Quote:
Originally Posted by
BCR
Question for you. The main issue with CA is the nexus of Trump and Russia and right-wing paramilitary orgs. I’ve heard you many times mention the impressive skill set of Russian hackers. If we assume Trump was in bed with Putin which seems obvious, what did CA provide that Russia couldn’t have achieved on their own given Facebook’s lax security? I don’t know if that question makes sense, but it seems to me what they most did was provide cover and insight. Like an English company wanting information for “research purposes” would make Facebook feel way more comfortable than some Russian connected company. Also sometimes Russia seems to lack a fundamental understanding of the American psyche. Is CA most culpable because of said cover and teaching Russians how to think and implement the data, or for the technical ability to harvest it, which seems like something they’d already possess.
The relationship between CA and FSB is poorly defined as of yet but the shapes of the missing pieces of the puzzle are ominous.
Mueller is focusing on it:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...-and-cambridge
We already have Flynn/Manafort's forensic fingers in the Lukoil/FSB pie but it would be typically Russian to manufacture those circumstances just to create more turmoil. But just the fact that Flynn/Manafort got so very, very rich behind all this lends itself strongly to the theory that they were in fact engaged in some quid pro quo relationship with thinly veiled FSB resources, and that the ingredients in that soup include most if not everything on this list:
CA technology, CA product, DNC emails, Lukoil stock, and money laundering through TrumpOrg.
Russian APT crews likely had no role in the CA / trollfarm parts of this story, beyond providing the hacked DNC emails and other kompromat(everything you see at Wikileaks basically) to the FSB. Using them for the active measures agitprop portion of the show would be like trying to change a tire with a scalpel, it's needlessly risky. Their product would be passed back to the FSB agitprop teams and fed into the weaponized social media resources along with other conspiracy theories and sundry Christian fundamentalist/protectionist/nationalist memes. All of that would be coordinated by a central FSB team, providing top-down support/direction/resources to the Russian trollfarms.
Remember that none of this was caused by lax security at Facebook. Security had nothing to do with any of this; security is the application of specific controls to bolster what we call the CIA (no relation) triad;
Confidentiality
Integrity of data
Availability of data
(lately there is a push to move to CIAA which includes 'audit' fwiw).
Facebook's security protocols never failed their pre-ordained definition. They actually caught the lateral scraping but never flagged it as potential abuse after being told it was part of some educational program iirc. Poor training, poor judgement, a lack of awareness, but not a failure of security.
Whats more, the crown jewels wasnt the scraped data at all. The crown jewels were the real time behavior of the people being targetted with memeware(tm). That was where the AI was able to take things to the next level. And the current narrative is that CA gave the FSB(Lukoil) a powerpoint on how to harvest their baseline profile data (perfectly legally) using their own lolgames and lolquizzes and even explained to them how their AI used supervised training on the fly to engage Dumbshit, USA most effectively.
Which is a very curious thing for CA to do, btw.
Regardless, at that point, the FSB had what they needed to roll out their own CA.
But the thing thats making everyone back away slowly from everyone involved in TrumpOrg/CA/Lukoil/etc is that there is an absolute note for note correlation between FSB pushed troll content and the words that came out of Trump's mouth.
Meaning: Trump/Don Jr/Flynn/Manafort/FSB were orchestrating their propaganda with each other.
Further more, having access to the CA product would have turbocharged the training and sophistication of the FSB trollfarm targetted agitprop platform. To the point where it could be a make or break decision for TrumpOrg to facilitate that knowledge transfer.
And after all; in for a penny, in for a pound. And as we can clearly see, TrumpOrg has been 'in for a penny' with Russian moneylaundering for decades. The names and faces proposing 'an arrangement' between TrumpOrg and Trollfarm.ru
would all be friendly and familiar.
My point being that there was no need to unleash the Russian APT teams when they can get the same data for the cost of getting Manafort's dick wet on a private yacht in the Caspian,
and then get paid by TrumpOrg for their agitprop campaign on top of it.