Exclusive: The Kremlin began supporting Donald Trump on Facebook as soon as he announced his White House bid in June 2015. Investigators want to know if the campaign colluded with Russia to use Facebook as a propaganda tool.

Brad Parscale picked up the phone on Wednesday June 17, 2015. It was real-estate mogul Donald J. Trump. The San Antonio web designer had built websites for the Trump organization before but this request from his client was far bigger than anything the then 39-year-old Kansan had ever worked on before.

A day earlier, Trump descended the escalator at his Manhattan Tower to a basement full of supporters and journalists to announce his bid for the White House. Trump told Parscale on the phone he wanted him to build a full presidential campaign website.

Parscale had no political or campaign experience but in the ensuing seventeen months he would build the most aggressive digital media campaign for a president anyone had ever seen. The 6’7? web designer assembled a team in San Antonio, Texas where he lived while Donald Trump began doing the rounds on cable news.

“You think you’d be able to get along with Vladimir Putin,” Sean Hannity asked Trump on Fox News. “Did you talk to him?”

“I don’t want to say,” Trump dodged the question, then added with something of a wink: “Putin truly hates Obama. He thinks he’s terrible. He thinks he’s arrogant. He thinks he’s just terrible.”

At exactly the same time Trump said he was open to dealing with Putin, a Russian company funded by a “close Putin ally with ties to the Russian intelligence” began buying ads on Facebook supporting Trump campaign issues and continued doing so throughout the campaign. The social network describes the ads bought by Internet Research Agency as “amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum?—?touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights”

Trump launched his campaign with a tirade against Mexicans immigrants and proposed a border wall. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting,” he told supporters.

On Facebook, a Russian created community called “SecureBorders” with 133,000 followers, began publishing racists ads to amplify Trump’s message, including one of a cartoon Trump dangling a man wearing a T-shirt with a Mexican flag over a wall with the headline “You have to go back pal”.

Russian oligarch Evgeney Prigozhin hired hundreds of Russians to pose as American conservatives and post fake news on issues closely aligned to the Trump campaign.

“SecureBorders” and hundreds of other fake pages like “Spread Your Wings”, “Art Gone Conscious” and “Celebrities Against Obama” were created by the IRA which is funded by Russian oligarch Evgeney Prigozhin. Prigozhin was Putin’s chef for more than a decade. Since then, he’s built a catering empire serving Russian public sector and military contracts. He is now under sanctions by the U.S. for running a digital propaganda machine serving up fake news and memes to American voters.

Prigozhin pumped millions of rubles into the IRA to hire hundreds of well-paid 20 and 30-something year olds to generate content on a specific agenda. The New York Times Magazine revealed employees at the St. Petersburg agency had multiple fake Facebook accounts all created in the summer of 2014. They parroted, commented and shared content, amplifying the message across social media on Facebook groups by posing as American conservatives.

A former employee of the agency described a culture plagued with homophobia, racism and poor grammar. “You see these people with a lot of tattoos,” the insider told the New York Times Magazine. “They’re so cool, like they’re from New York; very hip clothing, very hip tattoos, like they’re from Williamsburg but they are stupid,” said Marat Burkhardt. “In office conversation, they used gay slurs to refer to [Ukrainian politician] Petro Poroshenko and called Barack Obama a monkey,” Burkhardt said.

Investigators want to know if the Trump Campaign coordinated efforts with a Russian propaganda army.

Facebook claims to have found $150,000 worth of ads from 470 suspicious Russian accounts but this may just be the tip of the iceberg. “This is a very significant set of data points produced by Facebook,” Congressman Adam Schiff told the Washington Post. “Left unanswered in what we received from Facebook — because it is beyond the scope of what they are able to determine — is whether there was any coordination between these social media trolls and the campaign. We have to get to the bottom of that,” Schiff said

Which brings us back to Brad Parscale. In the months after Parscale got the call from Trump to build a campaign website in June 2015, Parscale’s became something of a campaign manager involved in communicating every message for the Presidential nominee.

His company Giles-Parscale which was accustomed to billing in the double-digit thousands received $90 million dollars during the campaign, most of it destined to Facebook. Facebook was on-site at the Project Alamo headquarters in San Antonio. “They were helping us,” Trump social media director Theresa Hong told the BBC. “They were basically our “hands on” partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.” Hong said.

Facebook worked alongside Cambridge Analytica in San Antonio. CA’s parent company SCL has been accused of stealing 30 million Facebook profiles through a malicious Facebook app. The social media network shut down the app in 2015. Facebook must also have been aware that Cambridge Analytica was profiling users through innocuous looking quizzes on the social network for use in the campaign.

Parscale’s team was able to identify voters in minute detail. “What I needed to do was to find smart people who came from the Republican Party, subcontractors and my own company and say how do we find these individual voters and the exact right ones,” Parscale told the Joe Page show. “I didn’t need a gut, because I had the data”.

Congressional investigation committees and Special Counsel Robert Mueller want to know if someone within the campaign helped the IRA target its Facebook ads geographically, which implies granular knowledge the campaign’s progress and local issue in specific counties across the country.

Parscale testified before the House Intelligence Committee in July he was unaware of any Russian links to the his social media campaign. We “used the exact same digital marketing strategies that are used everyday by corporate America,” Parscale said in a statement. This may be true but campaigns are not corporations and are subject to regulations forbidding foreign propaganda supporting a campaign.

The FBI is now investigating if Sputnik News and Russia Today, which use Facebook to distribute content, failed to register as foreign agents.

Investigators are also probing Facebook outlet “DC Leaks” which published the first samples of material stolen by Russian hackers from the DNC and they’re investigating the role of Russian news services like Sputnik and Russia Today, as well as Breitbart, in pushing fake news on Facebook at the Kremlin’s behest.

Andrew Feinberg, a former journalist who worked for Sputnik News told Yahoo! News he received his marching orders from his mostly Russian editors at the Washington D.C. office and claims they often said, “Moscow wants this, or Moscow wants that.” Feinberg was interviewed by the FBI recently about Sputnik’s operations to determine if it is in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

“This tells me they have good information and intelligence that these organizations have been acting on behalf of the Kremlin and that there’s a direct line between them and the [Russian influence operations] that are a significant threat to our democracy,” says Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Sputnik, along with Russia Today and Breitbart, relies heavily on Facebook and Google to target its news content at American consumers. If indeed Sputnik failed to register under FARA, their entire operation could become the subject of prosecution or expulsion. Dmitry Kiselyov runs Sputnik and formerly headed Russia Today and is widely referred to as Putin’s chief propagandist.

The big question now is whether the campaign coordinated its social media efforts with the Trump Campaign, and specifically Brad Parscale. If investigators are able to find this type of cooperation, it could well be the most conclusive proof of a conspiracy between Russia and Trump to influence the 2016 election yet.

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The secret story of how American minds were manipulated during the 2016 election campaign and how Donald Trump’s backers are making money off it.

Psychologist Michal Kosinski switched on the TV in his Zurich hotel room on the morning of November ninth. The headlines were all about Donald Trump’s against-all-odds win in the U.S. presidential election. The news filled the Polish-born academic with dread, Kosinski told Das Magazine. The 34-year-old psychologist was sure of one thing: the scientific model he had created helped elect Trump.

Kosinski is a pioneer in the field of psychometry. It’s the science of predicting behavior using a psychological profile gleaned from social media activity. There are five criteria which analysts use to define your personality called the OCEAN model.

• Openness to new ideas and learning.
• Conscientiousness is a measure of your reliability, promptness and organization.
• Extraversion measures openness and sociability.
• Agreeableness refers to your kindness, empathy and warmth.
• Neuroticism measures your emotional stability and rate of negative emotions.

In a 2012 study, Kosinski and two colleagues at Cambridge University were able to predict any person’s race, political affiliations and sexual orientation by analyzing someone’s social media activity.

While at Cambridge, Kosinski met fellow researcher Aleksandr Kogan. Russian-born Kogan asked about using Kosinski’s method for election manipulation. “The whole thing began to stink,” Kosinski told German Das Magazine.

Kosinski wanted nothing to do with using his research for malevolent means and broke off contact with Kogan. Since then, Kosinski has travelled the world lecturing about the dangers of ‘big data’ manipulation warning it can “threaten the welfare, freedom, or even the lives of men.”

Kogan, who has since changed his name to Alexandr Specter, had very different plans for his colleagues’ research.

After the invasion of the Ukraine, a Russian born researcher at Cambridge University began harvesting private data of 30 million U.S. Facebook users for Cambridge Analytica.

In 2014, Kogan founded “Global Science Research”, which was funded by London-based Scientific Communications Laboratory (SCL) and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Kogan’s company hired 185,000 Americans to take an online survey and download a Facebook app. Once downloaded, the app gave Kogan information on 30 million unsuspecting Facebook users who were Facebook friends with the original survey-takers, according to The Intercept. Kogan had used Kosinski’s model to build an an algorithm to profile American voters.

In 2015, Kogan’s app was shut down because of complaints about privacy concerns. By then Kogan had gathered data on millions of Americans. “No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that “likes” and demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by political operatives hired to influence American voters,” according to The Intercept.

SCL has since distanced itself from the use of this data and Kogan’s GSR. “We do not do any work with Facebook likes,” Cambridge Analytica spokesman Lindsey Platts, said in a statement. The company “has no relationship with GSR,” Platts said.

The Trump Campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for a database of 220 million U.S. voters including private details of their personality and activities.

In 2016, Cambridge Analytica, under the leadership of CEO Alexander Nix and vice-president Stephen Bannon helped manipulate the British electorate to vote for Brexit. The previously unknown company had achieved the unthinkable in breaking up the E.U. and then began to turn its attention to U.S. politics. Donald Trump even tweeted on Aug 18:

Every time you take one of those Facebook quizzes, you know the ones, which celebrity are you most like? Which Game of Thrones character are you? What country are you really from? You may think you’re taking an innocuous quiz, but what you’re really doing is giving a data mining firm like Cambridge Analytica, “express consent” to profile you. The company then cross-references that information with other data and creates an OCEAN profile of you which is even more accurate than a partner or family member could provide.

Donald Trump paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for work on his 2016 campaign. The company’s data scientists were able to figure out Trump voters who were “very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness and slightly conscientious.” Once profiled, Cambridge Analytica could target their specific interests with tailor-made election messages and specific news content (real or fake) to work on their emotions, interests and regional location.

Think of it as a digital soapbox where the speaker is digitally crafted to appeal to your every fear and desire and pinpoint exactly where you live. Take for example, Donald Trump’s focus on the Opioid crisis and immigration during the 2016 election campaign. All of the messages were designed to surgically target voters with these seemingly “local” concerns in important swing states.

Meet the woman who wrote @realDonaldTrump's campaign Facebook posts – and the tech firm that helped him get elected. pic.twitter.com/9vA3KMIIGj

— BBC Stories (@bbcstories) August 13, 2017

As Russian hackers targeted state voters rolls, Cambridge Analytica provided the Trump campaign with private voting history.

Cambridge Analytica assembled a database for the Trump campaign of 220 million voters known as Project Alamo. The data set included voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, internet viewing history, car purchases and information from data-mining companies like Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom Corporation.

Theresa Hong was a key digital officer for the Trump campaign. Hong told the BBC the data-set also included information about voting history. “Some of the attributes would be when was the last time they voted, who did they vote for.” In response to a question on how Cambridge Analytica would know all that information, Hong replied, “that’s their secret sauce.” (video above).

You’ll recall Russian hackers were able to infiltrate voters rolls in almost every state before the election. “We had to assume that they actually tried to at least rattle the doorknobs on all 50, and we just happened to find them in a few of them.” Michael Daniel, who led the Obama White House effort to secure the vote against Russian intrusions, told Time Magazine.

Add to this, a mysterious server in Trump Tower which is suspected of compiling a massive database of hacked voter information with Russia’s Alfa Bank and the DeVos family-owned Spectrum Health, and you begin to see a clearer picture of how Cambridge Analytica may have gotten all this data. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was until recently owned by a British-Iranian businessman with ties to Putin-linked Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash who is wanted for bribery by the U.S. and was allegedly involved in a racketeering scheme with Paul Manafort.

From their digital headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, the Trump campaign placed between 70,000-175,000 different pieces of content on Facebook every day specifically targeting profiles provided from Cambridge Analytica. Trump’s digital advertising chief, Gary Coby, likened the effort to “high-frequency trading” and says Trump used Facebook “like no one else in politics has ever done.” In fact, all of Trump’s $85 million digital budget went into Facebook coffers.

Much of the targeted content that was delivered to voters was news created by Cambridge Analytica’s sister company Breitbart and Russian sponsored sites like Wikileaks, Sputnik and Russia Today. The FBI is investigating the role these news organizations played in Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections, according to McClatchy.

Trump Administration inked a $496,000 deal with Cambridge Analytica while Michael Flynn and Stephen Bannon were still in office which presents a possible conflict of interest.

Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by New York hedge fund manager and major Trump donor Robert Mercer, according to Politico. Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Bannon was until recently the company’s vice-president and owned a stake in the company which could be worth as much as $5 Million. Trump’s former National Security Adviser Lt-Gen Michael Flynn, a compromised Russian asset, also disclosed he played an advisory role for Cambridge Analytica.

On February 17, the Trump Administration paid $496,000 upfront to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL in a contract with the U.S. State Department. SCL’s role at the State Department is to “assess the impact of foreign propaganda campaigns and provide intelligence agencies with predictions and insight on emerging threats,” according to the Washington Post.

SCL is also working a deal with the Pentagon to teach them “how to conduct effective psychological operations,” says the Post. SCL has hired new staffers and opened a new office just up the street from the White House. SCL’s effort is being driven by a “former aide to now-departed national security adviser Michael Flynn, who served as an adviser to the company in the past,” says the Post.

Considering the senior roles Mercer, Bannon and Flynn held within Cambridge Analytica, the new Washington operation of SLC and the State Department deal could well indicate a conflict of interest.

More importantly, the way Cambridge Analytica gained access to some 30 million Facebook accounts without users’ consent, along with private voting records, raises serious privacy concerns.

The office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating all aspects of a possible conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the election. “That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” Former FBI Director James Comey testified before a congressional committee in March.

The post Psychological Warfare appeared first on Narativ.

Unnamed sources say the FBI now has details of how the operation to elect Trump colluded with Russia to win. Here’s what to expect.

Back in the Spring of 2012, the campaign of the incumbent President of the US offered one lucky supporter a “Dinner with Barack”.  Not just any dinner, mind you. Dinner with former President Barack Obama was going to take place at the West Village Brownstone of Sarah Jessica Parker with the “Sex and the City” star and other celebrities in attendance.

This extraordinary intersection of pop culture and US political power was no accident. It was the result Obama’s extraordinary data machine figuring out that some his supporters had an affinity to certain celebrities, Jessica Parker among them. The dinner contest was just one example of how the Obama campaign utilized “big data” to galvanize support for the president in a way no other president had ever done before him.

To be fair, Facebook was only 4 years old when Obama was elected the first time, 8 years-old the second time around, so being first was good fortune as much as foresight.   But to his campaign’s credit, they realized social media was a way to upend the establishment and win an election. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” declared then campaign manager Jim Messina.

As President Obama took a victory lap for his wins in 2008 and 2012, a team of geeky data crunchers were doing their own high-fiving for their role in winning and re-winning the White House.  Time Magazine revealed this effort after the election in a story about how data won the election for Obama.

What they revealed was:

“a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

Flash forward to 2016, and reality TV star and property mogul Donald J. Trump was eyeing the White House. As a “self-funded” campaign the billionaire was not utilizing much of his own cash to power his campaign but now it has emerged, he was relying heavily on a big data campaign of his own.  Not funded by his own wallet, but by the coffers of a foreign nation.

Trump had little to no celebrity support and he certainly wasn’t organized enough to build a date machine in the Obama mold but with Russia’s help he was able to create a data machine with impressive results. Central to their operation was a server housed at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The server, was described as “odd” by FBI investigators.  The server made regular check-ins with two other servers owned by Russia’s Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

Alfa Bank outwardly operates independently of the Kremlin but is largely believed to be a front operation for Vladimir Putin. Spectrum Health is a medical facility chain run by Dick DeVos, husband of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Brother-in-law to Erik Prince, The Blackwater CEO and Trump ally who is believed to have held a secret meeting in the Seychelles between UAE officials and Russia, on behalf of Trump.

“From May 4 until September 23, the Russian bank looked up the address to this Trump corporate server 2,820 times — more lookups than the Trump server received from any other source,” according to CNN. This accounted for 80% of connections to the server. The remaining 20% (714), were look-ups by Spectrum Health servers.

Now a few online bloggers, including Tea Pain and Conspirador have concluded that the server was reconciling a SQL databases – basically updating a giant spreadsheet of voter information, contact info and social media data so Trump and his Russian partners could spam, intimidate and influence the election.

This would be just like the Obama data machine only this time the data was illegally gotten by a foreign government.  Here’s a sample of the IP look-ups which has led analysts to believe what was going on here was a reconciliation of voters data.

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