Bigger than the NSA

Facebook will become the “most powerful government contractor” in the world, in less than ten years.

The forecast was made by John Robb, a former counter-terrorism operative in US Special Operations Command and long-time US military intelligence advisor on the future of warfare to agencies like the NSA and CIA. In 2016, Robb was special consultant to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on the future of artificial intelligence and robotics warfare.

Posting on his New York Times-acclaimed Global Guerrillas blog, Robb explained that given Facebook’s current rate of growth, the social network platform — which currently has 2 billion monthly users — will hit an all-time high of 3.5 billion monthly users by 2025 — enough to have a “complete social graph” of the entire population on the planet.

With that many people under its radar, more than half of the 6.5 billion people living outside Russia and China, Facebook will have the capacity to effectively access information about almost the whole human population.

In Robb’s words:

“That’s a network that is large enough and deep enough to create a global census that can ‘see’ nearly everyone on the planet, even if they don’t have a Facebook account.”

INSIGHT: Social mentions of location along with images of associates, friends and family would effectively give Facebook access to the rest of the population not on the Facebook network.

This will “enable real-time tracking on nearly everyone on the planet using smartphone GPS data and ancillary information” including pictures, posted links and likes. And this, in turn, will allow Facebook to “create the largest micro-targeting database on earth”, replete with intimate details on the interests of billions of people.

INSIGHT: In essence, this means that Facebook’s mass surveillance capabilities will be even more powerful than that of the NSA.

In John Robb’s words:

“Facebook now has the ability to offer NSA scale services, with better data, to nations around the world.”

Facebook denied Robb’s forecast unequivocally. A spokesperson said: “Intelligence agencies possess wholly different legal authorities and capabilities from private sector companies, so this is a false comparison. Our operations and practices are subject to specific regulatory oversight.”

Big Brother goes global: welcome to meta-government

The problem was put well by Alexis Wichowski, a former State Department official specializing in digital diplomacy. With Facebook’s user-base now encompassing literally a quarter of the global population, she says, it has in effect become a ‘net-state’, due to its mass access.

INSIGHT: Facebook, however, is uniquely positioned to become the number one global service provider of information operations for world governments, whether democratic, autocratic, or in between.

In an exclusive interview with INSURGE, Robb explained that this unprecedented access to global population dynamics will make Facebook the go-to contractor for comprehensive surveillance, censorship and counter-terrorism services to governments all over the world:

“The US government realizes that Facebook has better and more data than they do and can do much more with it than they can, particularly in regards to US citizens. It simply can’t keep up so the only alternative — China is doing the same thing — is to coerce the platform to work with them.”

While private sector advertising will be a primary source of profits for the platform, Facebook’s success will depend on being able to avoid government regulation. By offering its own critical security and surveillance services to governments, Robb said, “Facebook will avoid regulations that will limit its ability to make money.”

John Robb further predicts that Facebook will provide governments the enhanced capacity to “ID anyone using facial recognition AIs… and then track their movements globally.”

The technology is already in development, with Facebook currently focusing on facial recognition tools for use with cameras in high end retail stores. The tools would gauge customer emotions and behavioral profiles by crowd-scanning facial expressions, and relay the information to managers and shop assistants.

INSIGHT: The platform will also be able to “limit domestic political conversations to those approved by the government,” as well as “limit sources to approved channels, prevent the discussion of banned topics, and steer conversations in subtle ways.”

Finally, Robb added, Facebook will routinely “peer into private conversations and do the network analysis to ID potential extremists. It will also actively sabotage or intervene in terrorist and extremist recruiting networks to damage their effectiveness in securing recruits.”

One problem here is that definitions of a “potential” extremist, let alone extremism itself, are so vague as to be almost useless. As I’ve previously reported for The Guardian, the Pentagon has an unfortunate track record of equating extremism with any form of political activism that is critical of government.

The Facebook spokesperson denied that the company could become so powerful, noting that the top US government contractor in FY2016 “was Lockheed Martin to the tune of nearly $44 billion”.

But John Robb’s point was not that Facebook would become the most profitable contractor, but the most “powerful” in terms of its capacity to influence global populations.

Third party surveillance loophole

AXIOM: The boundaries between government and private use of Facebook to manipulate population behaviors are increasingly blurred.

While Facebook has claimed opposition to government surveillance, the platform’s actual conduct suggests otherwise.

John Robb described Facebook as “pretty compliant” with government data requests, and told me that the company not only has a counter-terrorism unit, but a “surveillance and censorship division” which is “growing fast.”

No wonder the company has actively fought against biometric facial recognition privacy laws across the US.

Earlier in 2017, Facebook announced a policy to prevent developers from using Facebook data to create applications for surveillance. The announcement came after revelations that US police departments had gained special access to social networks to track protestors.

Unnoticed at the time, Facebook’s actual policy for developers provides a legal loophole that could grant government and police agencies an indirect route to Facebook surveillance, by signing a confidentiality agreement with a third-party middleman:

“Keep private your secret key and access tokens. You can share them with an agent acting to operate your app if they sign a confidentiality agreement. If you use any partner services, make them sign a contract to protect any information you obtained from us, limit their use of that information, and keep it confidential.”

INSIGHT: This loophole potentially opens the gate for public authorities to use third party companies to achieve exactly the same surveillance goals, under the banner of confidentiality.

According to Facebook, this is not a problem: “If companies are providing access to our APIs for surveillance, that would be against our policies. That is not a loophole. If we become aware of violating behavior, we will take the appropriate action with the developer, which can include removing access.”

The spokesperson failed to explain how Facebook would become aware of such violating behavior, when their own policy prevents it from coming to light under a confidentiality protocol.

(Cyber)War is a racket

No wonder, then, that Facebook has become an information battleground between governments.

Instead of corrupt arms dealers selling weapons to warring parties, Facebook sells information tools to governments on opposite sides of very real physical battlefields.

The Facebook spokesperson told me that this characterization of the platform is “a fundamental misunderstanding of our business. Of the six million advertisers on Facebook, the majority are small and medium-sized businesses. Political advertising represents only a small fraction of our business.”

Yet this does not take away from the fact that despite political spending not being even a top 10 advertising vertical for Facebook, the company continues to actively encourage opposing governments and political campaigns to use its platform to influence constituencies — with highly divisive consequences.

And as Pentagon insider John Robb told me, one of the biggest upsides Facebook is banking on by opening the door for government influence operations is accessing the vast national populations of those governments.

So far, a total of around $200,000 in Facebook ad spending on the US elections has been attributed to Russian sources. This pales in comparison to the Facebook ad campaigns of the Trump and Clinton campaigns combined: a whopping $81 million according to Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch in Senate Intelligence Committee hearings.

Russia has received extensive criticism for using platforms like Facebook to promote ‘fake news’. But the vast scale of the US State Department’s global Facebook ad program speaks for itself.

One analysis of federal spending records shows that American information campaigns in 2010–2011 and 2015–2016 spent $59,541 in ads targeted at Russian speakers. This was part of a $1.6 million eight year Facebook ad spending drive by the State Department, Voice of America and US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Other countries targeted by these Facebook influence campaigns included Indonesia ($136,217), Pakistan ($127,684), Iran ($87,381), Afghanistan ($61,176), as well as the former Soviet republics of Armenia ($33,187), Uzbekistan ($19,275) and Georgia ($40,100).

These ads focus on promoting US “diplomatic initiatives”, and driving readers to pro-American news outlets such as Voice of America, sponsored by Washington.

Facebook ad buyers are able to target ads with extreme precision due to the vast amount of data Facebook holds on users. Whether on your phone or computer, Facebook collects information about everything its users do online, unless they logout of the platform.

AXIOM: Moria Whelan, former deputy assistant secretary for digital strategy at the US State Department, says that the US State Department reaches 30 million people every day through Facebook, often with direct support in the form of training and tools.

In Whelan’s words: “[Facebook] is one of the most useful and cost-effective instruments of American power and promoting our ideas. Every American embassy in the world has an account — more likely multiple accounts.We aren’t alone… Almost every foreign government — save a handful — have a presence on Facebook and their embassies use Facebook as a primary source to communicate… Facebook was a willing partner in a way that outpaced other platforms. The Facebook team innovated in ways relevant to public diplomacy professionals and that other social media sites did not: They built trainings and developed tools that made our lives easier.”

INSIGHT: In other words, the relationship between governments and Facebook for global influence operations is increasingly symbiotic. Governments want to influence people. And they are willing to pay Facebook handsomely to help them do it.

Censorship

Facebook “was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected,” wrote co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the company’s S-1 filing in 2012.

“Our new mission is to bring the world closer together,” he told CNN Tech in the summer of 2017.

And yet Facebook’s willingness to profit from global information warfare has already brought the platform into direct forms of censorship for authoritarian states.

For Turkey, Facebook has — reportedly under Turkish government pressure — deleted the Facebook accounts of people expressing solidarity with Rojava, an autonomous Kurdish province in northern Syria which plays a leading role in rolling back ISIS.

Facebook routinely censors comments of government critics in India, Pakistan and Morocco.

Facebook works with the Israeli government to censor Palestinian groups based on its moderation rule that “any organization that is primarily dedicated to intimidate a population, government, or use violence to resist occupation of an internationally recognized state” cannot be praised, supported or represented in anyway.

Facebook has, according to Facebook sources who spoke to the New York Times, built software that could potentially accommodate censorship demands in China.

Facebook is even sanitizing horrendous crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide in Myanmar (Burma), by massively deleting posts by Rohingya activists documenting the violence against their men, women and children.

But Facebook denied operating in effective alliance with such repressive and autocratic states: “We evaluate reports based on our Community Standards. We also publish country-level information in our Transparency Report about content restrictions based on violations of local law.”

Psyops and Elections

The most insidious uses to which Facebook has been put emerged in relation to the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, the American affiliate of SCL Elections — a subsidiary of the British company, Strategic Communications Laboratory Group, now known simply as SCL Group.

Cambridge Analytica uses artificial intelligence and psychological propaganda techniques honed during US-British military interventions to influence foreign populations. These techniques assisted the Donald Trump election campaign, and compelling evidence is emerging of their use during the referendum on Britain’s role in the European Union.

The details are now fairly well-known. The firm boasted of having access to the psychological profiles of 220 million American citizens, based on datasets compiled from Facebook.

That data was further integrated with commercially-obtained voter data, and used to target individuals with ‘bespoke’ Facebook ads, finely calibrated to press their emotional buttons.

Data scientists disagree on how effective these techniques might be — there is no way to verify their impact, as the models used are not public, but privately held by SCL Group and its subsidiaries.

Meanwhile, some of the data firm’s extraordinary political connections have been exposed. A leading financial backer of Cambridge Analytica, for instance, was billionaire computer scientist Robert Mercer, Donald Trump’s single biggest campaign donor. Mercer held a stake in Breitbart News, then run by Steve Bannon — who sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica as its vice president, before becoming Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Mercer had also, reportedly, urged Cambridge Analytica to provide support for the Brexit campaign.

Direct line to the deep state

Yet this is only a partial picture of a much wider web of establishment connections. Deleted company information and existing company records perused by INSURGE intelligence unearth a series of relationships encompassing the most secretive echelons of the British government’s national security industry, NATO, the global private military sector and arms trade, the pro-Tory financial establishment, and the global fossil fuel industry.

SCL Elections has operated since 1993 to provide what it described in a now deleted section on its website as “advanced electoral polling, audience research and behavioral analysis” in election campaigns. These techniques have been “adapted for civilian use from military applications to better understand behaviour within electorates.”

An archive of SCL’s old website provides a useful backgrounder into how the SCL Group developed its methodology in a military context. The page describes how the success of initial field trials in the 1990s:

“… encouraged SCL to offer its unique capability to International Militaries for independent critical evaluation*. Following a comprehensive analysis of the methodology and thorough assessment of its effectiveness, SCL Defence now supplies the world’s leading militaries, including both the US and UK Departments of Defence.”

The asterix leads to the following paragraph:

“*Independent analysis of SCL’s TAA [Target Audience Analysis] methodology undertaken by, among others, ARAG — Advanced Research and Assessment Group (UK) Ministry of Defence and Sandia National Laboratories — US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Public endorsement of SCL capabilities published by the Government Accountability Office, State Department.”

The description went on to outline how this behavioral influence methodology was applied to civilian populations:

“Over the same period, SCL also offered its TAA methodology to governments and political Parties worldwide. To undertake this work SCL established SCL Elections and since 1994 SCL Elections has provided the research, strategy and execution for over 23 election campaigns — WITHOUT LOSS.”

According to another now deleted description from SCL Group’s website about its SCL Defense division, the company had deep ties with the British defense ministry, and the entire British diplomatic corps:

“SCL is a UK government approved commercial body authorised to undertake military and civilian projects for foreign clients. SCL has received ‘List X’ accreditation from the British Government’s Ministry of Defence, the same equivalent to Facility Security Clearance (FSC) used in other countries, which provides us with Government endorsed clearance to handle information protectively marked as ‘confidential’ and above. We have an extensive worldwide track record and enquires can be directed through any British High Commission or Embassy.”

According to the UK government’s guidance on security requirements for List X contractors, these “are companies operating in the UK who are working on UK government contracts which require them to hold classified information. This information is at ‘Secret’ or above or international partners’ information classified ‘Confidential’ or above, and is held at their own premises at a specific site.”

A government spokesperson confirmed that currently the SCL Group has no active contracts with the MoD, and therefore “no access to classified or confidential MoD information.” However, the spokesperson did not clarify when SCL Group was last contracted by the MoD, and for what purpose.

INSIGHT: The deleted SCL Group paragraph also refers to how inquiries about the SCL Group could be made through an open door via British embassies worldwide — seemingly indicative of a symbiotic relationship with the British Foreign Office.

This Foreign Office relationship raises an awkward question: have its ongoing Facebook campaign operations to influence national elections been pursued in service to British foreign policy interests?

When I first put this question to the Foreign Office, a spokesperson replied with: “I am looking into your query however I have been advised you may wish to contact the Ministry of Defence on this matter.” Despite follow up requests, no further clarification on SCL Group’s symbiotic relationship to the FCO was forthcoming.

SCL Group, including its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In previous public statements, SCL Group has gone out of its way to deny undertaking “disinformation” in its influence operations.

However, in 2005, at the Defense Systems and Equipment International (DSEI) expo, the UK’s largest showcase of military technology, the firm displayed a mock-up of its operations. The case study on show was of a smallpox outbreak in Britain, contained by the government through “a sophisticated campaign of mass deception” designed to convince unsuspecting Britons that the danger is not an epidemic but an accident at a chemical plant. The result, supposedly, would be that SCL’s propaganda operation reduces the projected casualties of around 10 million to just thousands.

In another case-study, SCL Group would help “a newly democratic country in South Asia as it struggles with corrupt politicians and a rising insurgency”, by assisting the monarchy to seize power, temporarily of course. “The SCL scenario also sounds a lot like using a private company to help overthrow a democratically elected government,” observed Sharon Weinberger.

The Anglo-American military-industrial complex

AXIOM: The direct line to the British ‘deep state’ is only one factor in SCL Group’s affinity with Western government counterinsurgency operations. The other factor is the outsourcing of those operations to private military contractors, often with questionable track records.

As of May 2016, the SCL Group subsidiary company — SCL Elections — has been run by managing director Mark Turnbull, a former long-time communications consultant at the giant PR firm, Bell Pottinger.

During his last stint at Bell Pottinger, in his LinkedIn profile, Turnbull claims to have “advised both UK and US governments on the role of strategic communications in the planning and implementation of national defense strategy.”

He also founded and led in 2004 a Bell Pottinger-based “strategic media and influence capability with a hand-picked team to conduct work in stabilization, counter-radicalization and democratic reform in zones of conflict and geopolitical sensitivity”.

In that capacity, he “planned and directed ‘social change’ communications campaigns in several theatres of conflict in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia” — including, he says, “a seven year nation-building effort with multiple integrated programmes addressing counter-terrorism, stabilization, ethno-sectarian conflict, and political reconciliation.”

This was the same year, 2004, that Bell Pottinger began work in Iraq, having signed a $5.6m deal with the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to promote ‘democracy’ in the country. As Middle East Eye reported, then chairman Lord Bell told PR Week magazine at the time: “There is no Arabic word for democracy — they use the word ‘democratier’, which is not Arabic. It is certainly a very big comms challenge. It is not going to be easy but it will be rewarding.”

Between 2007 and 2011, Bell Pottinger received $540 million from the US Department of Defense for “information operations and psychological operations”.

Bell Pottinger’s Pentagon output under Turnbull’s watch included fake al-Qaeda videos in Iraq, according to a former employee of the firm. These were copied onto CDs and dropped in the streets by US soldiers on patrol.

Rules of engagement: mass shooting, recruiting child soldiers, tactical incompetence

AXIOM: After cutting his teeth in places like Iraq, Turnbull went on to co-found and head up Aethos, a new strategic communications division of the giant British private military contractor Aegis Defense Services. Aegis has operated in Iraq and Afghanistan under a number of hundred million dollar contracts with the Pentagon.

In 2005, Aegis came into the spotlight when videos were leaked by a former Aegis contractor, Rod Stoner, appearing to show Aegis contractors shoot randomly at Iraqi civilians on the highway between Baghdad and the Green Zone airport.

Aegis issued a formal statement denying the clips are “in any way connected to Aegis”, and a US Army investigation concluded that no crimes had been committed as the shootings were in compliance with the ‘rules of engagement’. Despite this disavowal of a connection to the video, Aegis obtained a High Court injunction against Stoner, forcing him to takedown the website where he had posted the videos.

More recently, the firm was accused of recruiting child soldiers as mercenaries in Sierra Leone.

Despite this, Aegis has just signed a $1.3 billion contract with Donald Trump’s State Department for increased security at US diplomatic installations around the world. That is notwithstanding internal concerns among US embassy staffers about the company’s tactical incompetence and “a dangerous lack of understanding of the operational environment”.

Aethos, the strategic communications division of Aegis set-up by Turnbull, was eventually folded into the main company — which in 2015 was bought by Canadian security contractor GardaWorld, the world’s largest privately held security firm.

GardaWorld has been engulfed in controversy over its dubious handling of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, for defending international oil interests in Nigeria, and potentially for violating Security Council resolutions prohibiting armed mercenary personnel from operating in Libya.

Several of Turnbull’s former Aethos/Aegis colleagues are now GardaWorld directors — Oliver Westmacott (president and COO) and Major General Graham Binns (senior managing director of strategy and sales, also CEO of Aegis).

INSIGHT: In short, Turnbull brings to SCL Elections an exemplary track record of honing psychological manipulation in the murky world of private military contracting in foreign war theatres. And those connections to private military contractors continue to pay off.

“SCL has… provided intelligence assessments for American defense contractors in Iran, Libya and Syria,” reported the New York Times citing company documents. Thanks to Facebook, these techniques are now being used against domestic populations to influence national elections.

SCL Group did not respond to requests for clarification on Turnbull’s work at Bell Pottinger and Aegis, and how this experience might impact on his role at SCL Elections.

Global weapons trade

AXIOM: Ties to US and British private military contractors are only one dimension of SCL Group’s establishment credentials. Another is the company’s connections to the global defense sector, revolving around the figure of Julian Wheatland, an SCL Group director who is also longtime Chairman of SCL Group’s board.

While holding the position of Chairman of SCL Group, Wheatland is simultaneously the sole founding director of an obscure company called Hatton International Limited.

Hatton International was until last year listed as a member of ‘ADS’, the premier trade organisation for companies in the UK aerospace, defense, security and space sectors. The now deleted listing says:

“Hatton International is an advisory, principal investment and Offset Services business. It also markets and promotes selected defence services and equipment. Hatton’s principal activity is to assist international defence and aerospace companies to help satisfy their offset obligations in customer countries. Hatton International offers unique, discrete, sophisticated and professional offset solutions, individually crafted to satisfy customers’ economic and development requirements.”

‘Defense offsets’ oblige companies exporting arms and equipment to a particular country to re-invest a portion of their contract in that country. As the British NGO, Transparency International, observes: “Offsets are big business, and yet they are very opaque and receive much less transparency and attention than they should, given their susceptibility to high corruption risk.”

Hatton International’s own website makes no mention at all of the specialization in defense industry offsets. However, an archived version of the website dated back to July 2009 says, after listing a range of benign activities such as infrastructure development projects:

“We specialize in assisting international aerospace companies with their overseas offset obligations and can devise bespoke programmes, tailored to the needs of the company and the customer country.”

Clients include “international corporates, government departments and family offices.”

INSIGHT: SCL Group’s chairman thus operates at the heart of the most opaque sector of global defense industry.

Wheatland did not respond to questions about the influence of this work on SCL Group operations.

Big business and Big Oil

AXIOM: Through Hatton International, SCL Group is also connected to global fossil fuel interests.

From 2014 to 2016, Wheatland was a director of Phi Energy Limited, the London-based company for Phi Energy Group, a short-lived oil company venture “exploring opportunities” in Libya, the US, Africa and Eastern Europe, according to a presentation deck about the company. The company shut down in 2016.

Wheatland is listed in the deck as Phi Energy Group’s Chief Finance Officer. The same deck identifies the companies that Phi Energy worked with as follows: Shell, Noble Group, Eni, Esso, BP, Statoil, Tamoil, Total and Saras — a veritable who’s who of international oil majors.

Phi Energy’s then Chief Commercial Officer, Tarick Kreimeia, also worked directly under Wheatland — he is described in the deck as “a Director of Hatton International”. Kreimeia’s LinkedIn profile provides further detail, identifying him as a “non-executive director” of Hatton International between September 2012 and August 2016. That profile acknowledges Hatton’s work “with defence and aerospace companies”, but also adds that it “supports client companies, particularly in the energy industry, to develop financing strategies that will deliver the strategic objectives and help bring new products and propositions to market.”

Kreimeia’s Phi Energy bio depicts him as a key player in negotiating refining agreements in Middle East countries. He has, for instance, assisted major EU refineries in negotiations with the Libyan National Oil Company (LNOC), the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Company and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).

INSIGHT: These all happen to be regions where private contractors associated with SCL Group directors have undertaken profitable operations, in the context of US-UK military interventions.

Thatcherite Euroskeptics

AXIOM: Through subsidiary company SCL Elections, SCL Group also has far more direct ties to elements of the Tory-leaning British financial establishment than hitherto understood — some of whom are hostile to the European Union.

Company records obtained by INSURGE for SCL Elections Ltd show that the UK company, created in 2012, has only ever had two directors. One of them is Alexander Nix, CEO of SCL Elections affiliate Cambridge Analytica. The other was Christian Patrick Teroerde, who joined the company during its founding just months after it was incorporated, holding a one-year director role from February 2013 to 2014.

Since 2010, Patrick Teroerde is co-founding managing director of Hanson Asset Management, originally created to formalize the management and oversight of the assets of the Hanson family.

The Hanson family’s wealth was built up through Hanson PLC under the leadership of the late Lord James Hanson, a Thatcherite industrialist whose chief strategy was buying and turning around distressed assets. Acquisitions covered a range of sectors including high street clothes, chemicals, materials, coal and tobacco.

Hanson PLC had, for instance, acquired Peabody Holding Co. in the 1990s — then the largest coal producer in the US; and Imperial Tobacco Group (now Imperial Brands), the world’s fourth largest international cigarette company.

In 1983, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made Lord Hanson a life peer. He in turn donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party.

Lord Hanson was a founder of the anti-European ‘Business for Sterling’ group, as well as a member of the Bruges Group, a think-tank founded by Thatcher to promote a less centralized Europe. Both organizations play key roles in anti-EU Tory politics.

From 1999 to 2002, Lord Hanson’s ‘Business for Sterling’ was run by Dominic Cummings, who went on to become Head of Strategy for the Conservatives. Cummings would later serve as special advisor to arch-Euro skeptic and then education minister Michael Gove. Eventually, Cummings himself served as Campaign Director of Vote Leave, the official campaign for Britain to exit the EU.

It is not clear what role Teroerde played at SCL Elections during his one year directorship. But the position coincided with his ongoing role at Hanson Asset Management, where he works under Lord Hanson’s son, Robert, who chairs the board. The correspondence address for Teroerde’s directorship at SCL Elections is the same address as Hanson Asset Management.

The connection is notable because Vote Leave, run by Lord Hanson’s former surrogate Dominic Cummings, paid an obscure Canadian firm, AggregateIQ, £3.5 million for Facebook profiling and advertising. Cummings himself is quoted on AggregateIQ’s website praising the firm’s work.

Yet the firm is directly linked to SCL Group, and at one point appears to have operated as its Canadian subsidiary.

Reports in the Canadian press confirm that AggregateIQ had been previously contracted by SCL Group. Until February 2017, AggregateIQ’s office in Victoria was listed on SCL Group’s website as their Canadian office. The listing disappeared, but the archived version of the page included a phone number which went directly to AggregateIQ CEO, Zack Massingham.

A spokesperson for the SCL Group said that AggregateIQ had been sub-contracted for “software development and digital marketing (before we built up our own in-house capacity in these areas).” Massingham insisted that “other than the work we had done in the past, we do not have any current business with them [SCL].”

Carol Cadwalladr put paid to these denials when she discovered a confidential, signed intellectual property licensing agreement that granted SCL Elections a binding “exclusive” “worldwide” right “in perpetuity” to use all of AggregateIQ’s intellectual property.

Neither Teroerde, nor Cummings could be reached for comment.

Tycoons of wine and property

AXIOM: The final connection unearthed for the first time by INSURGE is SCL Group’s direct ties to a group of British property tycoons heavily invested in the Russian property market — and with intriguing economic goals for that country.

Roger Michael Gabb, a director of SCL Group holding the largest shareholding in the company, is also a director of the subsidiary companies, SCL Insight and SCL Analytics.

Gabb made his fortunes in the wine industry through the companies Western Wines and the South African wine brand Kumala. He is a longtime Tory donor. Records of the House of Commons Register of Members Interests show that he has donated consistently for over a decade to Philip Dunne MP, who from 2012 to 2016 held a series of defense ministry positions related to defense equipment, procurement, and technology. Dunne has been health minister since 2016.

Gabb simultaneously holds a directorship in the Tal Se Land Development Partnership, where his partners include powerful British financiers with massive property investments. The major stake in that partnership is controlled by the Hamilton Portfolio Ltd, a private equity and real estate investment firm chaired by Sir John Boyle, who is also a partner director with SCL Group’s Gabb in the Tal Se company.

Boyle is a vocal Brexit proponent who appeared on Newsnight in the summer of 2016.

Also among Gabb’s partners are Bimaljit Singh Sandhu and Anton Bilton, both of whom belong to a company called Raven Russia.

Bilton is co-founding Executive Deputy Chairman of Raven Russia Ltd, a Moscow-based property investment firm. The company built or acquired 19 million square feet of Class A Logistics warehouses in Moscow, St Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don and Novosibirsk, along with 540,000 square feet of commercial office space in St Petersburg. The gross value of Raven Russia’s portfolio is currently $1.3 billion.

Raven Russia was built from the acquisition of Bilton’s previous outfit where he was majority shareholder, the Raven Group — a residential and commercial property developer leasing out buildings to UK government departments and major retailers including Tesco, UCI Cinemas, Royal Bank of Scotland and Toys R Us. The Raven Group was acquired by Raven Mount PLC, before being bought by Raven Russia.

Along the way, Bilton worked directly with Gabb’s other co-director, Singh Sandhu, who served as CEO of Raven Mount Group until 2009.

A spokesman for Raven Russia said that: “Mr Bilton does not know and has never heard of either Roger Gabb or SCL Group.” The spokesman at first denied that Bilton was a partner with Gabb in Tal Se, claiming: “Mr Bilton is not on the Board of Tal Se. He was an individual investor in it many years ago but did not have any operational or management involvement.”

However, Tal Se company records confirm the company is an LLP, of which both Bilton and Gabb are ‘Designated Members’ — effectively equivalent to the role of directors in a normal private limited company, who have legal and regulatory responsibility for the company’s financial and administrative affairs. Gabb was appointed a Designated Member of Tal Se on 25 February; Bilton one day later on 26 February. Appointments of new Designated Members in an LLP require the approval of the other Designated Members, implying at least that Gabb — or his legal representative — would have had to approve of Bilton’s appointment.

Pressed on this, the Raven Russia spokesperson said that Bilton does not know SCL Group or Gabb, but conceded that Bilton remains an investor in their mutual property partnership, Tal Se: “Mr Bilton is an investor in Tel Se but his involvement (which is passive) has not brought him into contact with Mr Gabb.”

INSIGHT: The Russian property investments of an SCL Group director’s business partners function as an entry-point for foreign investors into Russian markets. Their tenants encompass a mix of foreign corporations and oligarchical Russian interests. Well-known Western outfits leasing Raven Russia warehouses in Russia include Pepsi, Bacardi, L’Occitane en Provence, Oracle, DHL, the Gates Corporation, among others.

Trump ties?

Then there are more traditional Russian firms who are clients of Raven Russia, such as X5 Retail Group, the largest food retailer in Russia, whose main shareholder is the Alfa Group Consortium, one of Russia’s largest privately-held investment conglomerates — accused of ties to Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin according to a controversial, largely unverified, dossier compiled by a former MI6 officer.

There are intriguing, but inconclusive, indications of good relations between Alfa Group and Donald Trump — less compelling evidence that Alfa Group is tied strongly to Putin.

One connection goes, once again, through Julian Wheatland. Upon his SCL Group appointment in 2006, he was simultaneously chief executive of Consensus Community, the investment arm of the Consensus Business Group owned by Vincent Tchenguiz.

Tchenguiz is a British-Iranian property tycoon whose father was part of the inner circle of the brutal Shah of Iran (installed in the 1953 coup backed by the CIA and MI6), and ran the country’s mint.

Tchenguiz and his family are major Tory donors — but the tycoon no longer owns shares in SCL Group. He does, however, share an office on Park Lane with Alfa Group’s billionaire chairman Mikhail Fridman.

Several individuals connected to Fridman also attended a gala dinner in Russia in 2014, which had hosted Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Opening up Russia to Western capitalism

In contrast, the widely-promulgated thesis that Alfa Group functions as a sort of Putin proxy is lazy journalism.

Fridman is not in Putin’s pocket, according to the Financial Times. Fridman’s close associates have strong personal ties to Putin which can be leveraged, but his real interests lie in leveraging Western capital. In an insightful profile for Intellinews, Ben Aris observes that for Fridman, whom he first met in the mid-1990s:

“Everything is for sale at the right price, but the only people that have the sort of money Fridman is interested in are the world’s leading corporations. While he is waiting for Russia’s integration with the global economy to the point where these global players will come and make strategic investments into Russian companies, he is busy building up his business as big as he can.”

Indeed, Fridman is one of the most Western-oriented oligarchs in Russia. He was born in Lviv in western Ukraine, and Alfa Bank Ukraine is flourishing as it expands its market share. Alfa Group’s key members have escaped both US and European sanctions lists. Fridman has applied for permanent residency in Britain, and plans to sell his shares in oil company TNK-BP, his joint venture in Russia with BP.

BP was among the list of oil majors that SCL Group chairman Julian Wheatland’s energy holding company, Phi Energy Group, had worked with.

Wheatland did not respond to questions about Phi Energy’s work with BP.

To Russia with Love

A 2009 Russia Raven financial prospectus document shows that two of SCL Group director Roger Gabb’s business partners, Bimaljit Singh and Anton Bilton, were majority shareholders in both Raven Mount PLC, and in its new owner, Russia Raven. The document also provides detailed insight into the risk perceptions of the company on property investments in Russia.

INSIGHT: Those risk perceptions demonstrate that Gabb’s business partners have a vested interest in ensuring that Russia maintains a “stable” political and economic climate conducive to foreign investment.

The approach appears to have dual ramifications: on the one hand, Russia Raven has a severe dislike of the policy of international sanctions on Russia, which has undermined the profitability of its portfolio — a matter which would naturally align with Putin.

On the other hand, the overriding objective is brazenly self-interested: a Russian economy very much open to business — that is, with as few restrictions as possible on Western foreign capital penetration, an approach that would not be so amenable to Putin’s efforts to consolidate Russian state control over the economy.

The 2009 document identifies a range of factors that could undermine the company’s profitability: “political instability” or “social unrest”; the “deterioration” of Russia’s “physical infrastructure”; the declining profitability of Russia’s oil exports, which could “reduce the value of Russian assets”; the “unpredictable manner” in which Russian foreign investment regulations and tax laws evolve; and, the biggest bogeyman of all — the potential threat of a rollback of privatization:

“Russia has, since the early 1990s, undertaken a substantial programme of privatization. However, an anti-privatization lobby still exists within the Russian parliament. Re-nationalization of assets cannot be ruled out. Any such activity could materially adversely affect the value of the Company’s assets… Some government entities have tried to invalidate earlier privatizations. Expropriation or nationalization of the companies in which the Company invests, or of their assets or portions thereof, potentially with little or no compensation, would have a material adverse effect on the Company.”

By 2015, a Russia Raven annual report laments the possibility that “sanctions against Russia remain in place for the foreseeable future and are potentially increased.”

The report grimly warns of a scenario in which Russia could be fundamentally isolated from Western markets, noting that one negative impact of sanctions is:

“Continued isolation of Russia from international markets and exacerbation of the slow down in the Russian economy… It is difficult to mitigate against the worst case scenario if escalation were to close Russia’s borders to Western markets.”

INSIGHT: These documents suggest that the business partners of a senior SCL Group executive holding the largest shares in the company have vested interests in a deeper economic alliance between private investors in the West and Russia.

The Raven Russia spokesperson did not answer my question on one of its tenants being the X5 Retail Group. I had asked: “One of Raven Russia’s major tenants is the X5 Retail Group, owned by the Alfa Consortium, accused of various ties to Donald Trump. I also note that various Raven Russia documents indicate a clear opposition to international sanctions on Russia, and keen desire to open up Russia to Western investors. This suggests an alignment with elements of the Trump administration being investigated for ties with and interests in Russia. I’d appreciate your firm’s comment on this.”

No comment on this matter was provided.

Did the structural alignment between these interests play any role in influencing the SCL Group’s activities in relation to anti-Russia information warfare? Raven Russia denied having anything to do with SCL Group, and SCL Group did not provide me any answer to that question.

What we do know is that in May 2015, SCL Group subsidiary SCL Defence delivered a three-month course at the National Defence Academy of the Republic of Latvia in Riga on behalf of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence.

According to a NATO announcement, the course taught “advanced counter-propaganda techniques designed to help member states assess and counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe”, including Ukraine.

The program was funded by the Canadian government to the tune of $1 million CAD.

In an announcement about the project at the NATO Wales Summit in September 2014, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper explained that the funding will “strengthen the ability of NATO Centres of Excellence in the region to better address regional security challenges related to energy, communications and cyber defence.”

He was alluding to the need to convince Europeans of NATO’s regional energy vision: “diversifying away from Russia”, chiefly by ramping up US gas exports to the continent, according to the Atlantic Council’s David Korayni in NATO Review magazine.

SCL Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for its American subsidiary, Cambridge Analytica, did eventually get back to me to say that the firm would not be able to comment because there were “only a few days left ahead of the Christmas holidays.”

Back to Facebook: government propaganda tool

On both sides of the Atlantic, SCL Group has been roped into official investigations into the subversion the democratic process in the US and UK. Despite this, the company remains very much embedded in the American and British political establishments.

In the US, the company was awarded a $496,232 contract in February 2017 with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to work on “target audience analysis” of potential extremists.

The GEC’s remit is defined by the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which asserts that one of its fundamental goals is to “counter foreign propaganda and disinformation directed against United States national security interests and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests.”

That includes swooping up social media information that can be deemed as threatening to US national security, while leveraging that data to create new information campaigns to promote US national security policy.

According to Ken McCallion, a former US prosecutor, SCL Group is actively using Trump administration connections “to snag other government contracts with the Dept. of Defense, the Commerce Department, Homeland Security, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other agencies.”

Facebook remains a major conduit for these US government influence campaigns.

“Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can go grab an audience, I can pick Country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who have liked — whether it’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or any other set — I can shoot and hit them directly with messaging,” said former GEC director Michael Lumpkin, describing the State Department’s reliance on Facebook advertising.

AXIOM: The British government is also fascinated by the fanfare about SCL Group’s Facebook-powered achievements with the Trump campaign. In February 2017, a conference organized in association with the British Foreign Office by the FCO executive agency, Wilton Park, hosted two officials from SCL Group subsidiary, SCL Elections: Mark Turnbull, managing director, and David Wilkinson, then lead data scientist. Turnbull and Wilkinson addressed the conference on the subject of “examining the application of data in the recent US Presidential election”.

The meeting, attended and opened by Jonathan Allen — the FCO’s Acting Director General for Defence and Intelligence — was described by a Wilton Park conference program document as being designed to “explore new opportunities for the FCO to make better use of data in diplomacy, but also emerging threats that challenge the current ways of working.”

The forum’s focus was on assessing “opportunities and threats” that are “of particular application to the FCO’s role in diplomacy and making international policy.” Intended outcomes of the meeting included: “Ideas and recommendations for the FCO to consider in making better use of data in foreign policy.”

Why is the FCO interested in the SCL Group’s data work to assist the Trump campaign?

INSIGHT: By implication the British government sees such techniques as potentially useful in foreign theatres — which raises a further awkward question: How does SCL Elections’ Big Data strategy to help Trump, using a Facebook-powered system for behavioral profiling of mass populations, fit into the British government’s foreign policy agenda?

In response to this very question, an FCO spokesperson effectively refused to comment, directing me instead to speak with the MoD.

Information hegemony

It should be clear by now, then, that Facebook has been willingly complicit in the use of its platform for behavioral profiling and audience manipulation.

According to Trump’s digital campaign director, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign had Facebook employees “embedded inside our offices”, providing guidance on how the platform could be used to target voters. Facebook had even “set-up” divisions within the company by political affiliation to support both sides.

In a statement about the platform’s alleged role in facilitating Trump’s election victory, Facebook clarified that it had offered “identical support” to both the Trump and Clinton teams.

“Everyone had access to the same tools,” the company said. “Both campaigns approached things differently and used different amounts of support.”

Trump and Brexit notwithstanding, the biggest beneficiary of all this activity is not SCL Group, nor the military industrial complex, nor the US, Russian or British governments — but Facebook itself.

Facebook, which is on track to be more powerful than the NSA within less than 10 years, is profiting massively from all sides of the information war.

Beneath the liberal veneer of “making the world more open and connected”, Mark Zuckerberg has taken the traditional business model of corrupt arms trafficking and applied it, wholeheartedly, to cyberspace.

Facebook thus holds the one card that truly counts in the 21st century era of power through propaganda: information dominance.

When the company responded to my inquiries, they did so through a consultant at the giant PR firm Teneo Blue Rubicon (TBR). Facebook seemed somewhat nervous about its anwers. At first, the TBR consultant warned that none of the comments could be “attributed to a Facebook spokesperson”, as they are for “background information only”.

Five hours later, it seemed, Facebook had changed its mind. The consultant emailed me: “Facebook is happy for you to use these as on the record comments.”

And so the circle closes as we see how even Facebook’s UK PR consultants, Teneoe Blue Rubicon, have curious ties to the very same network surround SCL Group.

In October 2016, Beth Armstrong, a former Special Advisor to Michael Gove who also provided ministerial support to Vote Leave, joined Teneo Blue Rubicon as a senior consultant.

In between, from 2014 to 2015, she had served as a senior consultant in Bell Pottinger’s Public Affairs division alongside Mark Turnbull, right before he went on to join SCL Elections, which oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook work to help win the Trump campaign.

This is the incestuous nexus of power that Facebook has become entwined with. Yet it is a nexus of power fundamentally enabled by our own bizarre and persistent addiction to the platform.

By 2025, holding the capacity to seamlessly monitor, analyze and model the behavior of almost the entire global population, the company will hold a global reach that is truly frightening.

Its consolidation could well signal the final subjugation of our already fragile democracies to the manipulative, unaccountable reach of Big Data.

And yet, the perversion of our democratic processes is only a fraction of the platform’s corrosive impact on civil society. Facebook’s basic business model is about centralizing profits through degrading techniques of dopamine-driven persuasion, which sow deep social divisions, stoke polarizing behaviors, and undermine psychological health.

We must ask ourselves? Why are we still plugged in?

This monocultural future is not inevitable. There is a way out, toward a polycultural future.

If we don’t, then in less than 10 years, an unaccountable Big Data behemoth will usher in a dangerous new era of global social control, like nothing we’ve ever seen.