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September 19, 2020

Targeted, by Brittany Kaiser A Book Review

By Herbert Calhoun

A review of Brittany Kaiser's book "Targeted." It takes the reader through the hidden halls of data-mining as Ms Kaiser experienced it the hard way by Cambridge Analytica's CEO Alexander Nix. It is an "object lesson" in high-class griffery.

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Targeted, by Brittany Kaiser

Another Dream Deferred ...

Ms. Kaiser, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed slightly left-leaning wobbly-kneed Democrat and PhD student, was out in the world making it on her own, and "doing good" at it.

When her family hit a few financial rough patches, continuing to volunteer for good causes without pay, ceased to be an option.

In pursuit of a salary-paying job, a friend introduced her to a suave polo-playing upper-class Englishman named Alexander Nix. Nix was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica (CA), the American spin-off of its mothership, the SCL Group.

Established in 1993, with Steve Bannon on its board of directors, the SCL Group was founded and funded by the ultra-conservative father-daughter billionaire duo, John and Rebekah Mercer.

SCL had established a track record as a successful consulting firm that gave sound political advice to governments and politicians across the globe.

In her job interview, Nix's pitch to Brittany was mind-bendingly seductive: CA was already successful at the leading edge of the new business sitting at the intersection of Big Data and Social Media. Using various social media platforms like Facebook, to marry them to each other and to politics through micro-targeted psychographics messaging, would be every data analyst's wet dream.

Such was the case for Brittany Kaiser.

Working with Nix would help expand her experience in an area where she was already a budding expert. She envisioned herself moving up fast possibly as high as the CEO of CA itself, while making tons of money.

Nix wowed her even further into this wet-dream by telling her that CA was now ready to enter the big game and go after the big fish, after the holy grail itself: using its tools, not just to read minds, but also to change them.

Brittany was no dummy, she came with a healthy built-in moral compass equipped with a sensitive crap-detecting antenna, and thus could see around the moral corners at what was being left unsaid in the subtext: Any fool could see that SCL and CA were in the business of using these tools as a means to any ends that yielded a profit or better, political power. Full stop.

As a result, she could see (even though she did not want to) that they were busy enriching themselves and gaining power by using their tools and the big data they had purchased, unregulated, and without regard to their moral consequences: If the money was right, the tools, remained morally neutral, and thus could be used for evil just as readily as for good.

And, as Nix so cleverly hinted to Brittany, the biggest test case yet was just around the corner: electing the next American president.

He suggested to her that, that train was already pulling out of the station, and if she wanted money and fame, she had better get aboard.

Brittany signed on not just because she would be working at the leading edge of a new exciting technology, and because her family needed the money, but also because, if things worked out as she had dreamed, she knew how to eventually vector those same tools in a direction that would give them a moral conscience such as using them for "preventive diplomacy."

But like the dream I once had to use military computer simulations in the social sphere to improve the lives of the poor, Brittney's dream too was to be another dream deferred.

Instead of becoming the first to use those tools for "preventive diplomacy," Ms. Kaiser would spend five years helping Alexander Nix become a rich, disloyal conniving "con" artist.

Her dreams died while watching Nix stuff his own pockets at her and everybody else's expense. When the evil within CA metastasized, envy and disappointment turned into revenge.

When her conscience finally awoke, and could take no more, Brittany put on her mother's best dress, and turned whistleblower to set the record straight. But she was only one of several to blow the whistle on the evil uses to which the new technologies and data were being put.

In a series of stunning admissions and revelations before Commissions in both the UK and America, we learned from her how weapons of mass disinformation can be, and were, weaponized to destabilize the world.

The essence of the technology can be summarized simply: Big Data, accessible at a modest price on the mostly unregulated major social media platforms, could be used to mine layers of information on huge numbers of innocent people (240 million voters in the US alone).

Predictive algorithms could then be hooked up to templates of individual psychographic profiles. Breaking these profiles into five group, an iterative Bayesian calculator could then be used to predict the most likely behavior of every individual in the CA data base.

Not only could innocent subjects' behaviors be accurately predicted, but with new micro-targeted messages after each iteration, those predictions could be refined and vectored in a specific behavioral direction.

At each iteration, the validity of each micro-targeted message is continually retested, and then recalibrated and readjusted until a refined and desired statistical level of confidence and behavioral response is achieved.

An electrifying read. Five stars.



Authors Bio:
Retired Foreign Service Officer and past Manager of Political and Military Affairs at the US Department of State. For a brief time an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Denver and the University of Washington at Seattle. A graduate of the National War College and a Phd from the University of Southern California.

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