INSURGE Cambridge Analytica reporting picked up by HuffPost and beyond
HuffPost have credited us for being first to report this story on how Cambridge Analytica advised the UK Foreign Office on how to apply data lessons learned from gaming the US presidential elections to UK foreign policy goals.
I first unearthed this in December 2017, in an extensive piece which contained numerous other revelations that the global press are only now beginning to catch up on. Here's the excerpt from HuffPo:
"The pair [Mark Turnbull and David Wilkinson of Cambridge Analytica/SCL Elections] gave their expertise to officials and others at Foreign Office’s prestigious Wilton Park conference centre in Sussex in February 2017. The agenda for the conference was first highlighted by INSURGE Intelligence journalist Nafeez Ahmed in December 2017. The title of their lecture was listed as “examining the application of data in the recent US Presidential election”, acknowledges the HuffPost piece by politics editor Paul Waugh.
If you haven't already, check out our full exclusive investigation exposing how Facebook was compromised by Cambridge Analytica, due to the platform's core (evolving) business model.
Three months after we broke numerous exclusives in that piece - such as Cambridge Analytica's past classification as a List X contractor for the Ministry of Defence, the firm's being contracted to NATO for anti-Russia propaganda operations in eastern Europe, along with its symbiotic connections to the Foreign Office, among numerous other key findings the press have yet to report - parts of the media began to catch up three months later.
After being picked up by HuffPost, the core elements of our story were picked up elsewhere, with The Guardian, BBC and others starting to realise that the real story here is not how CA/SCL have allowed foreign powers to hijack our democracies from outside, but how they have allowed our own unaccountable trans-Atlantic elite to subvert democratic process from within.
The BBC, for instance, reporting on an SCL Elections brochure, observed belatedly:
"In the document, SCL Elections claimed potential clients could contact the company through 'any British High Commission or Embassy'," a matter we reported and followed up on at the end of last year, while also highlighting the thrust of SCL's claims to have influenced all sorts of elections in foreign theatres through dodgy means.
To date, the reporting on CA/SCL only just scratched the surface of the extent to which an unaccountable and increasingly radicalised section of the Anglo-American elite with ties to military-industrial complexes, fossil fuel companies and banking/finance conglomerates on both sides of the Atlantic have used the firm and its techniques as one tool in a wide arsenal to manipulate public opinion.
What we are witnessing is a highly successful effort by elements of the US and British 'deep states' to use psychological operations techniques honed during wars to drum up support for a concerted and dangerous shift toward the far-right in both the US and Europe.
It is therefore with some satisfaction that we saw that fundamental questions we were asking in our Facebook - CA/SCL reporting in December 2017 were being raised on the BBC Sunday Politics show, and are now going to be asked in the UK House of Lords.