More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 10 - January 23, 2021
To Moscow, civil rights and the First Amendment are the American political system’s most glaring vulnerabilities. And so the Russian state sought to exploit this vulnerability—to hack American democracy. It would work, they decided, because
Then, decades later, when Europe looked more economically promising than the fledgling countries emerging out of colonial rule, Britain turned its back on these nations, closed off its borders, and implemented tough new immigration rules for Commonwealth citizens. At
For people like Sanni, Brexit was a story of marginalization and of Britain’s unaddressed legacy of colonialism—an attempt to right the wrong of denying immigrants and people of color access to the very country that had plundered them for centuries.
AIQ was able to target, engage, and enrage specific voters.
In short, it is far harder to make angry people fearful. The “affect bias” arising out of anger mediates people’s estimation of negative outcomes, which is why angry people are more inclined to engage in risky behavior—the same is true whether they are voting or starting a bar fight.
rescue British law and sovereignty from the grips of the faceless European Union, decided to win a vote by mocking those very laws. And to do so, they deployed a web of companies associated with Cambridge Analytica in foreign jurisdictions, away from the scrutiny of the agencies charged with protecting the integrity of our democracies.
The aim was to move people from all demographics of a more left-wing ideology to vote for a third-party candidate, like Jill Stein.
is not “How can we fix it?” Rather, it’s “How can we monetize it?” They were incapable of seeing beyond the business opportunity. I had wasted my time.
Facebook had given the data-harvesting application used by Cambridge Analytica express permission to use the data for non-academic purposes—a request I had made specifically to the company while working with Kogan.
A Democrat I was friendly with wrote, “This may have been just a game to you. But we are the ones who have to live with it.”
American journalist, I walked into the buzzing lobby bar of the Hoxton Hotel, in Shoreditch, and spotted Cadwalladr, who waved me over to her table. She was sitting across from Matt Rosenberg of the Times. Completely bald, slightly beefy, and apparently
We all pulled out our Faraday cases, which prevent phones from receiving or transmitting electronic signals. All my meetings with journalists started with this ritual. We then zipped the cases into a soundproof bag I had brought in case there was preinstalled listening malware that could turn itself on without remote activation.
it was a new era of colonialism, in which powerful Europeans exploited Africans for their resources. And although minerals and oil were still very much part of the equation, there was a new resource being extracted: data.
“We just put information into the bloodstream [of] the Internet and then watch it grow,” he said. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.” As I watched, I could barely contain myself. My experience was finally being validated by Nix’s own words.
these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.
Clinton said, “When you have a massive propaganda effort to prevent people from thinking straight, because they’re being flooded with false information and…every search engine, every site they go into, is repeating these fabrications, then yes, it affected the thought processes of voters.”
resonated with regular non-tech folk and caused a massive jamboree on social media (save for Facebook, which instead promoted its own press release in its trending news stories section).
we saw evidence that the Russians were speaking with Cambridge Analytica clients immediately before and after the clients met with the Trump campaign.
Leave.EU stated at its campaign launch, “map the British electorate and what they believe in, enabling us to better engage with voters.”
Bannon’s offer, consummating the emerging Anglo-American alt-right alliance with databases and algorithms. It was this relationship that became a focal point of interest for the House Intelligence Committee, as it appeared that this relationship was exploited by the Russian embassy as a discreet vehicle into the Trump campaign. In
Wires still dangle from the walls there. It was a smart TV that connected to my Netflix and social media accounts, and it had a microphone and camera. In my room, there is a nightstand with a drawer that is lined with a special metallic fabric that prevents any devices in the drawer from sending or receiving electronic signals. As part of my bedtime ritual, I leave my devices in there. Across the room in my closet are my old electronics from my life before. An unplugged Amazon Alexa sits alone, buried among a pile of other electronic rubbish—tablets, phones, a smartwatch—that
an air-gapped laptop that has never been connected to the Internet. I used it to work through evidence handed over to the House Intelligence Committee. In the drawer is the blank laptop I use for traveling, in case it is searched at the border. My personal computer sits in the living room, encrypted and locked down with a physical U2F key. The cameras are taped, although there is little you can do about the built-in microphone.
Faraday cases
Having experience on other hacking cases, my lawyers knew what companies backed into a corner were willing to do. But Facebook was different. They did not need to hack me; they could simply track me everywhere because of the apps on my phone—where I was, who my contacts were, who I was meeting.
The terms and conditions of Facebook’s mobile app asked for microphone and camera access. Although the company is at pains to deny pulling user audio data for targeted advertising, there is nonetheless a technical permission sitting on our phones that allows access to audio capabilities. And I was not an average user: I was the company’s biggest reputational threat at the time. At least in theory, audio could be activated, and my lawyers were concerned that the company could listen in on my conversations with them or the police.
Even if I was alone in the bathroom taking a shower, I wasn’t really ever alone. If my phone was there, so was Facebook. There was no escape. But getting
Facebook had refused to ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other armies of hate, but it chose to ban me.
Facebook’s “community” was building separate neighborhoods just for people who look like them. As the platform watched them, read their posts, and studied how they interacted with their friends, its algorithms would then make decisions about how to classify users into digital neighborhoods of their kind—what Facebook called their “Lookalikes.” The reason for this, of course, was to allow advertisers to target these homogeneous Lookalikes with separate narratives just for people of their kind.
The segmentation of Lookalikes, not surprisingly, pushed fellow citizens further and further apart. It created the atmosphere we are all living in now.
When Facebook goes on yet another apology tour, loudly professing that “we will try harder,” its empty rhetoric is nothing more than the thoughts and prayers of a technology company content to profit from a status quo of inaction.
set of ideas that some would later dub the Gerasimov Doctrine. Gerasimov wrote that the “ ‘rules of war’ have changed” and that “the role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown.” He addressed the uses of artificial intelligence and information in warfare: “The information space,” he wrote, “opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy.” Essentially,
The U.S. military budget, at $716 billion, is more than ten times that of Russia. The United States has 1.28 million active military personnel, as compared with Russia’s 1 million; has more than 13,000 total aircraft, as compared with Russia’s 4,000;
Moscow would never again be competitive with the United States in terms of “great powers” warfare, and Vladimir Putin knew it. So the Russians had to devise another way to regain the advantage—one that had nothing to do with the physical battlespace.
Americans on Facebook did the Russians’ work for them, laundering their propaganda through the First Amendment.
Because the objective of this hostile propaganda is not simply to interfere with our politics, or even to damage our companies. The objective is to tear apart our social fabric. They want us to hate one another. And that division can hit so much harder when these narratives contaminate the things we care about in our everyday lives—the clothes we wear, the sports we watch, the music we listen to, or the even coffee we drink.
Many of us forget that what we see in our newsfeeds and our search engines is already moderated by algorithms whose sole motivation is to select what will engage us, not inform us.
fake news is always free.
We are creating a future where our homes will think about us.
The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside. We risk creating a society obsessive about remembering, and we may have overlooked the value of forgetting, moving on, or being
...more
We cannot grow and change if we are shackled to who we once were or who we thought we were or how we once presented ourselves. If we exist in an environment that always watches, remembers, and labels us, according to conditions or values outside our control or awareness, then our data selves may shackle us
platforms are allowed to adopt dark pattern designs that deliberately mislead users into continual use and giving up more data. Tech
The politics of certainty repositions the notion of freedom, where freedoms from replace freedoms to.
This is because the Internet is a type of hyperobject—like our climate and biosphere, the
Internet surrounds us and we live within it.
But data crimes are crimes that usually don’t happen in one specific place. Data crime can often behave like pollution—it’s everywhere generally, but nowhere specifically. Data is completely fungible and intangible, as it is
merely a representation of information.
You’d think that after pulling off a conspiracy to hack a world leader’s private emails and medical records, bribe ministers, blackmail targets, and shower voters with menacing videos of gruesome murders and threats, there would be some kind of legal consequence. But there were no consequences for anyone involved in Cambridge Analytica’s African projects.
company knowingly and willfully violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It conducted operations to suppress African American voters. It defrauded Facebook users and menaced them with disgusting content. It exposed hundreds of millions of private records of American citizens to hostile foreign states. And yet nothing happened, because Cambridge Analytica was set up for jurisdictional arbitrage. Tax evasion frequently involves setting up shell companies on tropical islands all around the world in an attempt to launder money through a complex enough chain of countries and companies, each
...more
Facebook refused to hand over the full details of what happened on its platform during Brexit or the number or types of voters who were profiled and targeted by illegal campaigns.
it was Clegg who had once vowed that he would go to prison before registering in a pilot national identity database. But he was also the guy whose tenure as deputy prime minister became in effect a five-year apology tour after he broke a host of key promises in the coalition government. And the more I thought about it, the more the pairing seemed to be a match made in heaven. Both Zuckerberg and Clegg had built their careers on compromising their principles, both suffered catastrophic blows of public confidence after they ignored their promises to users or voters, and both stopped being cool
...more
