A week ago an interesting story surfaced briefly in the news about how the developing Republican presidential candidate bids by Nikki Haley and others had been attacked over the past eleven months by possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of false automated personas, referred to in the trade as “bots,” on Twitter and other…
When WhatsApp sold its giant messaging platform to Facebook for $22 billion, “I sold my users’ privacy,” one of the company’s co-founders said. WhatsApp founder Mike Acton has opened up about some of the moral struggles he has faced since selling the encrypted messaging app to Facebook, a company that makes money by collecting information on its users and selling that…
Those US and British politicians who are bashing Russia for foreign “election meddling” could use a more honest set of talking points. It is Israel, not Russia, China, or North Korea, that hosts a blossoming industry of cyber-election meddlers who operate from corporate offices in Tel Aviv, Cyprus, London, Washington, and Tortola. Most, if not…
Leaked documents show that Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of the notorious Cambridge Analytica, carried out a surveillance operation embedded among local Yemeni populations in 2009. The research and psychological tactics of deception were likely later used against populations around the world including Libya, Syria, and Iran where SCL Group carried out various operations…
Social media users are essentially left with three choices following the revelations that their Facebook data was being manipulated for political purposes, with each of them having their own pros and cons but none of them embodying the “perfect solution”. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has led to an outpouring of fury from most Facebook users…
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Israeli intelligence-surveillance-military complex – perhaps, in a dozen or more highly-secured computer systems laboratories in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat Gan, and Petach Tikva – the idea was first stumbled upon. Borrowing from the psychographic tools developed by online marketing firms and coupling them with age-old propaganda methods and…
