Cambridge Analytica raided by UK data watchdog

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/24/cambridge-analytica-raided-by-uk-data-watchdog/

by doppp • 8 years ago

112 76 8 years ago

Too late...

alkonaut2• 8 years ago

Raiding has to come with a sufficient reason for those raided to believe the raiding party already has at least a portion of the material, either obtained through interception or inside sources.

The idea is that the people being raided will hand over as much as possible because it’s in their own best interest - knowing that anything they don’t produce may be in the material already obtained, making them liable for destroying it.

A late and preannounced raid without any material obtained beforehand is useless.

(It should be noted that there is no need to actually obtain any material if you can make the people raided believe you have some of the material)

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

The legal term for the phenomenon is "spoliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence

TomK32• 8 years ago

Didn't know that. Thank you.

pyjammas10• 8 years ago

How much of that relies on the raided party to have a desire to remain in business and to avoid criminal charges?

I can't help but feel that those individuals who really 'matter' in this situation have insulated themselves appropriately from CA as a corporate entity that whatever happens to CA specifically is just a minor inconvenience.

jonhendry18• 8 years ago

They may have deleted the data, but missed mentions of the data, or conversations that imply the use of such data, in internal emails, etc.

rsynnott2• 8 years ago

Ultimately, this is a company founded by Bannon, who’s nearly as good at hiring The Best People (TM) as Trump is (see Milo, for instance). These are not the world’s smartest people. Even if they did decide to indulge in a bit of illegal destruction of evidence, there is every chance they would fuck it up.

And destruction of evidence is probably not as common as people think in these cases; it’s a huge risk.

rdiddly3• 8 years ago

Ah, this completes the triad for me. I had previously heard FB deny responsibility and Kogan deny responsibility. Hadn't yet heard CA deny responsibility until now.

That's settled then. I guess nobody's at fault! Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

djhworld• 8 years ago

I was just reading this article about Kogan https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/24/cambridge-...

The article is a bit confusing for me, it suggests that Kogan initially went to the parent company of CA and asked for $500,000 for the data+modelling, and they refused?

It's not entirely clear, but at some point some money must have changed hands for the work, the thing that surprises me the most is even with figures like $500k being bandied about, is that the going rate for stuff like this these days?

jaclaz• 8 years ago

Thank you for the article, very interesting.

At first read I had the impression that Kogan was criticized on an "ethical" base, then re-reading it, I understood that they were only arguing on how to divide the loot.

If SCL actually had given 1 million, half to Kogan and 1/4 each to Kosinski and Stilwell, we wouldn't have the mails.

The correspondence reveals the deep anxiety among university psychologists over the activities of Kogan, ...

Deep anxiety over the activities my sock, they wanted US$ 500,000 and were proposed only US$ 100,000 instead, and there started the disagreement ...

gabipurcaru• 8 years ago

did Facebook deny responsibility?

Analemma_• 8 years ago

Facebook has sort of apologized, but their position has been that CA bamboozled them, not that this is an inherent outcome of their business model.

rsynnott2• 8 years ago

A strange sort of non-denial denial.

pjc506• 8 years ago

"The usual people tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all."

-- Douglas Adams

Consultant324522• 8 years ago

At fault for what exactly, Trump getting elected? I still don't understand what we know today that anyone sort of paying attention didn't expect a year ago, or even five years ago.

rdiddly3• 8 years ago

I was thinking about the mere leakage of the data itself, but you make a good point. I pretty quickly figured out the nature of Facebook years ago and deleted mine. But all the people coming out of the woodwork now to hate on Facebook all of a sudden, you have to assume 1) they accepted all the things about Facebook that we all knew, including the use or misuse of data, and 2) what made them finally object was Facebook's sudden supposed intrusion into the (supposed) democratic process (though Kogan said profiling and ad targeting was worse than useless[0]), and specifically the fact that Trump won and now they're mad and looking for someone/something to blame.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/facebook-...

adamnemecek3• 8 years ago

This is on the front page of reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/86qxrb/cambridge_anal...

I’m guessing it’s real the building does look like the CA HQ.

Symbiote• 8 years ago

I'm not sure why you would doubt it.

But anyway, the Guardian has an article too: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/judge-grants-se...

passivepinetree• 8 years ago

Skepticism is healthy.

adamnemecek3• 8 years ago

Thx I couldn’t find the article and it does look damning but reddit sometimes has a tendency to run with things so I prefer to be cautious.

maxerickson• 8 years ago

The reddit link speculates that CA removed evidence from the building before the warrant was served. The Guardian article you link doesn't say anything about that.

(it's a legit Reuters photo, visible in the results at https://www.reuters.com/search/pictures?blob=cambridge+analy... )

IAmEveryone4• 8 years ago

It'd be incredibly stupid for CA to have destroyed any evidence[0].

Privacy protections are, as far as I know, completely a matter of civil law. The worst that one would expect from the facts known so far is a high fine, bankrupting the company.

Buy CA is toast anyway: no politician or reputable brand will ever want to be associated with them.

Destroying evidence, however, can rather quickly result in criminal prosecution.

So this doesn't make much sense even for the owners of CA. It's even worse for employees: their risk was mostly limited to losing their job when the inevitable happens. Participating in obstruction of justice for the sake of job security is borderline insane. That's actually the #1 reason why I mostly doubt conspiracy theories in the private sector.

The only way to possibly way to square destruction of evidence with rational thinking is the possibility of CA having engaged in things worse than currently known. Maybe they actually engaged in honeytraps or killing Kennedy.

[0]: Which doesn't mean it's not possible. They don't have the best track record as far as not-being-stupid goes.

adamnemecek3• 8 years ago

Destroying evidence, however, can rather quickly result in criminal prosecution.

I disagree with all your points. This would imply that no one has ever destroyed evidence. You are also implying they are acting rationally. You are also projecting US laws onto the U.K.

The only way to possibly way to square destruction of evidence with rational thinking is the possibility of CA having engaged in things worse than currently known.

Why are you assuming that this is unlikely rather than most likely?

ATsch• 8 years ago

Buy CA is toast anyway: no politician or reputable brand will ever want to be associated with them.

That doesn't really matter, I think. AFAICT, CA was merely a shell company and figurehead for SCL Group. I think what will just happen is SCL will found another shell company and keep on going as usual.

asddddd• 8 years ago

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5521893/Warrant-soug...

Best source from reverse image search

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

Big Brother raids Step Brother for data provided by Little Brother.

I can't imagine I'm any safer now.

vinay4272• 8 years ago

The raid was conducted by the Information Commissioner's Office, which has a mission to "uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals". That doesn't seem very Big Brother to me, even if other government agencies do fit that characterization.

Source: the bottom of their homepage - https://ico.org.uk

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

This is gov / quasi-gov agency, yes? Do they also oversea what the gov and other quasi-gov agencies collect? Or is their protection limited to what happens in the private sector?

cs702• 8 years ago

In the blink of an eye, it seems, we have gone from a world in which collecting, storing, and using personal data for financial gain was largely viewed as a harmless activity, to a world in which doing those same things will be increasingly controlled and regulated, scrutinized, criticized, investigated, fined, and ultimately, I suspect, criminalized.

pjc506• 8 years ago

Years ago Bruce Schneier said that nothing would happen until there was the privacy equivalent of the Exxon Valdez / Bhopal / Chernobyl; a leak high profile and toxic enough to irrevocably change public opinion. Maybe this is that trigger event.

The EU was ahead on this, adopting data protection rules from 1995, before even the first dotcom boom. I believe it's a legacy of fear of the Stasi driving opposition to surveillance.

468865325582• 8 years ago

Also the CCC and European hacker culture. I think in the US hacker culture is different and less political, because of the FBI suffocating its roots early on, and a general fear of leftist politics. In europe, and Germany in particular, the CCC and close structures have been really important correctives since before the internet. And they are like reeeally left wing anticapitalist idealists and antiauthoritarians, which plays part to their motivation.

nolok• 8 years ago

In France we always had strong laws too (we basically adapted our super old laws for "files and info on paper" to "files and info on paper on a computer"), in decent part because Vichy.

Technically I could already ten years ago ask any company to show me every file they had on me, allow me to edit, and ask them to delete, and they had to comply. But the era on gigantic worldwide corp made this much harder to enforce, and thus much harder for user to enjoy their rights. I'm glad the EU moved forward on standardisation and enforcement at EU level.

No more "the data you refer to is in Ireland and owned by an Irish company that doesn't operate in France !" and crap like that.

lostlogin2• 8 years ago

It’s interesting how the collection of the same information by the likes of the five eyes is ok, yet for Facebook it isn’t.

beagle3• 8 years ago

It is interesting how it is ok for a country to jail people whose conduct it disapproves of, yet for any non-government entity it isn't. /s

xr4ti2• 8 years ago

Seems perfectly in line with restrictions on other dual use technologies, such as biological pathogens, nuclear fuels, etc.

roywiggins• 8 years ago

At least in the US, there are legal prohibitions on government propaganda programs targeting Americans, whereas that's more or less entirely what Facebook is for. If the govt is caught running influence campaigns inside the US, there will be hell to pay- Congressional hearings, new legislation, etc.

anonnel• 8 years ago

That isn’t very hard to understand.

bluesmonk• 8 years ago

I just hope this does not backfire as new service models that require explicit consent (through ToS) from the user to allow monetizing user data in order to use such service.

the_cat_kittles• 8 years ago

news reports and reported public opinion seem to have shifted rapidly. but lots of people have been very vocal about how this is bad for a long time.

maxander• 8 years ago

And this is the climate while tremendously powerful corporations consider personal data collection to be a lynchpin of their moneymaking strategy (i.e., advertising.) Once internet advertising becomes broadly recognized as being not worth the cost, the demand for this data could fall off a cliff- what will policy look like then?

I consider it a reason to be optimistic.

pyjammas10• 8 years ago

Too early to tell. It took almost a week to get a warrant to raid the CA offices, and while I do sort-of understand why, it's not promising. Furthermore, the Snowden revelations didn't have as much of an effect as I'd hoped, and once it 'blew over' it largely stopped being a public concern.

The same could happen here. Perhaps Zuck will be fired or we'll stop hearing about his (alleged) ambitions to enter politics, and that will be the end of it.

Let's not forget that CA is just one company. As long as Robert Mercer can continue doing what he does under various shell companies that are easy to register, we really haven't gotten anywhere unless regulations are implemented, and somehow applied globally.

pjc506• 8 years ago

Relatedly, some more Brexit whistleblowing: https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/977601337889312768

and https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-outing_uk_5ab6...

krona• 8 years ago

Sorry, I failed to see the relevance, apropos Cambridge Analytica.

n4r9• 8 years ago

Cambridge Analytica conducted research for Leave.EU, one of the biggest pro-Brexit campaign groups, and are under investigation by the Electoral Commission for their role in the EU referendum.

sctb• 8 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16662141

Cambridge Analytica raided by UK data watchdog

Related Stories