Tag: hack

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Accountability ballot access folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies Regulating Protest

The Real Democracy Hack

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, data mining, hack, hacking, elections, democracy, meddling

A whistleblower in a British data company called Cambridge Analytica accuses his company of stealing as many as 50 million Facebook profiles. This is the latest version of the “hacked the election” meme pushed by the establishment after Trump’s 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton. 

Cambridge received data on 270,000 Facebook users, who traded their personal Facebook data and their friends’ profiles to download and use an app. The 50 million figure is an extrapolation supposing the average user had 200 friends. 

The outrage over this “hack” — by the whistleblower and by the television news commentators, who seem collectively to suffer from a case of the vapors — appears to be mostly pretense. That is, they pretend voters voted in a way they did not want to vote.

But that simply wasn’t the case. The implication that conspiratorial, behind-​the-​scenes puppeteers changed votes in some nefarious scam remains far off the mark. All we are really talking about is data miners gaining additional info that they pushed to political propagandists who in turn did what campaign propagandists always do. 

Maybe we should be grateful. 

And saying this data group propelled Trump is like saying that support for term limits propelled the GOP to take over Congress in 1994 — though, in this analogy, the data firm deserves less credit than the term limits issue. 

This is more a “life hack” than a technological intrusion into the political process. “Democracy was hacked” like civilization was hacked by Johannes Gutenberg.

What the fainting couch crowd really regrets? Their inability to control new media. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

We Are At War — So What Else Is New?

Russia, war, hack, propaganda, Morgan Freeman, video

As if on some hellish, punitive treadmill, we keep “experiencing” the last federal election, over and over. 

Hillary Clinton, who didn’t get a majority of all votes and who lost in the Electoral College, keeps on grinding through her long list of people who failed her. 

Her nuttiest charge, that “Russia ‘Hacked’ the election,” reached its apogee, last week, in the bizarre video featuring Morgan Freeman. The actor, who’s played both the President and God, intones that “We have been attacked; we are at war.” 

Financed by a cobbled-​together Committee to Investigate Russia, the notion seems to be: stretch Hillary Clinton’s conspiracy theory into the talking points for . . . a coup d’état.

Congress is, of course, investigating “what Russia did.” 

Unearthed, so far? Not much. 

As James Freeman wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, considering the paltry Russian presence on Facebook, “if Russian disinformation managed to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential contest, the Kremlin must have created the most influential advertising in the history of marketing.” 

And when you add in the FBI’s multiple FISA requests to bug Trump’s campaign manager, it’s hard not to come to this conclusion: it was not Trump, but the Deep State that colluded with the Russians.

The Committee/​Freeman video talks about “using social media to present propaganda and false information,” which puts the “hack” on the level of ideas — not real manipulation. Propaganda from the Kremlin is not appreciably different from propaganda from Clinton or Trump. 

Lies were everywhere, and if “false information” were worth declaring war over, the American people would have revolted against Washington, D.C., decades ago.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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