Slashdot Mirror
Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Says Data From 87 Million Users Could Be Stored In Russia (cnn.com)
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from CNN: Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says the data the firm gathered from Facebook could have come from more than 87 million users and could be stored in Russia. Wylie added that his lawyer has been contacted by U.S. authorities, including congressional investigators and the Department of Justice, and says he plans to cooperate with them. Aleksander Kogan, a Russian data scientist who gave lectures at St. Petersburg State University, gathered Facebook data from millions of Americans. He then sold it to Cambridge Analytica, which worked with President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. "I know that Facebook is now starting to take steps to rectify that and start to find out who had access to it and where it could have gone, but ultimately it's not watertight to say that, you know, we can ensure that all the data is gone forever," he said.
Maybe you should post stuff when you have actual information rather than bare speculation?
All Russia all the time!
It's red scare time. Witch hunts always find someone in league with Russia these days. We need shadowy villains and conspiracy stories. Reality doesn't have the same appeal.
Even worse, it could be stored in America.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
...had to exploit the system that Facebook created to get data. Ok. When are people going to get pissed that Facebook has willingly been sharing much more extensive data with Democrats for years? These crocodile tears are getting really old.
I've never created a Facebook account but Facebook created one for me and leaked out all my personal info to the World?
How dare them.
lets not forget the 500k speaking fee at about same time from a Kremlin connected bank which was 2x more then normal fee?
Hillary didn't bother retrieving it. It was stored in Wisconsin.
The Russians already have the data from the RNC and DNC so why not Facebook as well?
Oh no, the data might even be stored in (gasp) Russia!
Russia would be a safer place than the usual store of data, which seem to be publicly accessible S3 buckets.
Its probably being tormented by now :(
[($)]
Analysis of a Recent Facebook company announcement:
Buried in a company announcement was acknowledgement that nearly all of its users have been targeted to some degree.
That makes about 2 billion users whose privacy was leaked.
Also, Facebook was trying to collect patient data from hospitals:
The idea was to build profiles of people that included their medical conditions, information that health systems have, as well as social and economic factors gleaned from Facebook.
Also also, Diamond and Silk (two pro-Trump bloggers from the election cycle) were deemed unsafe for the community by facebook. Their followers no longer receive a notice when they make a new post.
From Facebook:
"This decision is final and it is not appeal-able in any way." (Note: This is the exact wording that FB emailed to [Diamond and Silk].)
Although unproven — indeed, unprovable, because there is no such crime — the "collusion" allegations must be repeated on the daily basis until they become accepted by the mainstream. To the point, where the low information voter just says: "Well, everyone knows it — just google it or something".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, we let any random company or individual collect "data about your friends", which amplifies a data siphoning campaign by 200x or something, and then we complain that it worked as intended?
Why have that feature in the first place?
(It's as if you watched porn on a Google phone, and it uploaded all your contacts info to the porn site. Wait, it doesn't sound far off either.)
Lately whenever Slashdot posts a story that shows Russia in a bad light, Slashdot starts having trouble with its nginx gateway.
#DeleteChrome
Here's Maxine Waters bragging about the database this world has never seen before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIA1lQBqH1s
There is now more than one copy of said data, and nobody knows exactly how many copies or who has them.
If piracy is about something that can't be "stolen" then I'd say all the personal information is right were it still is, and just like piracy no harm will come from others having it.
"0 matching rows found."
Ezekiel 23:20
We don't have any proof or evidence of anything so we're just going to throw any hypothetical Russian connection we can against the wall.
N/T
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Its probably being tormented by now :(
Well, at the very least it's annoyed about being pulled back and forth around the globe.
The Russian trolls and their alt right dupes are here in droves. Hi comrades!
The data COULD also be stored in North Korea. Or on a laptop in someone's basement. Or in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It's not going to go out of date or at least not quickly because people don't just wake up one day and totally change who they are. For an intelligence agency, especially a foreign one, this data is like solid gold. The possibilities for future targeted disinformation campaigns, recruitment or blackmail are almost without end. We haven't heard the last of this Facebook personality profile data. It will be used again for nefarious purposes.
So FaceBook collaborated with the Russians. From the summary:
;-)
"Aleksander Kogan, a Russian data scientist who gave lectures at St. Petersburg State University, gathered Facebook data from millions of Americans."
I know the Fox News lawyer said collusion isn't a crime. It is. It's acting as a unregistered foreign agent, the crime facing Manasfort, and Collusion to the crimes they commit. i.e. if he colluded with the hacking, he's guilty of the hacking.
And while you might want to go lah lah lah and pretend there is no problem with a candidate conspiring with Russia to seize power over the USA, even spelling out what he did makes it indefensible.
Fox News may sell out the US, but how many of their viewers would sell out the US? How many of their sponsors?
If the NRA funnelled money to Trump from Russia, likewise that's a crime too. Election finance rules prevent candidates from receiving foreign money. NRA insists it has two separate funds, and only pays political donations from the legal fund, but that just confirms the foreign money they receive, or there would be no 'other' fund. To receive money in one fund and pay it from another is laundering money. A crime.
Likewise the shell company property purchases, after he got the nomination a load of shell companies bought up his properties, going from 4% of sales to 70% of sales. Again money laundering of campaign finances is a crime.
Cohen supposidly paid the porn star from a mortgage. This is bullshit, no lawyer takes out a mortgage to pay off his clients hush money. However there is a money laundering technique where a sock puppet takes out a loan, and receives smaller payments mixed in with other payment to repay the loan with profit. Do you think the FBI don't know how that works?
"Low information voter".... yet the mainstream press is providing the micro details of what he did and how he did it. Only Fox tries to shut down the information.
Although unproven --; indeed, unprovable, ...
What is so unprovable? Either FaceBook gave the Russians access to the US data or they did not. FaceBook / Russia collusion seems evident given the summary ;-)
Shadowy villains and conspiracy stories? People have already been charged and have PLEADED GUILTY.
You're right I'm sure we're all imagining it
Yes, because a plea bargain could never indicate a victim of coercion, only a guilty person ever takes a plea. Its never about the cost and uncertainty of a trial; the uncertainty of the entire government against what you can afford in terms of legal representation and investigation/discovery.
Your data profile shows you buy the cheapest toilet paper. That's fine, but with your bouts of diarrhea we can conclude you smear your fingers with shit on a regular basis.
I've never created a Facebook account but Facebook created one for me and leaked out all my personal info to the World?
That's what you get for using gmail, Google had all that data and sold it to Facebook so they could create your account. ;-)
... at the current diplomatic climate, none of that data could hurt me. The far bigger problem is that that data is likely also stored at Facebook servers where administrations that could actually hurt me, can access it.
"I know that Facebook is now starting to take steps to rectify that [...]"
I think the only way for facebook to "rectify that" is self-immolation.
On political pages I'm kinda used to it. You just filter them out with the rest of the retards.
What really bugs me is that they have started pushing "Russia stronk!"-memes on 9gag.
It is tiresome enough to scroll by the usual crap but having to scroll through bullshit about how every territory Russia occupied have become so much better and gifs about how great Russia was during WW2 is just a bit much.
And there's the other trick, "the other guy did it worse", or "they're all at it, so why punish [my guy]". An attempt to lessen the perceive importance of a crime by pretending its common and accepted.
When Russia kills opposing *American* politicians in the USA, and Trump Mk II is saying "Russia if you're listening, here a list of politicians who should be killed".... I'm sure we'll see the same thing from Fox News, "the other guy wanted more killed", "colluding to murder politicians with Putin is not a crime and if it is, there was no colluding".
None of this is legal defense, and Trump's real (not that ridiculous Fox news TV lawyer) are smart enough to get him to keep his mouth shut. The seriousness of this crime they're totally aware of.
Oh, and BTW, John Bolton's payment for that "pro Russian gun rights" video he gave to that fake 'pro-gun' Russian organisation, it should have been declared as foreign lobby money too and wasn't.
That's one of the charges Manasfort faces, and Flynn took a plea bargain too.
I also bet the NRA didn't actually put the Russian sourced funds into a separate fund with a separate account. They'll have one pool of money, and when Mueller started sniffing around it, only then they did the claim that there's two separate pools of money and Trump was paid from the legal (US sourced) one. I bet there's one bank account, and NRA lawyers dreamed up that response.
I didn't find any indiciation of two funds prior to the investigation.
I also bet the NRA is riddled with patriotic whistleblowers, ready to undermine the fake paper trail, so if they claim a paper trail proves the funds were notionally separated, even if physically not separated.... I bet its trivial to prove as fraudulant.
If Trump's name didn't somehow get attached to this story, the Cambridge Analytica whistle blower would have been only a small blip on the landscape of the news media.
Attach Trump or Putin name to any story, however dry or souped up it may be, and the media will immediately pick and run with it.
Where are all of these 'meddling' Facebook posts? Why isn't the media showing us them? Perhaps because they're lying?
The real problem here is morons on facebook taking quizzes to see what type of pizza or what species of cat they are and they grant some Cambridge sub-brand has access to their entire life's history. I blame the people first.
Aleksander Kogan, a Russian data scientist who gave lectures at St. Petersburg State University
They are making it sound like he is a Russian data scientist because he gave a few lectures at St. Petersburg State University.
His parents moved to the United States when he was seven. He's obviously a citizen of the US and therefore an American data scientist.
How much do the elitists pay for your cuteness ?
Yeah, we know we are supposed to hate our Russian brothers and like the nice chaps from Riad. Those who sponsor terror on a worldwide basis.
CNN, BBC, NYTIMES told us, so it is binding.
And it only matters because it can be somehow linked to "Drumpf" and "Russians". Otherwise it would be fully O.K.
AIPAC, Riad, IRA - they can all operate in America, no problem.
If you are an asset of the Deep State, corruption is all OK. You can also receive bribes from Israel and Riad, no pro.
But don't you dare to question their perpetual wars and the profits from that. Then they will dig up something which remotely matches a crime.
That is what is going on.
Hillary is really healthy and will live until she is 150 and her electronics fail.
His parents moved to the United States when he was seven. He's obviously a citizen of the US and therefore an American data scientist.
*turns on TV* "Breaking news. New evidence of Russian spies infiltrating America and walking among us. Story at 11".
What's the evidence that this is a witch hunt? Is it just because Trump and his buds are calling it one? Because I've that's the standard I've got some bad news for you, Nixon thought it was a witch hunt against him, and no, that wasn't, and he had to quit before he got fired.
The Red Scare with McCarthy had major congressional force backing it, and congress seems to be asleep at the switch this time around, and sometimes running interference for Trump particularly through the actions of Rep. Nunes, as opposed to focusing on measures to secure electoral and other infrastructure. If you are going to invoke McCarthyism, you are going to want to show how it is a relevant comparison deeper than the pure surface similarity of being freaked out by the Russians.
You think Mueller's running a witch hunt? Because the work he's shown so far with the guilty pleas and indictments suggests otherwise. I know we've always been at war with Eastasia, but Mueller is a Republican, and was W Bush's pick to run the FBI, and was almost unanimously granted an extension to his 10 year term in Obama's first term. His background doesn't suggest him being any sort of political inquisitor.
I'm sorry, but from the other side of the fence these accusations of "witch hunt" really sound like cries of deflection and denial, there's an obvious amount of dirt in public view and the usual suspects want nothing more than to sweep it under the rug. Personally, I think a lot of these guys are guilty as hell, but ultimately I want the truth to come out and let the chips fall where they may. When you got guys like Hannity running interference for obvious crooks like Paul Manafort, who would be a total crook due to his work in Ukraine and for other dictators even if he had never met Trump, that's pretty clear indication that the truth and honest enforcement of the law is not the desired end from that side.
I find it hilarious that Democrats started hating Russians approximately the moment they stopped being communist.
Where does the data come from? Facebook. This is like bringing a phone book from the US to Russia and tell them the data comes from Russia.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
For all the noise Hannity makes, they reach about 1% of the Americans. When Fox put the lawyer on pretending that 'collusion isn't a crime and if it is, there is no collusion....' that was addressed to 1% of Americans. Their audience.
Addressing 5% of Americans is to address 5 times the audience of Hannity.
Revenues for Fox News are tiny, their sports channel revenues are what makes the big money, and Fox News shows like Hannity, is what drives away those advertisers. Do you really want to sell Pizza on the channel that pretends basements of Pizza restaurants are used to sell children for sex? Welcome to the Hannity show on Fox.
Better than it being stored in the USA? What can Russia do to hurt you?
The data is probably way out of date and mostly useless after 1 year.
2x more then normal fee
In this case, "then" and "than" get you to the same meaning, but it's probably not what you intended. "2x more then" means you got twice then usual payment, followed by the "normal fee," for a total of 3x normal fee. "2x more than" means you're paid 2x more than normal. Which, again, is 3x normal. What you probably means was "twice the normal fee."
It could be stored up a unicorn's butt. Qualifier words (could be, as much as, up to) are the cowards way of lying without lying.
Go back to Russia, troll.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How is it that we have a senior editor of a site like Slashdot, the guy who gets to exercise editorial control over what is posted, a guy who I doubt could have gotten himself into the monastery (alt.sysadmin.recovery) if his life depended on it, who posts crap like that that gets modded down to invisible troll levels and who is completely unashamed in his bullshit and bias?
Seriously.
Check your premises.
No, he took a number of research grants from St. Petersburg University too, and the University money in turn came from the Russian government.
That's not a problem in itself, but for some reason he seemed shy about telling anyone - his colleagues were unaware he'd ever worked with St Petersburg University, and he made absolutely no mention of grants he'd received and work he'd done on his CV and bio, even though he touted all UK and US experience before and after. That's really fucking weird, because life as an academic isn't easy, and you list every single grant you've ever successfully tended for, especially at universities that have been repeat customers, because it breeds confidence for other universities that you're a safe bet for grant funding. Academics aren't known for being untrusting of foreign universities in the way politicians are, in fact, academic links are usually the one thing that survive even the most fraught relationships which is why the British Museum still lends collections to St Petersburg's museum.
The fact he hid funding he'd received indirectly from the Russian government via St. Petersburg University as grants is really, really, fucking weird. St. Petersburg is a fairly prestigious institution, and no academic in their would hide successful grants and experience at such a university under normal circumstances. He clearly had reason to hide the fact he'd taken money from Russia, given what he was doing - meddling in US and UK elections using illegally harvested data, why do you think that might be?
Imagine they have a copy, too !
you misspelled fatshits
Oh.
Wait.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm laughing at all of you who stored your entire lives on Facebook, and now are pwned by these 'companies', and by Putin. Between this and the Equifax breach, your lives are about as safe and private as a convict in prison or an animal in a zoo, and it doesn't look like there's any recovery from it for you. Sad, sad, sad.
I thought it was in a cloud
""I know that Facebook is now starting to take steps to rectify that and start to find out who had access to it and where it could have gone, but ultimately it's not watertight to say that, you know, we can ensure that all the data is gone forever," he said."
Um no, that data is not "gone forever", quite the opposite, that data will now never go away.
It amuses me when on Slashdot, a site for nerds, there is an article whining about our 'data'. What the fuck is our data and why would I care? My name? That I liked a cat picture or told a relative happy birthday? God shut up about Facebook already who gives a fuck.
Other interviews clearly indicate that he is speculating as with almost all of what he said.
Someone began this thread with a conspiracy theory re:Trump having a tie to the Russians through this. The craziness of that is phenomenal.
This is pretty simple. Russia is a big country. There is going to be a good number of people that live there that have the same notions about what they can do with data that others have done. In Russia there are large businesses. There are all sorts, just like in America. To assume that no one else could have done this is pure ignorance.
Obama had the data of virtually every American that used Facebook during his last administration. Maxine Waters pronounced this miraculous and even warned all others including Democrats that they'd have to contend with Obama's database. Another TED like event had a woman give a speech where she clearly said Obama had a database covering all Americans and stated a fear that this was bad as it could adversely affect elections and was particularly bad because the Republicans did not have it.
So now tell me what the fuck this guy is talking about? Russians have collected data on Americans through Facebook due to how Facebook does business? Tell me people in the US and other nations do not have data on people outside their nation.
This isn't a Trump issue. The trust of all Facebook users has been violated.
Don't let the media not the Facebook PR people fool you. Even if you did t have an account it doesn't mean that Facebook doesn't have a profile on you. If you hadn't heard, if you have friends and family with the Facebook app on their phone they collected info on you and created shadow profiles. If you read the leaked Facebook memo you'll read a reference to that ... Collecting contacts info... If you haven't actively been fighting for your privacy by using technology a d techniques to block the collection you need to be aware that Facebook has lots of info on you.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
it's the aliens that have the data.
Oh get her a fainting couch: those poor millionaires got caught lying to the FBI. And now they're the real victims here!
Actually the FBI agent who did the interview said he didn't think the interviewee was lying, just honestly mistaken. But such facts are irrelevant to an overzealous prosecutor.
As for "millionaires" what they can do to a millionaire they can even more easily do to the rest of us. Are you so dim that you fail to realized the poor to a large degree go to jail so much more often because they are coerced to plea?
That's in Moscow, right? And this firm certainly isn't owned by a wealthy "elite" UK based family, is it? It's pretty clear who's responsible for this.