Cambridge Analytica and the Elections Industry
“Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights.”    -  Jeff Greenfield
We have been taught that the right to vote is sacred.
It is a right for which many have fought and died. The stories of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, of the Civil Rights Movement in the US have etched in our minds images of this bold self-sacrificing struggle for this precious right.
In our own country, this right was only available to propertied people who had a command of the English language up to 1946 when universal adult suffrage was a benefit of the anti-colonial struggle which erupted with the Butler Riots of 1937. Before that ex-slaves who were property less and ex-indentures who held on to their Bhojpuri language were denied that right simply because of their condition.
It has also been drummed into our consciousness that one man, one vote and the vote for elected representatives are hallmarks of democratic systems defined as the essence of freedom.
We are even told that to vote is our civic duty and those who do not are ridiculed or voting for ‘the other side’.
Over the years our vote has, however, become a commodity to be demanded by and sold to the highest bidder by the captains of a new (but actually not New) industry - the Elections Industry.
The Elections Industrialists
Since the Cold War and the imposition of the ‘New World Order’, the Anglo-American axis has defined societies as “democratic” once they operate the 2-party system in which the majority of the body politic are converted into election fodder for 2 parties which represent the same socio-economic interest – the monied and propertied oligarchy.
Our right to vote is reduced to a ritual of the ‘electoral cycle’. Once every so many years we are told our duty is to vote one or other party into office. Regardless of how badly they neglect our needs to ensure the interests of the real power behind the throne – the parasitic oligarchy as it was fashionable to call them in the 90’s – we are told “Just wait till the next election.
Three minutes in the voting booth is what our right to vote has been reduced to.
Without the right to select candidates; without the Right of Recall; without the Right to propose legislation; without the right to participate in decision-making on all matters that affect our lives, we, the electors, the voters are reduced to voting machines to be corralled in support of the elected over whom we exercise no control.
Our right to vote is commodified and competed for by a select group of ‘professional politicians’ and the Elections Industrialists have created elaborate Elections Industry whose operations is the capturing of the ‘vote’ for the caricatures that political parties have become.
On a world scale, this Elections Industry includes all kinds of corporations that are really mercenaries specializing in public relations campaigns to manipulate opinion and votes in favour of this or that electoral party.
The Elections Industrialists include Public Relations firms, consultants, elections strategists, pollsters, psychological profilers, hi-tech data-mining outfits – all engaged micro-targeting voters on behalf of political parties and their backers.
The Cambridge Analytica- Strategic Communication Laboratories-AggregateIQ (CA-SCL-AIQ) data mining web of companies is the latest form of these Elections Industry players.
Christopher Wylie, the celebrated whistleblower helped set up Cambridge Analytica and describes himself as a ‘data scientist’. He also encouraged his friend, Jeffrey Silvester to create AggregateIQ to get piece of the SCL-CA action in Canada.
While SCL, the parent company, boasts about their activities in elections from Brexit to the Trump campaign, in Nigeria, St. Kitts-Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago and up to 200 elections worldwide.
Wylie also said that SCL does “psychological warfare work for NATO”.
The Elections Industry is Not New
This Elections Industry in not new. CA-SCL-AIQ are its latest incarnations and data-mining from Facebook using innocent-sounding apps like “thisisyourdigitallife” obtain information from voters claiming to be doing social research.
What they do not tell unsuspecting citizens is that their data will be used for electoral or political purposes. When it is not outright theft of information, it is obtained by deception.
The Cambridge Analytica data app was not the first of its kind.
In 2007, the Psychometric Centre at Cambridge University created an app called “myPersonality” which they described as “an improved method to reach large samples of people for social research purposes”.
CA also captured data otherwise building profiles of millions of Facebook users as the Facebook founder admitted just recently to be many times more than Wylie first suggested.
The use of these apps by CA is a step up from the old methods of telephone surveys and direct polling of electors in various constituencies or polling divisions in the different countries
Advertising companies, messaging services and other entities are partners with CA-SCL-AIQ in the voter manipulation exercises and other work for state agencies like the US military and even international agencies.
There are also various commercial companies who are data-brokers offering data on citizens (voters) in various countries. They obtain data from everything from telephone directories to geo-demographic data and even lists of party contributors available where party financing law requires the establishment of such records.
They do all of this for huge amounts of money.
Wylie’s claim of a US$200,000 contract with a TT political party or even with the Government or a Ministry here is a drop in the bucket of the earnings of the corporations operating globally in the Elections Industry.
The Elections Industry in TT
The Elections Industry is at work in Trinidad and Tobago and has been for some time.
In 1981, it can be recalled that the ONR campaign saw the open presence of glitzy PR firms from the US in our elections.
Since then all kinds of consultants, advisers, public relations and campaign ‘experts’ have been increasingly involved in the campaigns of various political parties in general and local government elections.
TT politicians and activists are also engaged in other Caribbean elections as consultants and strategists.
Micro-targeting at different levels of sophistication with titles like VIM etc. are used to try and psychologically steer voters to give their vote to one or other party or their candidates in elections.
While the Cambridge Analytical scandal has become a new opportunity for politicians to point fingers and make accusations against each other, the body politic must not lose sight of the fact that our electoral and political processes have become a new source of profit for the Elections Industrialists.
Our sacred right to vote is cheapened by the operations of these vote merchants and the political parties who are their clients.
This is not merely a matter of the capturing of our information without informed consent or a violation of our privacy rights or about jailing some politician or politicians for involvement in that violation.
It is about the manipulation of our vote and of our electoral processes which is not in the service or interest of the majority of the electors, the majority of the body politic.
We must not lose sight of the forest for the trees. We must refuse to be distracted from the fundamental issues.

Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democratic Renewal
of our Society
5 April 2018

cHalf a Century Later:
50th Anniversary of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, April 4 1968 at 6:01 p.m. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, USA.
It is significant that King, the leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the US was killed while visiting that city to support an action of sanitation workers who marched with the slogan “I Am a Man”.
Tonight, the final two parts of a commemorative film titled “Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise” by Henry Louis Gates aired on US Public Broadcasting Television.
This mini-series traces 50 years of history from the date of King’s assassination, more it traces 50 years of the Civil Rights Movement.
To view historical developments in such a compact timeframe of four hours helps put several developments, which took 5 decades in real time, into perspective.
For one, the context of King’s own developing view of the issues of racism and segregation in the US was further clarified. At the time he was shot, and perhaps the reason he was eliminated, he had started linking racism with the economic and class structure of the American social order.
He had begun the demand for housing and other economic rights and went to support the workers’ struggle. He had already denounced the war in Vietnam. His going deeper beyond the surface of the causes of and the necessity for change to eliminate racism alarmed the guardians of the status quo. So, he had to go.
This film (made in 2016) also traces the ebb and flow of the struggle for full rights for Black Americans and recognition as part of the entire body politic.
It puts into perspective the victory of the fight for the right to vote, the rise of Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther Movement, Malcom X and others who were also targets of the FBI and other elements of the police power protecting the status quo.
In uncanny similarity with developments in and after 1970, the introduction of the drug culture and drug trade, the destruction of family and social life accompanying the mass incarceration of the poor black youth, the violent crime and police profiling and assault on this segment of the population are all features of the last half century.
Following Obama’s election in 2008, there was so much talk and so much hope that change had come to America in a “post-racial” era.
From the first days, the backlash began culminating in the election of the next US President with the full support of the most despicable elements like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi storm troopers of the rising fascism.
Despite the setbacks, the twists and turns, the film also revealed the persistence of the struggle against racism, inequality and oppression in new and modern forms as part of the struggle for freedom and for the Rights of All.
The struggle which Malcom X and King began to see in terms of the need to eliminate the root causes and move beyond the status quo continues. Those who attempt to maintain the status quo shall not succeed.
Those who fight for the New for Real Change and the creation of a new society that puts power in the hands of the majority and guarantees the rights of all Shall succeed.
The more the forces of the Old try to suppress, the more the forces for the New Shall Rise.
 
Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democractic Renewal
Of Our Society.
4 April 2018

Cambridge Analytica Scandal:
The TT Connection
                                         “No.1 stole the cookie from the cookie jar
                                          Who Me? Not me?
                                          Couldn’t be. Then Who?”
Childhood games and rhymes provide us with an innocence and mellowness that reality can never do.
A rush of statements over the Easter weekend, when the Christian world celebrated resurrection, took on a tinge of déjà vu, calling to mind the old Who Stole the Cookie hand-clapping game.
Though it began earlier, things got intense once the learned AG read a statement in Parliament expressing the concerns of the Government over “revelations” made by a whistleblowing initial designer of the Cambridge Analytica-Strategic Communication Laboratories-AggregateIQ (CA-SCL-AIQ) data mining capability of this web of companies.
According to whistle-blower Christopher Wylie (AIQ), the Canadian part of the CA web, worked on a project in T&T for a former Minister of National Security, the Ministry and Government and one political party, which involved attempting to harvest the data of this country’s population.
Documents released by him to the Canadian Government also allege that SCL-AIQ worked with another political party in 2010 and 2013 under contracts one of which involved a $200,000US payment to SCL or AIQ or CA.
On Monday 26 March (even before the AG’s announcement of an investigation to ‘protect citizens Constitutional right to private life) the UNC Leader mounted her party Forum platform to declare that “neither the party nor the previous administration had any dealings, engagements or contracts with Cambridge Analytica before 2010, post 2010, before 2015 or post 2015.”.
Who We, Not We…Couldn’t be …Then Who? The game was on (with much hand clapping to booth.
Well, Then Who? Became – Ask the COP.
Then the AG eagerly embraced the “fundamental right…to private life”, the same right he announced ‘did not exist’ when he piloted legislation that would allow the state to intercept the communications of citizens in the SSA Amendment Bill.
Championing this newly discovered right and alleging data mining allegedly breaching TT law, the AG announced Government’s investigation on 25 March.
Then, a whole posse of players joined the ‘Who Stole the Cookie’ game.
Like the proverbial series of dominoes, a flurry of media releases and conferences as well as official statements took us right into Easter celebrations.
One former National Security Minister declared – Not Me…Couldn’t be.
One former member-party of the PP coalition declared – Not We…Couldn’t be…and ‘requested’ the Integrity Commission to investigate the PP and a bunch of Ministries for alleged data mining, “violation of social media users’ privacy and ‘whether any public funds were used.
The Integrity Commission was also ‘requested’ to investigate if the alleged illegally obtained information was used by any political party.
Well, the Integrity Commission which does nothing about holders of public office who have failed to submit compulsory annual statements of their assets except to ‘name and shame’ by publishing a newspaper pull-out, is suddenly deemed to have powers to investigate political parties.
As my bajan cousins would say …Wuhloss! Powers you know they don’t have, you somehow want us to believe they do.
But, we digress.
Another former member party of the PP coalition which the whistleblower alleges SCL-AQ worked for in 2010 and 2013, not wanting to be left out of the game, declares – Not We...Couldn’t be…Then Who?
Not we and that transatlantic CA-SCL-AQ web. But, just in case is some ah we, they were on a ‘frolic of their own’.
A new feature injected into the Who Stole the Cookie game was the generous use of the new line – Distraction, Distraction!
So, on the one hand, we have a new love for the fundamental right of citizens to privacy and possible new roundtable alliances in its defense.
And, on the other we have the ‘it couldn’t be me/we’ and ‘distraction’ lyrical lines inserted into our old childhood game.
At the end of all the plausible denials, allegations abound and an investigation to protect our ‘fundamental privacy right’ and the misuse of private information for political purposes is underway by a Government formed by a party.
That party-in-power, which sends ‘foot-soldiers’ to our homes to find out if we voting for Dem every election; who seek to determine our private information as to whom we will cast our vote for, miraculously now wants us to believe that they are defending us against the use of private information for political purposes. Really?!
At the same time, the very Government has no problem with all kinds of transnational companies mining our data when we access their websites using ‘cookies’ (of all things) and other devices for commercial purposes.
Data mining to make profit is ok. Data mining for political purposes is bad.
This contradiction and other issues behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we, as part of the body politic in TT, we the citizens whose right to privacy is being abused daily by the international conglomerates, we must carefully study, analyse and get to the heart of what is the Real Issue.

Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democratic Renewal
of our Society
April 3, 2018