Cambridge Analytica, who stands accused of stealing data from over 50 million Facebook users, is working overtime to stop media outlets from issuing reports revealing their tactics.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Cambridge Analytica is trying to prevent an undercover report by London’s Channel 4 News that shows the firm’s CEO Alexander Nix speaking candidly about the firm’s practices from airing, according to the Financial Times. 

Reporters for Channel 4 posed as prospective clients and secretly filmed a number of meetings with the firm. 

The Financial Times's report did not make clear how the data firm was working to stop the report from airing. 

Cambridge Analytica also threatened to sue the Guardian to stop this story about the guy who blew the whistle on their Facebook data theft from being published: 

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process. 

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. 

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says. 

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

Clearly that didn't work.

In another piece by the Guardian that I am sure Cambridge Analytica would like to make go away, we learn that the guy who orchestrated the data mining on Facebook has ties to Russia: 

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with – which funded the project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon – also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin. 

Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections. 

The revelations come at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, with 13 Russians criminally charged last month with interfering to help Donald Trump.

Man no matter what the story, it always links back to Russia in some way or another. 

By the way Robert Mueller has requested all emails between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, so this party is far from over.

Interesting that not only is the Trump White House all super double secret about what they are up to, but so is just about everybody who helped them to get there in the first place.