Tamsin Shaw
Apparently, the historic flow of the old-fashioned spook is inward decline. What is emerging instead is an obscure reason of mysterious boutique companies specializing inward information analysis as well as online influence that contract alongside regime agencies. As they say nigh hedge funds, if the full general populace has heard their names that’s in all probability non a skillful sign. But at that spot is right away 1 information analysis fellowship that anyone who pays attending to the US as well as Great Britain press has heard of: Cambridge Analytica. Representatives receive got boasted that their listing of past times as well as electrical current clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as NATO. Nevertheless, they became recognized for precisely 1 influence campaign: the 1 that helped Donald Trump acquire elected president of the United States. The sort of assist the company offered has since been the dependent of much unwelcome legal as well as journalistic scrutiny. Carole Cadwalladr’s recent exposé of the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica shows that the company, along alongside its partner, SCL Group, should rightly move as a cautionary tale nigh the role private companies play inward developing as well as deploying government-funded behavioral technologies. Her source, quondam employee Christopher Wylie, has described the evolution of influence techniques for psychological warfare past times SCL Defense, the refinement of similar techniques past times SCL Elections through its exercise across the developing reason (for example, a “rumor campaign” deployed to spread fright during the 2007 election inward Nigeria), as well as the buy of this cyber-arsenal past times Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica, as well as who, alongside the assist of Wylie, Trump crusade managing director Steve Bannon, as well as the company’s original executive Alexander Nix, deployed it on the American electorate inward 2016.
But the revelations should also prompt us to inquire deeper questions nigh the sort of behavioral scientific discipline inquiry that enables both governments as well as private companies to assume these powers. Two immature psychologists are primal to the Cambridge Analytica story. One is Michal Kosinski, who devised an app alongside a Cambridge University colleague, David Stillwell, that measures personality traits past times analyzing Facebook “likes.” It was hence used inward collaboration alongside the World Well-Being Project, a grouping at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center that specializes inward the exercise of large information to mensurate wellness as well as happiness inward monastic say to meliorate well-being. The other is Aleksandr Kogan, who also works inward the champaign of positive psychology as well as has written papers on happiness, kindness, as well as honey (according to his résumé, an early on newspaper was called “Down the Rabbit Hole: H5N1 Unified Theory of Love”). He ran the Prosociality as well as Well-being Laboratory, nether the auspices of Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute.
Despite its prominence inward inquiry on well-being, Kosinski’s work, Cadwalladr points out, drew a keen bargain of involvement from British as well as American intelligence agencies as well as defence forcefulness contractors, including overtures from the private fellowship running an intelligence projection nicknamed “Operation KitKat” because a correlation had been found betwixt anti-Israeli sentiments as well as liking Nikes as well as KitKats. Several of Kosinski’s co-authored papers listing the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, as a funding source. His résumé boasts of meetings alongside senior figures at 2 of the world’s largest defence forcefulness contractors, Boeing as well as Microsoft, both companies that receive got sponsored his research. He ran a workshop on digital footprints as well as psychological assessment for the Singaporean Ministry of Defense.
For his part, Aleksandr Kogan established a company, Global Science Research, that contracted alongside SCL, using Facebook information to map personality traits for its move inward elections (Kosinski claims that Kogan essentially reverse-engineered the app that he as well as Stillwell had developed). Kogan’s app harvested information on Facebook users who agreed to accept a personality essay for the purposes of academic inquiry (though it was, inward fact, to move used past times SCL for non-academic ends). But according to Wylie, the app also collected information on their entire—and nonconsenting—network of friends. Once Cambridge Analytica as well as SCL had won contracts alongside the State Department as well as were pitching to the Pentagon, Wylie became alarmed that this illegally-obtained information had ended upward at the middle of government, along alongside the contractors who mightiness abuse it.
This patently bizarre intersection of inquiry on topics similar honey as well as kindness alongside defence forcefulness as well as intelligence interests is not, inward fact, especially unusual. It is typical of the sort of dual-use inquiry that has shaped the champaign of social psychology inward the US since World War II. Much of the classic, foundational inquiry on personality, conformity, obedience, grouping polarization, as well as other such determinants of social dynamics—while ostensibly civilian—was funded during the mutual depression temperature state of war past times the military machine as well as the CIA. The mutual depression temperature state of war was an ideological battle, so, naturally, inquiry on techniques for controlling belief was considered a national safety priority. This psychological inquiry set the groundwork for propaganda wars as well as for experiments inward private “mind control.” The pioneering figures from this era—for example, Gordon Allport on personality as well as Solomon Asch on belief conformity—are yet cited inward NATO psy-ops literature to this day.
The recent revival of this mutual depression temperature state of war approach has taken identify inward the setting of the state of war on terror, which began inward 1998 alongside Bill Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 62, making terrorism America’s national safety priority. Martin Seligman, the psychologist who has bridged the military machine as well as civilian worlds to a greater extent than successfully than whatever other alongside his move on helplessness as well as resilience, was at the forefront of the novel dual-use initiative. His inquiry began as a role of a mutual depression temperature state of war computer program of electroshock experiments inward the 1960s. He subjected dogs to electrical shocks, rendering them passive to the signal that they no longer fifty-fifty tried to avoid the pain, a Earth he called “learned helplessness.” This concept hence became the reason of a theory of depression, along alongside associated ideas nigh how to foster psychological resilience.
In 1998, Seligman founded the positive psychology movement, dedicated to the study of psychological traits as well as habits that foster authentic happiness as well as well-being, spawning an enormous manufacture of pop self-help books. At the same time, his move attracted involvement as well as funding from the military machine as a primal role of its soldier-resilience initiative. Seligman had previously worked alongside the CIA as well as fifty-fifty earlier September 11, 2001, his novel motion was inward melody alongside America’s shifting national safety priorities, hosting inward its initiatory yr a conference inward Northern Republic of Ireland on “ethno-political conflict.”
But it was after the September eleven attacks that terrorism became Seligman’s absolute priority. In 2003, he said that the state of war alongside jihadis must accept precedence over all other academic research, proverb of his colleagues: “If nosotros lose the war, the laudable, but pet projects they endorse, volition non move issues… If nosotros win this war, nosotros tin sack proceed to pursue the normal goals of science.” Money poured into the dependent for these purposes. The Department of Homeland Security established Centers of Excellence inward universities for interdisciplinary inquiry into the social as well as psychological roots of terrorism. Elsewhere, scholars worked to a greater extent than obliquely on relevant behavioral technologies.
Some of the psychological projects cultivated nether the banner of the state of war on terror volition move familiar to many readers. Psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt as well as Steven Pinker, as well as their colleagues inward other disciplines (most prominently, the Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein) rehabilitated the mutual depression temperature state of war inquiry on “group polarization” as a way of agreement not, this time, the radicalism that feeds “totalitarianism,” but the as amorphous notion of “extremism.” They sought to scrap extremism domestically past times promoting “viewpoint diversity” both on campus (through organizations such as the Heterodox Academy, run past times Haidt as well as funded past times libertarian billionaire Paul Singer) as well as online, suggesting ways inward which websites mightiness employ techniques from social psychology to scrap phenomena such as “confirmation bias.” Their notion of “appropriate heterogeneity” (Sunstein) inward moral as well as political views remains controversial.
Seligman himself saw the potential for using the Internet to choose his inquiry on personality together alongside novel ways of gathering data. This projection began presently after the September eleven attacks, with a paper on “Character Strengths Before as well as After September 11,” which focused on variations inward traits such as trust, love, teamwork, as well as leadership. It ultimately evolved into the innovative World Well-Being Project at Penn. Seligman also fostered links alongside Cambridge University, where he is on the board of the Well-Being Institute that employs the same sort of psychometric techniques. The aim of these programs is non but to analyze our subjective states of hear but to divulge agency past times which nosotros tin sack move “nudged” inward the direction of our truthful well-being as positive psychologists empathize it, which includes attributes similar resilience as well as optimism. Seligman’s projects are almost all funded past times the Templeton Foundation as well as may receive got been employed for solely civilian purposes. But inward bringing together the personality inquiry as well as the behavioral technologies that social psychologists had for decades been refining alongside the novel tool of large information (via the astonishing resources provided past times social media), it has created an of import template for what is right away the cutting-edge move of America’s intelligence community.
In 2008, hence Secretary of Defense Robert Gates commissioned the Minerva Initiative, funded past times the DoD, which brought researchers inward the social sciences together to study civilization as well as terrorism, as well as specifically supported initiatives involving the analysis of social media. One of the Cornell scientists involved also participated inward the famous as well as controversial Facebook study of emotional contagion. Less good known is the Open Source Indicators program at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA (a torso nether the Director of National Intelligence), which has aimed to analyze social media inward monastic say to predict social unrest as well as political crises.
In a 2014 interview, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, speaking hence as caput of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that such open-source information initiatives, as well as inward detail the study of social media such as Facebook, had solely transformed intelligence-gathering. He reported that traditional signals intelligence as well as human intelligence were increasingly beingness replaced past times this open-source move as well as that the way inward which intelligence agents are trained had been modified to accommodate the shift. H5N1 growing portion of the military’s $50 billion budget would move spent on this information analytics work, he claimed, creating a “gold rush” for contractors. H5N1 few weeks after this interview, Flynn left the DIA to works life the Flynn Intel Group Inc. He after acted as a consultantto the SCL Group.
Carole Cadwalladr reported inward The Observer final yr that it was Sophie Schmidt, miss of Alphabet founder Eric Schmidt, who made SCL aware of this aureate rush, telling Alexander Nix, hence caput of SCL Elections, that the fellowship should emulate Palantir, the fellowship prepare past times Peter Thiel as well as funded alongside CIA venture majuscule that has right away won of import national safety contracts. Schmidt threatened to sue Cadwalladr for reporting this information. But Nix recently admitted earlier a parliamentary select commission inward London that Schmidt had interned for Cambridge Analytica, though he denied that she had introduced him to Peter Thiel. Aleksandr Kogan as well as Christopher Wylie allowed Cambridge Analytica to evolve into an extremely competitive operator inward this arena.
It was past times no agency inevitable that dual-use inquiry at the intersection of psychology as well as information scientific discipline would move employed along alongside illegally-obtained caches of information to manipulate elections. But dual-use inquiry inward psychology does seem to nowadays a specific set of dangers. Many areas of scientific inquiry receive got benefited from dual-use initiatives. The National Cancer Institute began its life inward the early on 1970s as role of a coordinated computer program examining the effects of tumor agents developed as bio-weapons at Fort Detrick. The National Institute of Allergy as well as Infectious Diseases, similarly, researched the effects of militarily manufactured hazardous viruses. This was the foundation of a biotechnology manufacture that has acquire a epitome instance of dual exercise as well as has led, inward spite of its to a greater extent than sinister side, to invaluable medical breakthroughs. But the evolution of behavioral technologies intended for military-grade persuasion inward cyber-operations is rooted inward a specific perspective on human beings, 1 that is at odds alongside the way they should move viewed inward democratic societies.
I’ve written previously nigh the way inward which a keen bargain of contemporary behavioral scientific discipline aims to exploit our irrationalities rather than overcome them. H5N1 scientific discipline that is oriented toward the evolution of behavioral technologies is leap to take in us narrowly as manipulable subjects rather than rational agents. If these technologies are becoming the heart as well as soul of America’s military machine as well as intelligence cyber-operations, it looks as though nosotros volition receive got to move harder to maintain these trends from affecting the everyday life of our democratic society. That volition hateful paying closer attending to the military machine as well as civilian boundaries beingness crossed past times the private companies that undertake such cyber-operations.
In the academic world, it should entail a refusal to apply the perspective of propaganda inquiry to a greater extent than by as well as large to social problems. From social media nosotros should demand, at a minimum, much greater protection of our data. Over time, nosotros mightiness also take in a lower tolerance for platforms whose job concern model relies on the collection as well as commercial exploitation of that data. As for politics, rather than elected officials’ perfecting technologies that give them access to personal information nigh the electorate, their focus should move on informing voters nigh their policies as well as actions, as well as making themselves accountable.March 21, 2018, 7:00 am
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