security assistance. We are a resource rich country, it’s an obligation of the government to share the wealth with those that need it. You could also say that it’s an economic stimulus, not so much if it’s given to third parties like Indue, to manage.

The next part will look at how Indue and the government is getting away with it, and the push to open up income management for the banks.

Many thanks to all of the sourced researchers, my Twitter community, publications, and artists involved in this article.

This article was originally published on Political Omniscience.

We live in a time where often it’s only a handful of seats that can win an election, instead of election campaigns focusing on ideas and policies, the focus is now on influencing voters to win marginal seats. Data mining and surveillance tools that were created for war zones before being picked up by the advertising industry, are now in use against civilians. Privacy laws and regulations haven’t kept up with the pace of technology, and too many people are willing to exploit these loopholes. Business models that involve data mining like Cambridge Analytica and i360 can’t exist without tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Palantir.

Everyone is scraping, selling and analysing our data it’s now about influencing our behaviour, predicting what we will do next. The co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, wasn’t joking when he named his company after the Lord of The Rings stone that is ‘far seeing’. Technocrats take advantage of the fact that most of us aren’t technologically minded, especially the politicians that they pitch their technology too. This is the main-game now to try to see into the future with predictive technology, including predicting crime. In this article I will provide background about the tech giants and how they adopt each other’s technologies, how data is being used against marginal voters with the debut of i360 software in Australia, and what looms on the horizon. Firstly we will take a look at Palantir and its ties and similarities to Facebook.

What is Palantir and how is it connected to Facebook?

Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay in 2002. He took advantage of a post-9/11 world and created a company that used PayPal’s fraud-recognition software to stop terrorist attacks. This company became Palantir and was founded in 2003. Thiel provided the seed money for Facebook in 2004 and joined Facebook’s board, he is still on the board today. Mark Zuckerberg was only 19-years old at the time, Thiel soon became a mentor and friend. Zuckerberg bragged at the time about how he was able to collect data willingly from people, he called them “dumb f***s”.

Initially the only investor of Palantir was Thiel but in 2005 the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel, also became an investor. The CIA was the only customer of Palantir for the next three-years. They had the best engineers working for the company as they tested and evaluated their data mining software to predict terror attacks. Word soon got around and before long they were getting contracts from intelligence agencies, military units, and eventually police departments. Police departments in America were interested in using the technology for its ability to analyse big data to predict crime.

Predictive crime technology goes mainstream, including in Australia

Palantir secretly began using the population of New Orleans to test its predictive crime technology in 2012 by offering its services for free. In return they were given free data relating to public records, court filings, licenses, addresses, phone numbers, social media, and non-criminal data to train its software to forecast crime. Palantir’s prediction model also used an intelligence technique called social network analysis (SNA), which looks for connections between people, places, cars, weapons, addresses, social media posts and any data stored in databases.

This information is analysed and used to predict if people are most likely to be the victim of a crime, or to commit a crime based on their connection to known victims or criminals. It’s frighteningly close to the TV series ‘Person of Interest’, there are so many things that can go wrong here:

• A culture in law enforcement of guilt by association.
• The profiling of citizens being analysed by an algorithm with no human oversight.
• Privacy issues.

There is no clear evidence of predictive technology reducing crime in New Orleans. Despite this it led to more contracts for Palantir, including foreign ones and with the Australian government. There are twenty-four patents relating to Palantir in Australia, the latest tender was signed last year, it’s worth $7.5 million and ends in June 2021. The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) and different partner agencies use Palantir’s Fusion software, ACICs different partner agencies include: the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Tax Office, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and the Department of Human Services.

Home Affairs Department becomes an intelligence hub 

Two bills were introduced in February this year, the Identity-Matching Services Bill and the Australian Passports Amendment Bill. The first bill authorises the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, and his department to match photos against identities of citizens in various agencies without a warrant. Media reports about it say that the government was basing this bill on an FBI model, but where did they get their model from? Palantir.

Home Affairs is now a huge data collection hub akin to Palantir and it will continue to grow as it collects information, each time a user makes a request for their identity-matching services. For example, say a bank supplies CCTV footage and data with a request, the footage and all of the data associated with the request will be hoovered up into the hub. The reasons for Home Affairs using this information are very broad, and include: criminal intelligence gathering and profiling, community safety (an example is a person acting suspiciously in a crowded, public space), road safety, and the policing of activist communities and protests. The second bill allows Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop to direct the automation of sharing passport data for the purposes of national security, meaning no human oversight, just algorithms talking to each other.

Palantir patents ‘crime forecasting’ tech    

Palantir is renowned for its secrecy, the only way to tease out what they’re up to is to keep tabs on their patents. The most recent patent that was granted was in December last year and it relates to ‘crime forecasting’ technology, to help police “to know when and where crimes are most likely to occur in the future.” Another patent pending involves the data mining and analysis of billions and trillions, or petabytes, of records. For context one petabyte equates to 58,292 movies or 13.3 years of HDTV content. These could be bank transaction logs, call data records, computer network access logs, email messages of corporations or other high-volume data.

The last patent pending involves household behaviour predictive software that analyses past behaviour in an effort to predict future behaviour. Examples detailed in the patent include obtaining data about household incomes, the number of cars belonging to a household, and your household bills. There are similarities here with Facebook’s ‘Loyalty Prediction’ tool and their ‘Household Audience’ tool. These tools allow you to target entire families in the household. This week the Intercept obtained a confidential document that claims that Facebook is promoting their ‘Loyalty Prediction’ ad service tool. It’s meant to assist advertisers chasing users that are on the verge of disengaging with brands. The Facebook business model has always been about data collection but now it’s moving into territory where it is feeding data into a machine learning program called ‘FBLearner Flow’. Algorithms predicting behaviour aren’t foolproof and because companies are paying for these predictions, there’s a financial incentive to make sure that the predictions are correct. There is concern that Facebook could engineer results.

Facebook has been experimenting on its users for years, their mood experiment in 2014 proved that it could change people’s emotions dependent on the content shown to them. It would be tempting to employ this method to change people’s minds about disengaging with brands. GQreported that Google has an application for a patent in the same realm regarding an algorithm to determine a user’s mood from a “plurality of data sources”; or big data. This technology is basically social engineering and it could be used to sway voters. Next we will take a quick look at the Cambridge Analytica debacle and then on to the debut of i360 software in the South Australian election.

The Cambridge Analytica debacle wasn’t really a data breach

In 2014 when Cambridge Analytica data mined Facebook there was a way that anyone could do it using one of Facebook’s own tools. Facebook had a ‘Reverse search tool’ which enabled users to search for people on Facebook just by using a phone number or email address to find their profile. The feature was ‘opt out’ for users and could only be turned off in the privacy settings. You could potentially feed the tool a list of phone numbers or email addresses that could have been taken from data breaches, online leaks, or even electoral rolls. It was only this month after being warned for years by developers of the potential for using the tool to data mine, that they finally shut it down.

When Facebook learned about what Alexsandr Kogan was doing for Cambridge Analytica in 2015 they actually paid him to do consultancy work. He was also asked to explain his technique for Cambridge Analytica, and to give talks to Facebook staff about behavioural psychology. Another method that app developers like Kogan used to scrape Facebook data, is by writing code inside their apps to capture your data. It was a Palantir employee that gave Cambridge Analytica the idea to use an app to data mine Facebook. Many are extremely sceptical of Zuckerberg telling Congress recently that he is unaware of what Palantir does and if Palantir itself has ever scraped data from Facebook.

i360 makes it debut for the South Australian election

The South Australian (SA) Liberals lost the election in 2014 because they didn’t win enough seats to form government. The leader of the party, Steven Marshall, and the SA Liberal State director Sascha Meldrum, looked to America for solutions. In 2016 they purchased a product license for i360 software, it costs around $25,000 per month. They worked together with i360 to customise the software to include Australia’s compulsory and preferential voting system. They began using i360 in 2017 giving them a headstart in targeting marginal seats for the March 2018 election. Dozens of staff and volunteers including Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy, had a dry run using i360 in the field at the SA election. i360 has been credited for the SA win. The Victorian Liberals have been using it for a while, Queensland is about to sign up and the NSW Liberals, and the Federal government are thinking about it.

What is i360?

i360 was created by Michael Palmer in 2009 with a team of nine data scientists with PhDs behind him. It started out as a database to help Republican’s catch up with Obama’s successful use of data during his 2008 campaign. In 2011 the Koch brothers helped out by merging i360 with their non-profit organisation, Freedom Partners. Millions and millions have been pumped into it by themselves and their rich, conservative allies ever since. Making it non-profit means that they can hide who the donors are as well as the money trail. i360 is no longer just a database, they offer a suite of cutting edge tools, including analysis and predictive technology for political campaigning. i360 is primarily funded by the Koch brothers. If you haven’t heard of the Koch brothers, they’re billionaires that fly under the political radar and have made a fossil fuel, fortune. Their company Koch Industries, owns and operates a massive network of oil and gas pipelines, and they make a wide range of products that include: chemicals, jet fuel, plastics, and synthetic fertilisers. They have been funding climate change denialism, to protect their interests through foundations, institutes and front groups for years including an institute in Australia, the Institute of Public Affairs. More in this link and this link, if you’d like to learn more about that. Next we will look at how i360 works, their technology will sound a little familiar.

How does i360 work?

i360 has a multi-pronged approach that involves apps, technology, analytics, predictive analysis, as well as data science, digital marketing and advertising. Over the years they’ve amassed trillions of data points on hundreds of millions of Americans. They use thousands of unique pieces of data and combine data, analytics and predictive modelling for election campaigning. Facebook and Google Adwords work alongside i360, and are their featured digital partners.

i360 predictive technology

Advanced predictive modeling enables i360 software to test the effectiveness of thousands of political ads before using them. They use segment models that go above and beyond demographics, they include issues such as whether you want to ‘cut immigration numbers’ or are in favour of ‘raising the minimum wage’. These models can also help them to predict which issue that people care about the most. Knowing these details about people enables them to tailor their ads specifically for you, they personalise the style and tone of the ad, even the aesthetics and colours. These models get updated with new data and refreshed every night. This business model has much in common with Cambridge Analytica.

i360 tracks your online movements  

According to the i360 website they have partnered with a number of ‘mobile ID matching’ services instead of using traditional cookies to track your online movements. Cookies are a small piece of data sent from website’s that you browse back to your computer to help identify you so that they can advertise to you. This works for desktop and laptop computers but isn’t good for tracking your movements on mobile devices and for tracking your activities within apps that you visit. They claim to use ‘mobile device IDs’ which are used to identify you via your mobile devices and the apps that you visit. And then there is ‘direct matching’, which matches up apps that you visit while being signed into Facebook or Google enabling you to be found on multiple devices. According to their website this service is 100% accurate, no doubt because they’re partners with Facebook and Google. In fact the technology just sounds like a jargon laden version of the ad-tracking tools that Facebook already offers. More on this below.

Facebook and Google tracks you too

The Facebook like button has a small piece of code that tracks you as well as the Facebook share button when sharing online content, and then there’s Facebook Pixel. You only need to visit a page that has one of these buttons or Pixel code attached to it for it to collect data about you. What is Facebook Pixel, you may be asking? Pixel allows you to track user movements offline with: “A piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimise and build audiences for your ad campaigns.” It tracks your activities and reports it back to Facebook and the code doesn’t expire like traditional cookies do. Advertisers can track what users are doing offline even if they don’t have a Facebook account, it’s called ‘shadow profiling’. Google does this too, even if you don’t have a Gmail account you only need to communicate with a Gmail address for one to be created.

Asher Wolf has recently written about how the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) with an unnamed telco, did an experiment in 2016 to track people by using their mobile devices. It turned out that the telco was Telstra, the ABS said that their reasoning for the experiment was to estimate temporary populations, and to assist policy makers. It’s not too far of a stretch to assume that this data has been entered into Palantir’s Fusion software, and you have to wonder what else the ABS and the government have been secretly up to in the last couple of years since.

The ABS promptly released a statement claiming that the data that they used was non-identifiable, this argument is wrong. Technology has advanced far enough that it can re-identify anonymous people’s data.

i360 uses set top box data to tailor ads 

i360 has a TV targeting service which offers personalised TV ads that can be shown on any channel or program being watched. They’ve partnered with D2 Media (the image below is their business model), and it’s available in America through Dish Satellite TV, or Direct TV. These services and set top boxes are also available in Australia. In 2015 Dish TV partnered up with Freeview as its manufacturer, and it’s of note that Foxtel is currently in the process of transferring its cable service over to satellite. Are there plans afoot for this in Australia in the near future, or are they already in place?

Political parties, volunteers, contractors and representatives, exempt from Privacy Act

The last time that there was a Privacy Act review was ten-years ago. It lasted more than two-years and recommended hundreds of reforms. Many Australians don’t realise that registered political parties are specifically excluded from the definition of ‘organisation’, so they’re exempt from the Privacy Act. Also exempt from it are political representatives (MPs, and local government councillors), volunteers for political parties, and contractors and subcontractors of political parties. One of the recommendations was for the exemption to be removed. Both major parties ignored the recommendation. In light of recent events with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook I think it’s time to remove the exemption. If political campaigning is no longer a public process and is done in private, being exempt from the Privacy Act is no longer acceptable.

The Liberal Party database and i360 combine  

i360 has been specifically formulated to sync and capture data from the Liberal Party’s database, Feedback. Feedback is operated by Parakeelia Pty Ltd which provides the party with the software for their data to be entered into. It’s owned by the Liberal Party. Feedback consists of data obtained from door knocking, phone calls, visits to MP offices, email responses, online and call surveys, census data, and social media data. This data combined with their software enables you to pinpoint swinging voters and marginal seats like never before. Similar to Google maps you can click on a location and it will pull up everything that you need to know about a person, including a script to read to them. Volunteers can make calls from home and door-knockers are saved time by the app providing directions to the next targeted voter to win over. The apps save time door knocking and calling, as you only target voters that you need to.

Parakeelia transfers money back to the Liberal Party, how is i360 being paid for?

In 2016 it was revealed that Liberal MPs had been paying $2,500 each to Parakeelia out of their software allowance for its services. Labor MPs also paid about the same for their database Campaign Central which isn’t owned by the party, it’s run by third-party provider Magenta Linas. Parakeelia started to transfer money from the company back to the party in 2010. In 2010 it was $12,100 with amounts continuing to rise with a 2016 transfer of $915,000. This made Parakeelia the party’s biggest donor for that financial year. There were concerns by Labor and the Greens that money was essentially being laundered through Parakeelia to boost Liberal coffers. However a limited-scope review by the National Audit Office in the same year, found that Parakeelia was not in breach of any electoral or parliamentary rules. University of Queensland Law Professor, Graeme Orr thinks that Parakeelia presents problems “deeper than strict legalities.”

“You have a question of a business built on taxpayers funds returning money to a political party: that’s problematic in a way we haven’t seen before,” he said. He thinks that these issues would be avoided if they chose their IT provider through a tender.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any information after these financial years save for a vague tax return from 2016-17. We know that i360 costs at least $25,000 a month, who paid for the SA Liberals to use it and how are the financially struggling Victorian Liberals paying for it? If taxpayers are, than that would be all shades of wrong and would take us further into unchartered territory.

New entitlement rule changes opens up electoral budgets for software purchases

Following on from software allowances, late last year, new regulations for entitlement spending were quietly introduced by Special Minister for State, Mathias Cormann. Instead of receiving a $2,500 software allowance, for the first time MPs can now spend some of their electoral budget on software and services. These services include: robocalls, SMS and survey services, ‘subject to the limit of your office budget’.

Are taxpayers paying for themselves to be politically targeted?

How the NationBuilder platform compliments i360 software

i360 software needs a platform as well as a database to work. In early 2015 Indaily obtained documents that outlined how the SA Liberals were going to start training MPs and staff to use NationBuilder. NationBuilder is software that brings together services like WordPress, Mailchimp and PayPal on to the same platform. It imports things like the details of interactions with an MPs office from the Feedback database and builds profiles on people by syncing this with social media. NationBuilder also creates websites with donation platforms and provides content management. The documents describe the platform as “an electronic program where we can import emails and build profiles on voters” and how “it will track what people are liking, what they’re commenting on and add all of this information to their individual profiles.”

“Anyone who leaves a comment on Steven’s website is sucked in by NationBuilder, and a profile is created for them.”

NationBuilder has been used by Labor and some of the Greens for the last few years or so, according to the NationBuilder website it’s used in Australia by a number of parties. NationBuilder is used by politicians of all stripes around the world, President Trump used it for his election campaign and it was the platform that was used by both sides of the Brexit campaign.

Strange misinformation campaigns during elections, becoming the norm

To look at all of this in totality I’ll briefly explain a disinformation campaign that was also in play during the SA election. An early voting website that appeared to be from the SA Electoral Commission (ECSA), was actually authorised by the Liberal State Director. The authorisation line was at the bottom of the website in a light font. There was also a range of ads distributed to mailboxes and posted on social media making out that they were from the ECSA. It is unclear who was behind all of it exactly. The website and flyers requested personal details from those that were targeted. Three-weeks before the election after receiving complaints, the ECSA said:

“South Australians are advised that, if they provide personal details in response to these flyers or via the website, these have not come to ECSA.”

“ECSA advises that you should exercise extreme caution when releasing your personal information.”

These are tactics that are designed to deceive you and to slyly take your data, Republicans have been doing it in America for years. Every vote counts and every dirty tactic that is available is in use in Australia now. Anything that you see online like email surveys, or in your mailbox that asks for your details, be very wary.

Study about social media’s impact on elections, partly funded by a Koch Foundation

Facebook has recently announced a commission of researchers to study social media’s impact on elections to appease the groundswell that is building against their influence in elections. They will be given unprecedented access to Facebook data. Financing for this is coming from foundations including from one of the Koch brothers, the Charles Koch Foundation. There is understandably major concern about this, they’re known for not being the type of donors that just donate and step away, they like to be involved.

Facial recognition technology, and new tools on the horizon

Despite all of the recent privacy controversy Facebook wants to be able to run facial recognition scans without your consent. Legislators in America are still considering a change to the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). For years Facebook has fought a lawsuit regarding the handling of biometric data like fingerprints or facial recognition profiles. The plaintiffs argue that Facebook’s photo-tagging system violates the law because photos that are uploaded in this way are done so without consent. It’s of note that even if you aren’t tagged in a photo, their tech can find you. Facebook wants these consent protections neutered. Free access to pictures for years including Facebook owned Instagram, has no doubt sped facial recognition technology along.

Facebook has a new tech patent to determine social class, seriously, more here. They also have patents relating to eye activity, and the tracking of your relatives. And Google has a new tool out that will no doubt be shared and tweaked for further use in political campaigning. It’s called Plus Codes and it pinpoints locations extremely accurately. Google wanted to address the problem of high-density slums in India where just 30% have accurate locations for their addresses. There is a general election in India next year.

There is so much more that is already here and coming soon: the tracking of your car, listening to your phone calls, looking inside your house and the use of AI that studies CCTV footage to predict crime before it happens.

Is there hope?

Yes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is working on a project called Solid. He’s working on a solution of separating apps from the data that they produce. An app built using Solid architecture would ask users where they want to store their data, ownership of your data and access to all of the data that you create. He believes that rather than our data being locked up with a company, we should have the choice of who to share or not share our data with. Who knows what innovations we could come up with ourselves and within our communities?

In conclusion

Governments entering the surveillance game alongside Palantir is chilling to say the least. Decisions based on algorithms without our consent and with no human oversight is a dangerous path to go down. A lot of predictive technology promise governments the world but most of it is largely unproven. The current Privacy Act doesn’t protect us as it should, this isn’t Facebook being dodgy with their user terms, default options and making it impossible to opt out of things, it’s our own government. Election wise its hardly democratic or ethical to target and influence voters secretly using their own data, perhaps even charging taxpayers to do so. The misinformation tactics also need urgent addressing it’s bad enough that our data is being used to manipulate us, to misinform us at the same time for a vote is cruel and immoral.

Many thanks to all that have helped contribute to this article.

This article was originally published on Political Omniscience.

When I recently learned of the push for Australia’s superannuation industry to invest in American infrastructure, alarm bells rang. Neoliberalism is still very much in economical favour so what was this really all about? When I read articles about it from Australia a little closer, I realised that they were missing the meat of the story, all that I was reading was the bare bones.

Firstly there is no $US1.5 trillion infrastructure plan as such in the 2019 budget. The Trump administration’s infrastructure plan is basically a finance deal that includes deregulation, and the privatisation of America’s state and local government assets. $US200bn is all that the American government is willing to spend, including $US100bn that has been allocated to an Incentives Program. These figures however, do not include $US178bn worth of cuts to be made in the state and local government’s infrastructure budgets. They pretty much cancel each other out. The deep cuts in funding, and the need to fix their infrastructure will leave many of these governments no choice but to look at private funding and selling off its assets.

No matter where the funding comes from, privatisation requires taking over a government function at a lower cost than the government can provide it, and to make a profit, or it wouldn’t be worth its while.

America has been undergoing privatisation since the Reagan administration through its neoliberal policies. These policies enabled private enterprises to take over energy infrastructure and utilities, but not roads, rails, ports and airports, they have mainly remained as state and local government assets. Privatisation though is not as popular as it once was due to Americans seeing and living with the consequences of privatisation; they know how it affects their lives, wallets, and their communities. In Chicago for example, parking meters were privatised 10 years ago with a 75-year lease that has cost the city $US974m in lost revenue, so far.

Privatisation in Australia under the guise of ‘asset recycling’ has been used to lobby American politicians for the last couple of years. It was introduced to Australia by former Australian Treasurer, Joe Hockey. Hockey in his current role as American Ambassador has led the charge with assistance from others, including former New South Wales Premier Mike Baird. In Australia it involved selling state assets to private to help pay for infrastructure projects, and the federal government paid an incentive payment to add to the funding. There were no big cuts or deregulation involved. The super funds think selling it to the American public as “workers capital” rather than private, to pay for public assets will do the trick. The super funds have even re-branded: Public Private Partnerships in America, to Pension Public Partnerships.

You might be asking yourself: ‘Why should I care where or how Australian Super is invested if it’s bringing back returns?’ That’s a good question. America has inflicted neoliberalism policies around the world for the last 40 years, and this has led to the global decay of infrastructure. The global race to fix ailing infrastructure (or to gobble up what’s left of public assets), is being touted by Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, as the answer to sustaining economic growth. Neoliberal policies are profit-driven, whereas things like infrastructure maintenance are not very profitable. Hence the decline. Pretty ironic when you think about it.

Is it right or ethical for super funds to invest in a country that is also being deregulated within an inch of its life to make it easier for private with their investments? There are grave concerns for the plan to deregulate the country’s water supplies, some water utilities are already struggling to keep their water clean. Did you know that 16 million Americans get sick from dirty tap water each year? Deregulation, especially in regards to environmental restrictions designed to protect communities, will once again add to the monetary burden of cleaning it up onto the states and local governments. Even if super funds just invested in toll roads there like IFM Investors with their Indiana investment, wouldn’t it be better to invest in Australia’s infrastructure? In particular renewable energy, there’s a whole industry waiting to be untapped. Or perhaps the super funds could look to our neighbours in Asia needing infrastructure assistance, including being climate change ready. There is so much more to ethically invest in than road tolls and user charges around the world.

And on a final note, another concern that I have is if investing super into anything that makes a profit becomes the norm and accepted, what other ideas or policies that are unpalatable now, are lurking waiting for the right moment to be introduced? The privatisation of sidewalks in Australia? It’s already happening in Kansas City and Missouri.

There are only public assets (including public land), and services left to invest in or take over. If this were to happen what would the world look like? I don’t even want to imagine.

This article was originally published on Political Omniscience.

Income management isn’t new in Australia, what is new, is the current government’s ideological push to enforce neoliberal policies on an unsuspecting Australia. In 2007, Professor Helen Hughes, wrote ‘Lands of Shame: Aboriginal and Torres Strait “homelands” in Transition.’ A few months before it was published, Hughes gave it to the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination (OIPC), the department responsible for indigenous policies. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs was Mal Brough.

The book was published by conservative think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). It’s final chapter, reads like a blueprint for what occurs in the Northern Territory (NT) in June 2007. It calls for the closure of Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory (NT); a health audit of all children; the appointment of administrators; private home ownership; and the abolition of communal title customary law; the permit system and Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP). The book was also highly critical of policies relating to self-determination and land rights, branding them failed socialist experiments.

The use of a book, research or reports produced by a think tank, or a foundation, for government policies isn’t a new tactic. The Ronald Reagan policies from 1980’s, were mostly from the Heritage Foundation, which has been heavily financed for years by the conservative elite, and the likes of the Koch brothers.

Before we go any further, I need to provide some background, and a timeline of events. The Howard government, received many detailed reports about the escalating violence in Indigenous communities, but they were never actioned. With thanks to Chris Graham (current owner of New Matilda), Crikey and Michael Brull, for their succinct research over the last decade relating to the Intervention.

So many reports, not enough action

Indigenous academic, Boni Robertson, completed many detailed reports throughout the nineties. Robertson also led an inquiry in 1999, that actually involved Indigenous Australians, with fifty-senior women representing their communities in Queensland (QLD). In 1999, a shocking report about Indigenous violence, was released by Doctor Paul Memmott. The report was suppressed from the media and the public by the Justice Minister, Amanda Vanstone for eighteen months. By the time that the media got wind of it, it was old news and nobody really cared.

All of these reports and inquiries, warned of the numerous problems in Indigenous communities. The causes of family violence stem from a failure of government to provide adequate services, education and housing infrastructure. It’s also a failure from both sides of the political spectrum to acknowledge Indigenous culture and their relationship with the land. Neo-colonialism is still a problem in Australia, despite the fact that Indigenous Australians are the oldest known civilisation on earth.  They’ve hundreds of languages and their map of Australia is made up of many nations, not a handful of states. Wanting them to assimilate into a monolingual, mono-cultural society is one thing, the reality is another.

In 2002, the Central Aboriginal Congress prepared a paper showing how the number of Indigenous women being treated for domestic assault had more than doubled since 1999. A year later Howard staged a ‘roundtable summit’ of Indigenous leaders to address family violence. This achieved nothing.

An election was approaching in 2006, and for the government and the media, Indigenous violence was a popular topic. At one point, ABC Lateline had filed seventeen stories about it in just eight nights. Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, was on the show in May that year and spoke of her experience with violence against children, including sexual violence in remote communities. What Rogers spoke about was exactly what Dr Memmott had detailed in his suppressed report, seven years earlier.

The media heats up

Minister Brough appeared on Lateline the next day and told the host, Tony Jones that: “Everybody in those communities knows who runs the pedophile rings.”

Jones: “You just said something that astonishes me. You said pedophile rings. What evidence is there of that?”

Brough said that there was “considerable evidence” but provided none. Claire Martin, the NT’s Labor Chief Minister, called on him to provide evidence of the allegation, he said nothing. Five weeks later on June the 21st 2006, Lateline had an anonymous male, former youth worker on their program. He backed up what Brough said:

“It’s true. I’ve been told by a number of people of men getting young girls and keeping them as sex slaves.”

The youth worker, claimed that he was once based in Mutitjulu, working in a joint community project for the NT and federal governments. The Mutitjulu community are the legal custodians of Uluru, or Ayers Rock.

His identity was hidden with his face shadowed and a digitised voice, and he cried as he detailed how he’d made repeated statements and reports to police about sexual violence, in Mutitjulu. He said that he’d withdrawn the reports after being threatened by men in the community, and that he feared for his life. He also said that young Indigenous children were being held against their will, and that other kids were being given petrol to sniff in exchange for sex with senior Indigenous men.

The next day, Martin announced that her NT government would hold a major inquiry into violence against children in Indigenous communities. Also on that day, Brough finally responded to calls for evidence of his accusations. He released a press statement, saying that information had been passed onto NT police, and that he’d been advised that “for legal and confidentiality reasons, I am unable to disclose detail.”

Questions asked too late, the damage is done

A few weeks later, the National Indigenous Times reported that the youth worker crying about his experience in Mutitjulu on Lateline wasn’t a youth worker at all. He was actually, Gregory Andrews an assistant secretary at the OIPC, and an adviser to Brough. He advised Brough about violence and sexual abuse in remote communities. Later it was revealed in parliament, that Andrews had never made a single report to police about women or children. He also misled a federal senate inquiry into petrol sniffing in 2006 and lied about living in Mutitjulu, he had never even set foot there.

All of Andrew’s allegations were thoroughly investigated and dismissed by the NT police. And the Australian Crime Commission, spent eighteen-months and millions of dollars, and also concluded that there was no organised paedophilia in Indigenous communities.

Martin’s inquiry reported back to her in August 2006. The inquiry’s final report: Little Children are Sacred, was handed to the NT government, in April 2007. It was impressive and was more than 300-pages-long, with ninety-one recommendations. The authors, Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, didn’t have an easy job, but they said that they were:

“impressed with the willingness of people to discuss the issue of child sexual abuse, even though it was acknowledged as a difficult subject to talk about. At many meetings, both men and women expressed a desire to continue discussions about this issue and what they could do in their community about it. It was a frequent comment that up until now, nobody had come to sit down and talk with them about these types of issues. It would seem both timely and appropriate to build on this good will, enthusiasm and energy by a continued engagement in dialogue and assisting communities to develop their own child safety and protection plans.”

But before the Martin government could respond to the report and without any consultation with her, or even his own cabinet. Howard and Brough used the report as a catalyst to launch their Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), or the Intervention.

The Intervention

The Intervention relied heavily on shock tactics. Naomi Klein has covered these extensively in her book about disaster capitalism. It favours a multi-pronged, speedy attack, this helps to create cover to introduce unsavoury or neoliberal policies. The Intervention ticks all of the boxes.

The NT and the Australian Federal Police, were sent into remote Indigenous communities, and the army and business managers were installed into Indigenous communities. Signs were put up declaring bans on pornography and alcohol in towns. It was framed as a “national emergency” and while everyone was distracted, and with a senate majority, the federal government was free to pursue its agenda. NTER (Northern Territory Emergency Response), was a $587 million package of measures, and laws regarding human rights, had to be changed or suspended, to get the new legislation through, these included:

Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

Native Title Act 1993(Cth).

Northern Territory Self-Government Act and related legislation.

Social Security Act 1991.

IncomeTax Assessment Act 1993.

As a result of the new legislation, regulations were introduced to ban access to alcohol, tobacco, pornographic material, and gambling services. Land was compulsorily acquired by the government in seventy Indigenous communities, this was to ensure that there were no interruptions by traditional owners. An income management scheme was introduced, the BasicsCard, which was actually born out of an Indigenous innovation.

The FOODCard was introduced by the Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA) in 2004, the idea came about after community consultations. The main differences between the two cards are that one had community consultations, while the other did not. The terms and conditions for the FOODCard are available in Yolngu Matha and English for example, while the BasicsCard is in English only.

The other key difference is that the ALPA one is voluntary and you can set for yourself how much money to quarantine, whereas the government one is compulsory, and quarantines 50%-80% of income. The FOODCard was rolled out in 2007, but by then the BasicsCard had taken over.

Neoliberal ideology

The government waited a month until it introduced its last measure, abolishing a program called Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP). The CDEP was one of the programs that was working, it allowed communities to pool all of their unemployment benefits together. This was then paid out as a direct wage for local jobs within the community, or within the CDEP organisations.

Participants were counted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as employed, even though the funds originated from unemployment benefits. A form of self-government, and a good solution for unemployment that empowered many communities, especially remote ones.

Communities were also sent pamphlets from Centrelink, explaining that they now had to do something in return for their Centrelink money. The pamphlet also said that they had to call them with their contact details, or their payments might be stopped.

Dr David Scrimgeour, told the Public Health Association of Australia conference in September, that year that:

‘Most of the recommendations … have been implemented by the Commonwealth Government in the NT under the guise of protecting children, despite the fact that the recommendations are not based on evidence, but on neo-liberal ideology.’

He also said that the think-tank, CIS, that published Helen Hughes’ book, received ‘significant support from large corporations, particularly mining companies, and has close links with the Government and the media, particularly the Murdoch-owned newspaper The Australian.’

Reports ignored or used as political tools

So what does income management look like in the NT, ten years after the Intervention? The authors of the Little Children are Sacred report have both said that the report’s recommendations were ignored and that it was used as a political tool to push for an Intervention. Wild said this year that:

“One of the threshold items of the report is that community consultation is needed to be able to best implement the report and that clearly didn’t happen.”

Since the Intervention, report after report gets written about socio-economic disadvantage, and the negative aspects felt by those on income management, only to be ignored. They all have a common theme, that there is no evidence of value behind income management programs, and that they didn’t change behaviours. Is it the government’s place to modify human behaviour with financial measures?

There is one report though that has been listened to, it was commissioned by the Abbott government and reviewed by mining billionaire, Andrew Forrest. It was released in 2014: Creating Parity – the Forrest Review. Forrest and his Minderoo Foundation, want a new card called the “Healthy Welfare Card” to replace the BasicsCard. It would apply to all working age Australians, around 2.5 million Australians, if you exempt pensioners and veterans. This is consistent with Abbott’s view in his book Battlelines.

Following the BasicsCard money

The BasicsCard started out as store card’s from merchants such as Coles and Woolworths; by direct deduction of funds set up by a merchant; or by Centrelink making a credit card or cheque payment. This was too cumbersome, so in 2008 the federal government started the process of procurement for an open tender of the card. Five tender applications were received and the winner was Indue Ltd.

Indue started out as Creditlink, it changed its name in 2006 a year after Larry Anthony, former Liberal National Party MP became chairman of its board. Anthony was the chairman of Indue until 2013, and he’s been the Federal President of the National Party since 2015. Indue’s win was publically announced in December 2009, the original contract was worth just over $11 million for three-years, it ballooned out to over $25 million.

I’ve gone through the tenders and contracts relating to the card, there are thirteen in total to date. Out of those, seven of the contracts are limited, so none of the finer details are available for the public.

Open Tender, Contract Total:

$31,138,574.50 million

Limited Tender, Contract Total:

$29,064,436.16 million

Total: $60,203,010.66

Cashless welfare card cost, blow-out

The ‘cashless welfare card’ trials were originally slated to cost taxpayers $18.9 million.

According to the government tender, the original contract for Indue was worth $7,859,509 million, (media reports round it up to $8 million), it’s now at $13,035,581.16 million.

That’s just the Indue part, if we add the remaining $10.9 million for the other contracts involved in the income management program, we get a total of $23,935,581.16.

There’s 1,850 participants in the trial which began last year, so the cost of the card works out to be $12,938.15 per person.

Using the maximum Newstart allowance of a single person as an example, which is $535.60 per fortnight; they would receive $13,925.60 for the year. Add the Indue layer and the total is $26,863.75 per person.

A lot of money provided by taxpayers for behaviour change, and of course a nice profit for Indue, especially if it rolls out to millions of Australians. The millions of dollars flying about without any oversight, and the political connections are a grave cause for concern.

Income management rolls out nationally

In 2012, the Gillard government extended income management nationally, and for another ten-years. In the House of Representatives during the debate about the ‘Stronger Futures Legislation’, Senator Nigel Scullion, Country Liberal Party member, said this:

“There is a fundamental thread through most of the feedback we get when we talk about consultation. When we get to most communities any observer would say that Aboriginal people more generally hate the intervention. They do not like it, it invades their rights and they feel discriminated against.”

He still voted with the Gillard government. NTER was renamed, Stronger Futures. He went on to become the leader of the Nationals in the Senate, and Minister for Indigenous Affairs in 2013, and he still holds these positions.

Since the Intervention, the model has expanded from remote communities in the NT to the Kimberley region and Perth in WA; Cape York; all of the NT and selected areas of ‘disadvantage’. The areas that are deemed as disadvantaged are: Logan in QLD, Bankstown in New South Wales (NSW), Shepparton in Victoria and Playford in SA.

Six different income management measures:

1. Participation/Parenting – NT only, when the government deems you ‘at risk’ if you’ve been on a welfare for a certain amount of time.
2. Vulnerable welfare – When you’re referred to income management by a Centrelink social worker.
3. Child protection income management – NT and some parts of WA, a child protection officer refers you to income management.
4. Cape York measure – People there are put on income management, if they engage in    dysfunctional behaviour.
5. Place based income management – For people living in five targeted communities that have been referred for income management.
6. Supporting people at risk – People are referred for income management by certain state and territory agencies.

As of 25th March 2016, there were 26,508 on income management programs, 20,941 of those were Indigenous.

Trial sites, and another report

The three-part Orima Report is being used by the government, to not only extend draconian, income management measures, but also to quantify its success. Social and political researcher, Eva Cox sums up the report perfectly in a Facebook post, on The Say No Seven page:

“The whole data set of interviews, quantitative and qualitative, are very poorly designed and not likely to be valid data collection instruments. I’d fail any of my research students that produced such dubious instruments.”

The reports includes a lot of spin, asks respondents for their ‘perceptions’ at times, and includes retrospective responses, for questionnaires. The Say No Seven page, has been following all three of the reports closely, they crunched the numbers at the start of this month, when the final Orima report was released. An example cam be found on page forty-six:

“At Wave 2, as was the case in Wave 1, around four-in-ten non-participants (on average across the two Trial sites) perceived that there had been a reduction in drinking in their community since the CDCT commenced.”

This approach means that the reader focuses on the minority of responses, rather than the majority of responses. Six-in-ten not perceiving any reduction in drinking around town. It reads a lot differently than the latter.

Other places rumoured to be put on the card trial are Hervey Bay and Bundaberg in QLD. One peaceful rally against the card in Hervey Bay involved armed police, with protest organiser Kathryn Wilkes saying:

“There were eight of us women aged between 40 and 60 … We were very peaceful.

“They’re afraid of a bunch of sick women on the (disability support pension).

“If you pushed me over I’d end up in hospital. Most of us couldn’t fight our way out of a paper bag.”

This heavy-handed approach is all too familiar…

Star chambers and regrets

Which leads me to the anonymous, paid community panels that determine whether those put on income management should be able to access more cash from their bank accounts. Meddling in communities like this isn’t new, it’s been happening in Indigenous ones for years. Turning communities against one another is surely not the role of the government. It also allows them to neatly deflect any accountability for the program.

The BasicsCard can also make life harder for those already living in poverty, in that you’re restricted from buying second-hand items with cash, or something cheap online. It also means that things like how you pay your electricity bills for example, is decided by Centrelink, so no more payment plans. That’s what income management is, it’s not about just being put on a card as such.

Two trial sites were chosen to trial the BasicsCard card for one-year in 2016, one in Ceduna South Australia, and one in WA’s Kimberley region. The trials were extended indefinitely this year, before the trials had even finished, and before the final Orima report was released just this month.

One of four Indigenous leaders from WA that originally supported the scheme has since withdrawn his support for the card. Lawford Benning, chair of the MG Corporation, says he feels “used” by the Human Services minister, Alan Tudge. He met regularly with Tudge ahead of the cards introduction over a year ago, and helped drum up support for it. He said that services that were promised in return were not provided until seven-months later, and that what was finally offered was no good.

“I’m not running away from the fact that I was supporting this. But now I’m disappointed and I owe it to my people to speak up,” Benning said. “Every person I’ve spoken with said they don’t want this thing here.”

When Benning heard that the card was going to be permanent and about the roll out of the card at other sites:

“I said hang on, it sounds like you’re trying to get a rubber stamp on something already under way, in an attempt to legitimise something the community doesn’t support.”

“I said to him ‘your minister isn’t showing respect to us’. Prior to introducing the card Tudge was flying here every second weekend to meet with us. As soon as we signed up, we’ve never seen him again.”

Take a drug-test or no welfare for new recipients

The latest legislation currently before the parliament, involves a two-year drug-testing trial for 5,000 people in Bankstown (NSW), Logan (QLD), and Mandurah (WA). If it passes, new recipients of the Newstart and Youth allowance have to agree to be tested, in order to receive their allowances. If they refuse a random drug-test, their payments will be cancelled. If they test positively they will be placed on the BasicsCard program, with 20% of their allowance made available in cash. Twenty-five days later they get tested again and if they test positively again, they will be referred to a privately contracted medical professional.

There is no evidence that mandatory drug-testing will work on civilians despite what Social Services minister, Christian Porter says, this ABC fact-check puts that to rest.

‘Experts say that, rather than lots of evidence, there is no evidence, here or overseas, to show that mandatory testing will help unemployed drug addicts receive treatment and find jobs.’

The City of Mandurah has accused the Turnbull government of using dodgy data to justify being chosen for the drug-testing trial. City chief executive, Mark Newman wrote:

“One statistic used is that there has been an increase in people having temporary incapacity exemptions due to a drug dependency diagnosis rose by 300% from June 2015 to 2016.”

“The number of people concerned was a rise from 5 to 20 out of a total number of 4,199 people in Mandurah on either Newstart or Youth Allowance benefits as at March 2017.”

The standard that you walk past is the standard that you accept

To summarise, this is about neo-liberal paternalism, and human rights being exploited for financial gain, under the guise of philanthropy. The Intervention, and other recent punitive measures (including robo-debt) imposed on us, wouldn’t fly if we had a charter of human rights. We need one desperately. Indigenous Australians need a treaty, the right to self-determine, and a proper voice in politics, similar to what New Zealand has. Because if we don’t fight for our human rights, we won’t recognise this country in a few years time.

Statistics wise, Indigenous incarceration is sky-high, Indigenous youth suicide rates have risen by 500% since 2007-2011.

All that these measures are creating is a subclass of stigmatised Australians. At a time when many countries are talking about universal-basic-income or UBI, we’re still caught up in “dole-bludger” discussions. The reality is there is less paid work out there, and that this trend will continue.

Punishing our most vulnerable and those looking for work as though they’re criminals, with drug-testing, just isn’t Australian. We don’t need to follow America with a welfare system that’s littered with “food stamp” programs, and other neo-liberal ideologies. I believe the abolished CDEP is also a model worth looking at again and not just for Indigenous employment. Work-for-the-dole is just labour exploitation, and most of it is pointless when there aren’t any jobs to be found, in the first place.

And on a final note, remember the fake youth worker? He’s still been around as a public servant, and even landed a cushy job with the Abbott government in 2014 as the country’s first ‘Threatened Species Commissioner’.

Before we look at how Steve Bannon met David Bossie and Andrew Breitbart, we need to go back to 1976, before the 1980 American elections. Billionaire brothers, David and Charles Koch were frustrated by legal limits prohibiting how much that they could spend on political campaigns. A candidate could spend as much as they liked running for office, and an individual could spend what they liked promoting candidates, but only if the spending wasn’t coordinated with them. Charles decided that David should run as the Libertarian party’s vice-presidential candidate too, so that they were free to donate as much as they liked.   

Their father Fred Koch, was a chemical engineer and built the family fortune out of oil refineries. Interestingly enough, he started out building refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and believed that communism was evil and didn’t like any type of government intrusion, these views became his son’s views. David Koch explained in a 2012 interview that their father: ‘was extraordinarily fearful of our government becoming much more socialistic and domineering. And that: ‘from the time we were teenagers to the present, we’ve been very concerned and worried about our government evolving into a very controlling, socialist type of government.’

When the Koch brothers inherited their father’s business in 1967, they renamed it Koch Industries in honour of their father, and have turned it into the second largest privately held company in America. Koch Industries not only owns and operates a massive network of oil and gas pipelines but it also makes a wide range of products including Dixie cups, chemicals, jet fuel, fertilisers, electronics, toilet paper and more. Out of the Koch family, these two brothers are the most politically active.

Back to 1980 and the Koch brothers and the Libertarian party. What is the Libertarian party? It was founded in 1971 by David Nolan and it promotes free market economics, protection of private property, non-interventionism, laissez-faire capitalism and the abolition of the welfare state. Some of the Libertarian policy platform that David Koch ran on is below.

The Libertarian ticket only received one-percent of the vote. All was not lost as the campaign gave them valuable political experience. The older brother Charles, told a reporter at the time that: ‘It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,’ and that he was ‘interested in advancing libertarian ideas.’ They came to realise that in order to change the direction of America they had to have influence in the areas where policy ideas arise from. They had already founded America’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, three years earlier in 1977. Today, they underwrite a huge network of foundations, think tanks and political front groups and their powerful, ideological network is known as Kochtopus, in political circles. They have also given millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists since then.

In 1988, a Political Action Committee (PAC), called Citizens United (CU) was founded by Republican, Floyd Brown, with major funding from the Koch brothers. It promotes corporate interests, socially conservative causes and candidates that advance their goals, which are: ‘limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security.’ During the 1992 American elections, Mr Brown hired fellow Republican, David Bossie to find dirt on Bill Clinton. Mr Bossie made a name for himself as being a bit of an attack dog, in particular with all things relating to the Clinton family. Four-years later when the House Republicans launched a probe into the 1996 Clinton campaign’s fundraising practices, he ended up being the chief investigator for the member in charge, Republican, Dan Burton. Eighteen months later he was forced to resign after distributing doctored transcripts of an investigator’s’ jailhouse conversations with Clinton associate, Webb Hubbell.      

In 2001, Mr Bossie took over from Mr Brown as president of CU, where he began to write negatively slanted books about Democratic politicians. He became interested in making films in July 2004 after seeing Michael Moore’s documentary, Farenheit 9/11. His documentary questioned the Bush administration’s motives for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and amongst other things, it argued that the media was used to exploit the 9/11 attacks. A couple of months later, Mr Bossie, mindful that it was an election year, retaliated with his own documentary, Celsius 41.11 (the temperature when the brain begins to die). CU produced the film and said in a press statement that they issued at the time: ‘Celsius 41.11 was made to refute the propaganda in Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11.’  

At around the same time that Celsius 41.11 was released in October 2004, Steve Bannon was promoting “In the Face of Evil,” a Ronald Reagan documentary that he had worked on as a screenwriter. When Mr Bannon’s documentary was released, it was panned by mainstream critics, with Lou Lumenick from the New York Post, writing that it was ‘very much like Soviet propaganda.’ There was a small group of conservatives in Hollywood that did like it however, and Mr Bannon met Mr Bossie at one of these screenings. It wasn’t long before they started working together on a film called Border War, about the perceived threat of immigration, this led to a series of movies that they made for CU. Mr Bannon also met Andrew Breitbart at a screening in December at the Liberty Film Festival. Mr Breitbart was working for the Drudge Report at the time, with plans to start his own website. More on him, a little later.                

In 2008, Mr Bossie and CU produced a documentary called Hillary: The Movie, critical of then-Sen Hillary Clinton, for the election campaign season. It was to be aired on cable TV before the Democratic primaries, but the Federal Election Commission (FEC) blocked it. They reviewed it and found that it was “electioneering communication” and that they were subject to rules governing the production of political ads. In 2009, CU sued the FEC, this led to a Supreme court case called Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission. On January 21st 2010, a five-four majority of the high court, ruled against the FEC, and ruled that corporations such as CU can spend as much as they like for and against political candidates. This also meant that they could receive unlimited donations without any government oversight or ever having to publically disclose them. The ruling opened the donation floodgates and gave a small group of wealthy donors, even more influence on elections.

Liberal advocacy group, Common Cause, believe that two of the judges involved, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, should have recused themselves from the Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission case. Both of the judges have attended invitation-only retreats organised by the Koch brothers. The retreats are for Republican donors and in an invitation for their January 30-31,2011 meeting, it describes the retreat as a ‘twice a year’ gathering ‘to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it.’     

Think Progress also managed to get a copy of a booklet [PDF] from the June 27-28, 2010, meeting and buried within it, is a list of former guests at previous meetings. Mr Scalia and Mr Thomas are on the list, and while the booklet can’t prove when they went, if it was before the CU case, or if their decision was influenced. The booklet does provide insight into the issues that worry the likes of the Koch brothers. On page five, one of the topics for the small group dinners on the eve of the meeting caught my eye.

Issue Micro-Targeting: What gaps do we face in thoroughly understanding the electorate? What has been learned from research so far? How can we take advantage of this advanced technology?

When Obama was elected a myriad of conservative nonprofit groups cropped up, and one of them was called Liberty Central. It was founded in 2009, by Virginia Thomas, the wife of Judge Thomas. A few weeks after the CU court ruling, Ms Thomas told the Los Angeles Times that Liberty Central would be soliciting donations from corporations and other entities freed by CU to step up their political activity. Common Cause, also see this as a conflict-of interest, more on Ms Thomas soon.

In the next series we will look at Breitbart’s role in all of this, and take a look at the rise of the Tea Party, Steve Bannon and the Mercer family.

In 1917, one-hundred-years ago this year, American president Woodrow Wilson, declared war on Germany. Mr Woodrow also pioneered the government propaganda system that exists to this day. He began by intimidating and suppressing any ethnic or socialist papers that opposed the US entering the first World war. At the time such meddling in press freedom was unheard of. A week after the war declaration he created a new federal agency called the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The government now controlled the narrative and press coverage. The CPI was dubbed ‘the nation’s first ministry of information’ by journalist, Stephen Ponder. Their first task was to convince millions of young men being drafted to go to war, as well as millions of Americans that supported neutrality. They had to convince them that war was the only option to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ This was a time before radio became popular and before the weekly news magazine was invented. The chairman of CPI was journalist, George Creel and he organised it into several divisions.

The speaking division had 75,000 specialists who became known as the “Four Minute Men” for their skill in transcribing Mr Wilson’s war goals in short speeches.

The film divison produced the news reels needed to to garner support by showing graphic images in movie theatres. The images depicted the allies as the heroes and the Germans as barbaric.

The foreign language newspaper division kept an eye on US newspapers that were published in other languages than English.

The advertising division secured free advertising space in US publications to promote various war campaigns. Campaigns such as recruiting new soldiers, encouraging patriotism and feeding the narrative that the US was involved in a crusade against a barbaric, anti-democratic enemy.

The division of pictorial publicity comprised of a group of volunteer artists and illustrators. They were behind the famous image of Uncle Sam below. Mr Creel denied that CPI’s work was akin to propaganda but he did admit that he was engaged in a battle of perceptions. ‘The war was not fought in France alone’ he wrote in 1920. And after the CPI was disbanded in 1919, he described it as ‘a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.’

One of the techniques favoured by the news unit was to bury journalists in paper by producing numerous press-releases each day. The unit also restricted the media’s access to those involved in the war, creating a news vacuum. This was filled with government-written stories, masquerading as news. The CPI also issued a set of guidelines for US newspapers and if editors didn’t follow these patriotic guidelines, they were deemed as unpatriotic. In another first, they decided to create their own daily newspaper, published by the government.

A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward L Bernays, was a pioneer in human thoughts and emotion theories and was one of the CPI volunteers. ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,’ Mr Bernays wrote after the war. And that ‘Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.’ Many of those involved in the CPI went on to lucrative advertising careers after the committee was disbanded.  

In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman published the book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. They discovered that the propaganda model today, consists of five filters of editorial bias:

Media ownership: Media outlets have become large companies that cater to the interests of the owners or owner, and to make them profitable.

Advertising: Media can’t survive without it so they must also cater to political leanings as well as the economic desires of their advertisers.

Complicity: Government’s, corporations and institutions know how to influence the media. They feed the media scoops and interviews with “experts” and make themselves part of the journalism process. If you push back against the establishment you will soon find yourself out of the game.

Flack: When a story comes out that the powers that be don’t like, they mobilise and attack. They do this by discrediting sources, trashing stories, creating distractions and by changing the narrative back to where they want it to be.

The common enemy: Whether it’s communism, terrorism or immigration fears, to manufacture consent, you need a common enemy.

In 1992, they produced a documentary about it if interested and below is a handy animation, from March this year. It’s under five minutes long and has some more information, Australia gets a mention near the start.

I’m going to start introducing some of the players involved in today’s web of propaganda. In October 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, it was the first of its kind. A 24-hour conservative-populist propaganda channel, filled with right-wing opinions and slanted news stories. All under the banner of “fair and balanced” and delivered as entertainment. He is most definitely a key player and one of the most powerful men in the media, more on him later.

In 1995, a year before Mr Murdoch launched Fox News, Matt Drudge launched the Drudge Report, and he ran it alone. It began with a weekly email for subscribers full of quirky conspiracy theories, right-wing politics, extreme weather and pop culture. Andrew Breitbart, wasn’t doing much at this stage besides being a news-junkie of sorts, and became a big fan of the report. He emailed Mr Drudge offering his help of which Mr Drudge accepted. Mr Drudge became his mentor and they created their own headlines with a blurb telling you the main point of the story, that linked to articles from all around the web. The Drudge Report was one of the earliest news aggregator web sites, a link from them could bring hundreds of thousands of readers to a  story. This gave reporters wanting exposure an incentive to contact Mr Drudge or Mr Breitbart as soon as their pieces were published (or even before publishing them). Tips from journalists gave the pair eyes and ears into nearly every newsroom in the world. In early 1998 they broke not only the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal, but also the fact that Newsweek had killed the story.

The Drudge Report, didn’t just have the ability to provide scoops for its readers but it also had a sense of urgency about it, and continuous news and stories sourced from the internet to entertain its readers. All of this was achieved with two people rather than a whole newsroom and without having to host content on its site, meaning extremely low overheads. It was also marketed as an alternative to mainstream-media that wasn’t controlled by corporate interests or politicians. It’s role in directing mass amounts internet traffic also made it lucrative for the news sites that received the traffic. He has even been called the ‘Rupert Murdoch of the digital age.’ More on it’s role in the Trump election campaign and how far that it’s come today, in another part of the series.

Next, I will uncover how Steve Bannon meeting Andrew Breitbart and David Bossie in 2004, has led us to today. I will also explain how the political activities of the Koch brothers has influenced the chain of events and more.

Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, was very much behind her father’s presidential campaign. He focused on message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning or artificial intelligence. His friends in Silicon valley are some of the best digital marketers in the world. He also focused on micro-targeting on Facebook: “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Mr Kushner said. Mr Kushner’s inexperience in political campaigning and his understanding of the world online became an advantage. Mr Kushner also looked at campaign spending differently by getting a maximum return on every dollar spent. “We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,” Mr Kushner explained. “I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” He tapped into the Republican National Committee’s data machine and he also hired Cambridge Analytica (CA) to help identify which voters mattered the most for Mr Trump to win. Be it trade, immigration or change. There are digital tools out there such as Deep Root, which drove his TV spend by identifying shows popular with voter blocks in different regions. The TV show NCIS had ads directed at anti-Obamacare voters and for folks worried about immigration it was shows like The Walking Dead. “It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign,” says billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”

This week Facebook publically acknowledged that its platform has been exploited by governments manipulating public opinion in other countries. Including during the presidential elections in the America and France. In a white paper, they detailed well-funded as well as low-funded techniques that are used by nations and organisations to spread disinformation and lies for geopolitical goals. It explained that these tactics go further than “fake news” as they include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts to help amplify a particular view. “We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people,” said the company. Facebook didn’t mention any nation states involved, but that their investigation ‘does not contradict’ the report [PDF] by the US Director of National Intelligence, outlining Russian involvement in the US election.

The white paper [PDF] doesn’t go into much detail about micro-targeting or what are known as “dark posts”. These are paid, sponsored Facebook posts that can only be seen by those that you want to manipulate. Mr Kushner also employed this technique during the Trump campaign. The paper does talk about targeted data collection that uses phishing malware to infect an individual’s or organisation’s computer. The malware steals their identification and information in emails and in their social media accounts. This information helps hackers to better target their phishing campaigns or ‘advance harmful information operations’.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) had their emails hacked due to a phishing campaign by Russian hackers in the run up to the election last year. One of these was sent to the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, John Podesta. One of his assistants, Charles Devalan, noticed the email that was sent to Mr Podesta’s private email account. It asked Mr Podesta to change his password. Mr Devalan could see that it was a phishing attack and forwarded it to a computer technician. Instead of saying that ‘This is an illegitimate email’ and ‘John needs to change his password’ he typed that it was ‘legitimate’, meaning that they unwittingly gave the hackers access to about 60,000 emails.

This week it was revealed that Russian intelligence has been allegedly sending phishing emails to officials and others involved in Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in the French presidential election. Security researchers at cybersecurity company, Trend Micro noticed a hacking group sending emails with links to fake websites that baits them into turning over their passwords. They believe that Russian intelligence are behind this and the registering of decoy web addresses, were as recent as April 15th this year. The websites are registered to a group of web addresses that they say belong to the Russian intelligence unit that they refer to as Pawn Storm, also known as Fancy Bear, APT28, Sofacy and STRONTIUM. US and European intelligence agencies as well as US private security researchers have determined that they were responsible for hacking the DNC last year.

Trend Micro also released a thorough report [PDF] detailing phishing attempts by Pawn Storm that they have blocked, including their email headers. They also provide visual examples of how hackers target high profile email users. Mainstream media has also been utilised by Pawn Storm to publicise their attacks as well as to attempt to public influence. One example is reputable German magazine Der Spiegel reported on doping in sports in January this year. They admit to being in contact with the “Fancy Bear hackers” for months. They say that in December last year that they received “several sets of data containing PDF and Word documents in addition to hundreds of internal emails from United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and WADA, the World AntiDoping Agency.”

In April 2015, the British army created a special force of Facebook warriors, with skills in journalism, psychological operations or PsyOps, and in using social media to engage in unconventional warfare. They join the US and Israeli armies that already heavily engage in PsyOps. Counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan has inspired the creation of the force. An army spokesperson said: “77th Brigade is being created to draw together a host of existing and developing capabilities essential to meet the challenges of modern conflict and warfare. It recognises that the actions of others in a modern battlefield can be affected in ways that are not necessarily violent.”

In the last article I mentioned Michael Flynn’s 2010 report, when he was the top US intelligence officer in Afghanistan. It was about wanting intelligence in counterinsurgency to act more like journalists.

The purpose of this series of articles is to provide you with as much background as I can, by researching and analysing information that can only be backed up with evidence. I believe that this story is onion-like with many layers as well as foreign players involved. A multi-layered attack on democracy around the world is currently at play. Because this story is playing out in real time, new information, once validated, will also be woven into the series.

My next article will explore Wilson Woodrow’s contribution to propaganda and how this has helped lead us to the likes of Breitbart News and Fox News.

Recently I wrote about Cambridge Analytica (CA), I’ve discovered since then that there is a lot more to this story than just marketing tactics and I will be writing a series of articles about it. What has led us to the likes of fake news, alt-facts, disinformation, and propaganda not only in the media but also in social media? Who are the players and who stands to gain? I will explore all of this and more with detailed research in coming days.

Michael Flynn is a retired American army lieutenant general and was the first National Security Council advisor to be appointed by President Donald Trump. He was fired less than a month later this year on February 13th, under a cloud of suspicion relating to what he said on a phone call at the White House to Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. Mr Flynn told Vice President of the US, Mike Pence, that the call merely consisted of small talk and holiday pleasantries. The White House, upon analysing the transcript of the wiretapped conversation found that he had also had a discussion about sanctions imposed on Russia, for interfering in the 2016 election on Mr Trump’s behalf.

The US army was also investigating Mr Flynn about whether he had received payments from the Russian government for a trip that he took to Moscow in 2015. The occasion was the tenth birthday celebration of Russian Today (RT), a television network controlled by the Kremlin. US intelligence agencies have been warning since 2012 that RT is a propaganda arm of the Russian government. Payments like this, without the consent of congress could violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which forbids former military officers from receiving money from a foreign government without their consent. The FBI was also examining Mr Flynn’s White House phone calls. This was due to concerns that in his attempts to hide what was said in the call, the Russians could blackmail him by threatening to expose him if he refused.

Mr Pence was angry at Mr Flynn as he had defended him in a number of television appearances about the phone call and he wasn’t impressed with him blaming it on his bad memory. Mr Pence was dubious about the bad memory excuse because of a similar experience late last year when this time, he was defending Mr Flynn’s son on television. He denied that Michael Flynn Jnr, was behind the conspiracy theories, such as Pizzagate about Hillary Clinton on social media. He also denied that Mr Flynn Jnr been given a security clearance. He had been given security clearance even though Mr Flynn told Mr Pence’s team that he didn’t have one.

On March 16th this year, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (House Oversight Committee) reported back to President Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense, James Mattis and FBI Director, James Comey. [PDF] They uncovered documents showing that RT paid Mr Flynn more than US$45,000 for his participation in the birthday celebrations as well as US$11,250 from a Russian charter cargo airline and US$11,250 from a Russia-based cyber-security corporation. They also uncovered a retroactive filing by Mr Flynn on March 7th with the Department of Justice. It disclosed that he served as an agent of a foreign government while advising President elect, Donald Trump. The filing reported that US$530,000 was paid to Mr Flynn for pro-Erdogan lobbying work in Turkey between the months of August and November in 2016. It is of note that on November 8th Mr Flynn wrote an op-ed claiming that the Obama administration and the US media wasn’t being supportive enough of Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. ‘It is fair to say that most Americans don’t know exactly what to make of our ally Turkey these days, as it endures a prolonged political crisis that challenges its long-term stability. The U.S. media is doing a bang-up job of reporting the Erdoğan government’s crackdown on dissidents, it’s not putting it into perspective. We must begin with understanding that Turkey is vital to U.S. interests.’

Mr Flynn’s lawyers say that they notified the transition team about his lobbying in Turkey but the President and the Vice President say that they knew nothing about it. The House Oversight Committee, requested information as to whether he’d fully disclosed his communications and payments from foreign sources as part of his security clearance, for his return to government. They also requested that the Defense Department take steps to recover all foreign funds accepted in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. On March 31st Mr Flynn told investigators that he was willing to be interviewed about the allegations but only if he received immunity from prosecution.

In 2010 as the top US intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Mr Flynn wrote a report about intelligence acting more like journalists. He lamented that US intelligence in Afghanistan spent too much time on attacking the Taliban and not enough on figuring out Afghanistan’s cultural and social landscapes. ‘Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade.’ And that they overlook data such as polling data, patrol debriefs, minutes from local shuras, and economic statistics that helps them connect the dots. ‘This vast and underappreciated body of information, almost all of which is unclassified, admittedly offers few clues about where to find insurgents, but it does provide elements of even greater strategic importance – a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself,’ the report stated.

This sounds very much like the Strategic Communication Laboratories Group (SCL) which specialises in behavioural research and data that drives behavioural change. SCL is the parent company to CA. Five years earlier SCL was reported to be the first private company to provide psychological warfare services, known as ‘psyops’ in the military, at a global arms fair in London. It believed that armies were prepared to pay for their services from a private provider and that it could shorten conflicts.

The US Army definition for Psychological Operations or PsyOps is: “Psychological operations are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organisations, groups or individuals.”

Bolstered by the success of CA during the American election SCL has lobbied the US national security services in the Pentagon about how its technology could be used to deter terrorism and to help assess attitudes about immigrants. SCL’s lobbying has been driven by a former aid to Mr Flynn and Mr Flynn is a former adviser for SCL. SCL recently won a defense contract with the US state department “Global Engagement Services” to work on “target audience analysis” (TAA) of young men in other countries who may be thinking of joining ISIS. The founder of SCL, Nigel Oakes also founded the Behavioural Dynamics Institute.(BDi). BDi is the research arm of SCL and its stated goal is ‘to assemble and assimilate the full extent of creative and scientific knowledge on group behaviour and the dynamics of change, and package it into a unified and workable methodological approach to conducting successful and measurable behaviour campaigns.’ BDi has a nine page white paper [PDF] dedicated to TAA ‘if you just want to understand a population, hire an anthropologist. But if you want to change people’s attitudes and behaviours, TAA is essential.’

Marketing has long been used by corporations to influence people’s buying behaviour but what does it mean if government’s use psy-ops to change people’s behaviour?

Tomorrow, I will delve into Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, and the role that he played in her father’s election and more.

Can our digital footprints and data be used to manipulate our political opinions? Yes, but it was never the intention of scientists. The irony, in a world led by an American President that’s against science of any other kind bar psychometrics or keeping power. In 2008 Dr David Stillwell and Dr Michal Kosinski were students at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, when they launched a Facebook application called MyPersonality app. The research focused on five personality traits known as OCEAN. Openness (how open are you to new experiences?), Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), Extroversion (how sociable are you?), Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?), and Neuroticism (are you easily upset?). They asked Facebook users psychometric questions such as these as well as psychological questions. This was done with a test called “The Big 5 test” and they asked users permission to use their Facebook profiles for their research. Users were given their personality profile in return and forty-percent of users agreed to share their Facebook profile data with them.     

They expected maybe a few dozen users to fill in the questionnaire but they ended up getting over a million responses. Their data set combining the psychometric scores with Facebook profiles was the largest ever to be collected. Over the next four years they measured the OCEAN data and compared these with other data points such as Facebook “likes,” content shared and where they lived. In 2012 Dr Kosinski reported that with the data of 68 “likes” he was able to predict things such as whether the user was a Democratic or Republican supporter, with 85% accuracy. With constant refining and testing of this model Dr Kosinski was soon able to evaluate a personality with just 70 Facebook likes, learning more about the person than what the person’s friends knew about them. A couple of weeks after this Facebook changed “likes” so that they were private by default. This doesn’t stop data collectors, many apps and online quizzes today still require access to your private data before you can even take the personality tests. If you want to evaluate yourself based on your Facebook “likes,” I will provide links at the end of the article for Dr Kosinski’s website which you can then compare with an OCEAN questionnaire. The original project has finished as such but it is still open for research, you can even find Monash university from Australia on there as a collaborator.   

Dr Kosinski realised that it wasn’t just about Facebook “likes” or even Facebook but that we also reveal things about ourselves when we’re not online. Our smartphone he concluded, is in itself a psychological questionnaire that we are constantly filling out, both consciously and unconsciously. He worried what his research would mean in reverse and that essentially he had invented a people search engine that could possibly cause harm, rather than the original intentions of psychological research.

In 2014 Dr Kosinski was approached by a lecturer from Cambridge University’s psychology department. Dr Alexsandr Kogan, on behalf of a company called Strategic Communication Laboratories Group (SCL) wanted access to the MyPersonality app. SCL was founded in 1993 by Nigel Oakes, a former Saatchi & Saatchi ad man with a penchant for psychology and behavioural profiling. He also established the Behavioural Dynamics Working Group to understand and potentially change people’s opinions in 1989. SCL has been involved in elections in Africa, Asia, The Middle East, Europe, Latin America and The Caribbean. It has also worked for the UK Ministry of defence, the US state department, Sandia and NATO. It states on its websites that its methodology is approved purely because of its involvement with the latter, not anything to do with their success rate or ethics. Cambridge Analytica (CA) is an offshoot of SCL and was founded in July 2014.      

In the nineties, Mr Oakes employed two respected psychometrics professors, Professor Adrian Furnham and Professor Barrie Gunter. Both psychologists say that they were used by Mr Oakes to build credibility for his group. ‘I believe he is inappropriately using my name and reputation to further his career. He was unreliable and Prof. Gunter and I severed links with him’, Prof. Furnham wrote in an email. Prof. Gunter went further: ‘Adrian and I were  running our own small company providing consultancy services. Nigel made contact with us while he was working for the event division of Saatchi & Saatchi. As far as we were concerned Behavioural Dynamics was simply the name of a company he founded”, Prof. Gunter said. “Nigel didn’t have any qualifications in psychology. To have credibility he needed an association with bonafide psychologists, which is part of the reason that he brought us on board. But we found that no matter how hard we tried to rein him in, he would make all kinds of claims that we felt that we couldn’t substantiate, and that is why we stopped working for him’.          

In 2015 The Guardian reported that SCL found out about Dr Kosinski’s method from Dr Kogan in early 2014. After Dr Kogan was turned down by Dr Kosinski he established his own company called Global Science Research Ltd in May 2014. It also reported that he began working with SCL to deliver a “large research project” in the US. His stated aim was to get as close to every US Facebook user into their dataset as he could. He used Mechanical Turk (MTurk) which is Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace, to access Facebook profiles. He recruited MTurk users by paying them around a dollar to take a personality questionnaire that also gave access to their Facebook profiles. He promised that their Facebook data would “only be used for research purposes” and would remain “anonymous and safe”. Some complained that he was violating MTurk terms of service. “They want you to log into Facebook and then download a bunch of your information,” was one complaint at the time. Dr Kogan also captured all of the data of each MTurk users’ friends and at that time Facebook users had an average of 340 friends each.

This data was then used to generate models of their personalities using the OCEAN scale. Within a just a few months dr Kogan’s business partner gloated on LinkedIn that their company “owns a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States – for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles”. Dr Kogan was unable in email to explain where all of the data came from as he was restricted by various confidentiality agreements and said that SCL was no longer a client. After Dr Kosinski read the Guardian reports he believed that Dr Kogan replicated his measurement tool and that he had sold it to SCL. Interestingly, Dr Kogan changed his name not long after this and is now known as Dr Spectre.

In November 2015, former Ukip leader and UK politician Nigel Farage, was supporting the “Leave European Union” campaign and announced that it had commissioned CA to support its online campaign. The results as we know now, is that Britain is leaving the European Union (EU). A record number of Google searches after the polls had closed asking ‘What happens if we leave the EU?’ suggests that many people didn’t know why they voted to leave or what the consequences of their vote meant.

CEO of CA, Alexander Nix describes their marketing success as being based on three elements: behavioural science using the OCEAN model, big data analysis and ad targeting. CA buys personal data from places like land registries, automobile data, shopping data, loyalty card data, club memberships, magazines that you read and what places of worship that you attend. They also use “surveys on social media” and Facebook data. There are data brokers such as Acxiom and Experian in the US for example, where you can get almost any personal data that you desire for a price. If you wanted to know where Indian women live for example, you can just buy it, phone numbers included. CA can then add this data to the electoral rolls of the Republican party alongside their OCEAN and social media data. “We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America-220 million people” Mr Nix boasts. Which was exactly what Dr Kosinski feared.

“They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT” was a telling tweet by then Presidential candidate, Donald Trump on the 18th August 2016. Robert Mercer is a billionaire that started out financially backing Ted Cruz in the Presidential race but when he fell out of the race he supported Mr Trump to the tune of $13.5 million. He was Mr Trump’s biggest donor. Mr Mercer started out his career with IBM as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He is credited with “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s use of artificial intelligence. He later became CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money through algorithms on the financial markets. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, described how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.” One of its funds Medallion, that manages its employees’ money is the most successful in the world. It’s generated $55 billion so far. Mr Mercer also likes to fund such things as climate change denialist think tank, The Heartland Institute and right-wing news site Breitbart News. In fact it was $10 million of his own funding that enabled Steve Bannon, who is now President Trump’s chief strategist, to set up Breitbart News. Mr Mercer also has a $10 million stake in CA.

Mr Nix has also explained how most of Donald Trump’s messaging during his election campaign was data driven. CA divided the US population into 32 personality types and focused on just 17 states. They discovered that a preference for cars being made in the US for example, was a pretty good indication that they were a potential Trump voter. Similar tactics were used with gun ownership on the show “House of Cards” in season four. The episode focused on government “terrorism” surveillance data being used to influence gun-toting voters opinions, for their own means.

CA registered in Australia before our federal election last year and several state elections. It hasn’t lodged any financial disclosures as yet in Australia. They have registered an Australian office at a property currently being redeveloped in Sydney in Maroubra, corporate filings show. Mr Nix and Matt Oczkowski will be in the country next week for ADMA as guest speakers at a data analytics conference. They will also be meeting with Liberal party officials. In a country that has 10 percent of the population in comparison to the US, I personally can’t see too much damage. But what I do take offence to is another country trying to affect our countries voting outcomes. It doesn’t matter if you are English, Russian or American you have no right to manipulate voting intentions and we must legislate for our sovereignty now. For those curious about what makes you or your friends tick, or a little bit of insight into your personality, please feel secure in trying the links below:

https://applymagicsauce.com/

https://discovermyprofile.com/