Cambridge Analytica boss caught on camera offering to hire sex workers and offer bribes to compromise politicians.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed: 

The boss of Cambridge Analytica, the analytics firm at the centre of an international storm over the misuse of Facebook user data, has been caught on camera bragging about how the company could blackmail political candidates with sex workers, and telling a prospective client that it has been secretly operating around the world to campaign in elections. 

In an undercover operation by Britain's Channel 4 News, CEO Alexander Nix and two other high-ranking Cambridge Analytica staff took meetings with a reporter posing as a fixer who wanted the data firm's help getting candidates elected in Sri Lanka. 

On Monday evening, Channel 4 broadcast undercover footage from four meetings across three months, with Nix telling the reporter that one of the services of Cambridge Analytica could be to “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”. 

Nix also told the undercover reporter: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded. We’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet.”

Representatives of the company also offered to spread fake news about political opponents in order to help sway the elections.

Well gee, no wonder the Trump campaign wanted to work with these guys, they were singing the same tune.

This is what the whistle blower who outed the company's Facebook data mining operation said about this video:   

Wiley couldn’t speak as to how this relates to the firm’s work for the Trump campaign, but he went on to say “there is a perverse company culture inside of Cambridge Analytica, and as the undercover shows, they’re willing to go to extreme lengths to service their clients, and they’ll do anything that helps, whether it’s legal or not.”

Do we really believe that the Trump campaign did not utilize that skills set?

We also learned yesterday that before they started using their possibly illegal tactics to help Donald Trump, that Cambridge Analytica worked for Ted Cruz.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Before they ran shady data operations for Donald Trump’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during his presidential bid. Now, the Texas Republican is under fire for hiring the group amid reports that they improperly used Facebook data. 

The Dallas Morning News reported Monday that the Cruz campaign kept Cambridge Analytica on retainer six months after initial reports of the firm using illicitly-sourced Facebook data surfaced in 2015 — a fact the Texas Democratic Party touted in a news release published on Monday. 

“Ted Cruz will stop at nothing to weasel his way into power, even if it means weaponizing stolen information to manipulate people to like him,” Manny Garcia, the deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a press release. “Cruz’s campaign exploited personal information to create psychological profiles on millions of Americans. All to keep lining the pockets of Cruz’s billionaire super PAC donors — like Robert Mercer, who funded this propaganda machine.”

Color me unsurprised that Cruz would resort to tactics like this, nice to see that it might end up biting him in the ass and costing him this election.

Oh, one more thing.

I appears that Cambridge Anaylytica currently has a contract with our State Department: 

Strategic Communications Laboratories, best known for its work with its offshoot and collaborator Cambridge Analytica, appears to have an open contract with the State Department. DefenseOne first noted the contract on a government contracts database, where it is listed as still open.

Well, I ma going to have to take a really hot shower after this post to get the sleaze off.