8 ms·

Cambridge Analytica raided by UK data watchdog

112 points by doppp 9y ago

nightcracker 9y ago
Too late...
- alkonaut 9y 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 9y ago
    The legal term for the phenomenon is "spoliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence
  - TomK32 9y ago
    Didn't know that. Thank you.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      I’m not sure this is the case here. It may well be that in this case they are going for a fruitless search for material destroyed days ago. But at least I hope they are more clever than that.
  - pyjammas 9y 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 9y 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.
- rsynnott 9y 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.
rdiddly 9y 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 9y ago
  I was just reading this article about Kogan https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/24/cambridge-analytica-academics-work-upset-university-colleagues 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 $500k being bandied about, is that the going rate for stuff like this these days?
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    Thank you for the article, very interesting. At first read I had the impression that Kogan was criticized on an "ethical" base, then re-reading it, I understood that they were only arguing on how to divide the loot. If SCL actually had given 1 million, half to Kogan and 1/4 each to Kosinski and Stilwell, we wouldn't have the mails. >The correspondence reveals the deep anxiety among university psychologists over the activities of Kogan, ... Deep anxiety over the activities my sock, they wanted US$ 500,000 and were proposed only US$ 100,000 instead, and there started the disagreement ...
- gabipurcaru 9y ago
  did Facebook deny responsibility?
  - Analemma_ 9y 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.
adamnemecek 9y ago
This is on the front page of reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/86qxrb/cambridge_analytica_moving_boxes_out_of_their/ 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 9y 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-search-warrant-for-cambridge-analyticas-offices https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/judge-grants-se...
  - passivepinetree 9y ago
    Skepticism is healthy.
  - adamnemecek 9y 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 9y 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+analytica&sortBy=date&dateRange=pastWeek https://www.reuters.com/search/pictures?blob=cambridge+analy... )
- IAmEveryone 9y 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.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Big Brother raids Step Brother for data provided by Little Brother. I can't imagine I'm any safer now.
- vinay427 9y 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 https://ico.org.uk
  - chiefalchemist 9y 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?
    - vinay427 9y ago
      I suppose you directed this to me, so to be honest, I don't know. I'm not British and didn't know about this agency before I posted my comment. I just wanted to raise the point that the government isn't a monolithic entity that can be solely described by its actions that we disapprove of.
cs702 9y 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.
- pjc50 9y 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.
  - 46886532558 9y 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.
    - YorkshireSeason 9y ago
      they are like reeeally left wing The historical record of the extreme left is extremely pro-state, pro surveillance. Indeed, the Marxist corrective to freewheeling capitalism was a strong socialist state (to cover the period before communism emerges and the state withers away) [1]. Many modern surveillance techniques were pioneered or refined by the likes of the OGPU [2], the NKVD [3] and their equivalents in satellite states like the Stasi [4] in the GDR, or the secret police in China (sorry I have no good reference). Note that both Wilhelm Zaisser [5](founder of the Stasi) and Kang Sheng [6] (founder of China's secret police) had worked in Moscow under Stalin in the security services. This is historically very well documented, but seems to be somehow unpalatable ... [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_State_Political_Directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_State_Political_Director... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Zaisser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Zaisser [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Sheng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Sheng Edit: replaced "left" by "extreme left" for additional clarity.
pjc50 9y ago
Relatedly, some more Brexit whistleblowing: https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/977601337889312768 https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/977601337889312768 and https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-outing_uk_5ab62a25e4b008c9e5f776e8 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-outing_uk_5ab6...
- krona 9y ago
  Sorry, I failed to see the relevance, apropos Cambridge Analytica.
  - n4r9 9y 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.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Specifically this includes allegations that they were doing work which was outside the election spending rules.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sctb 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16662141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16662141

112 points by doppp 9y ago

nightcracker 9y ago

Too late...

alkonaut 9y 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 9y ago
  The legal term for the phenomenon is "spoliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence
- TomK32 9y ago
  Didn't know that. Thank you.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    I’m not sure this is the case here. It may well be that in this case they are going for a fruitless search for material destroyed days ago. But at least I hope they are more clever than that.
- pyjammas 9y 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 9y 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.
rsynnott 9y 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.

rdiddly 9y 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 9y ago
I was just reading this article about Kogan https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/24/cambridge-analytica-academics-work-upset-university-colleagues 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 $500k being bandied about, is that the going rate for stuff like this these days?
- jaclaz 9y ago
  Thank you for the article, very interesting. At first read I had the impression that Kogan was criticized on an "ethical" base, then re-reading it, I understood that they were only arguing on how to divide the loot. If SCL actually had given 1 million, half to Kogan and 1/4 each to Kosinski and Stilwell, we wouldn't have the mails. >The correspondence reveals the deep anxiety among university psychologists over the activities of Kogan, ... Deep anxiety over the activities my sock, they wanted US$ 500,000 and were proposed only US$ 100,000 instead, and there started the disagreement ...
gabipurcaru 9y ago
did Facebook deny responsibility?
- Analemma_ 9y 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.

adamnemecek 9y ago

This is on the front page of reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/86qxrb/cambridge_analytica_moving_boxes_out_of_their/ 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 9y 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-search-warrant-for-cambridge-analyticas-offices https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/judge-grants-se...
- passivepinetree 9y ago
  Skepticism is healthy.
- adamnemecek 9y 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 9y 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+analytica&sortBy=date&dateRange=pastWeek https://www.reuters.com/search/pictures?blob=cambridge+analy... )
IAmEveryone 9y 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.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

Big Brother raids Step Brother for data provided by Little Brother. I can't imagine I'm any safer now.

vinay427 9y 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 https://ico.org.uk
- chiefalchemist 9y 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?
  - vinay427 9y ago
    I suppose you directed this to me, so to be honest, I don't know. I'm not British and didn't know about this agency before I posted my comment. I just wanted to raise the point that the government isn't a monolithic entity that can be solely described by its actions that we disapprove of.

cs702 9y 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.

pjc50 9y 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.
- 46886532558 9y 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.
  - YorkshireSeason 9y ago
    they are like reeeally left wing The historical record of the extreme left is extremely pro-state, pro surveillance. Indeed, the Marxist corrective to freewheeling capitalism was a strong socialist state (to cover the period before communism emerges and the state withers away) [1]. Many modern surveillance techniques were pioneered or refined by the likes of the OGPU [2], the NKVD [3] and their equivalents in satellite states like the Stasi [4] in the GDR, or the secret police in China (sorry I have no good reference). Note that both Wilhelm Zaisser [5](founder of the Stasi) and Kang Sheng [6] (founder of China's secret police) had worked in Moscow under Stalin in the security services. This is historically very well documented, but seems to be somehow unpalatable ... [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_State_Political_Directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_State_Political_Director... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Zaisser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Zaisser [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Sheng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Sheng Edit: replaced "left" by "extreme left" for additional clarity.

pjc50 9y ago

Relatedly, some more Brexit whistleblowing: https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/977601337889312768 https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/977601337889312768 and https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-outing_uk_5ab62a25e4b008c9e5f776e8 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-outing_uk_5ab6...

krona 9y ago
Sorry, I failed to see the relevance, apropos Cambridge Analytica.
- n4r9 9y 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.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Specifically this includes allegations that they were doing work which was outside the election spending rules.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sctb 9y ago

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