Russia Needed Help Targeting U.S. Voters, Two Ex-CIA Chiefs Say

[.99center]

Source: bloomberg

By Chris Strohm
October 4, 2017, 4:46 PM CDT

Two former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency said Russia probably didn’t have the ability to microtarget U.S. voters and districts in the 2016 presidential campaign on its own, meaning some sort of assistance would have been necessary.

"It is not intuitively obvious that they could have done this themselves," former CIA director Michael Hayden said in an interview Wednesday in Washington.

Michael Morell, who spent his career at the CIA including a stint as acting director of the agency, said in a separate interview that Russia either needed someone to help give it information on microtargeting or stole the necessary information, such as through hacking.

"They do not have the analytic capability to do that themselves," Morell said.


Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-04/russia-needed-help-targeting-u-s-voters-two-ex-cia-chiefs-say

[Ligyron]

1. Oh no, they were given the info.

We need to find out who, what, where, when and why.

Bet the Mercers were in on it.

[QED]

3. And Jared.

It's always Jared.

[NCjack]

9. Mercers provide the money; Jared gets the worker bees; Ivanka is the brains.

[cstanleytech]

13. Now I have that "He went to Jared" commercial in my head, thanks LOL

[moda253]

16. They went to Jared....

Eom

[Scarsdale]

18. Ivanka is the brains???

Surely you jest. Ivanka is nothing more than a blow up sex toy for daddy.Her time is spent getting Botox injections and massages. Her tiny brain would not be able to handle this. She may or may not be smarter than Beavis and Butthead (her brothers) but she ain't no "brain" When she is interviewed on TV, it takes forever for her to think of an answer, then adjust her mouth to speak.

[lapfog_1]

2. cambridge analytica

[denverbill]

12. +1

[trof]

4. it was an inside job.

Donnie Two-Scoops' campaign fingerprints are all over this.

[Baitball Blogger]

5. Don't forget low-tech polling companies that collect data for Republicans.

No reason why the information they collect would be any less helpful than the information they obtained from Facebook.

[ffr]

6. Unless they were able to analyze historical election data, they'd have needed

help from someone who had up to date information they needed. Election campaigns would have that kind of information at their fingertips.

HFA did.

[truthisfreedom]

7. You can see exactly where this is gonna go. The repuke operatives left the security weak

on the servers that contained the essential voter data needed to determine the microtargeting, and the hackers were directed to the weakened servers to establish plausible denial.

[FailureToCommunicate]

8. This

[cstanleytech]

14. Probably but even if we had rock hard evidence of that happening the Repugnant base

would lap up Donalds claims of it being fake news like a dog lapping up a T bone steak that dropped on the floor in front of it.

[rockfordfile]

10. Trump/GOP colluded with Russians to basically attack our country.

[tiptonic]

11. Programs

Wasn't some of the software, developed by the russians, themselves?

[raven mad]

15. Hey................mmmm Jared?

[farmbo]

17. This explains the mysterious data transmissions from Trump Tower...

... servers to servers at Russia's Alpha Bank in mid 2016:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/09/politics/fbi-investigation-continues-into-odd-computer-link-between-russian-bank-and-trump-organization/index.html

It's quite likely that these data feeds included the voter profile information which was Cambridge Analytics' stock in trade.

This drove the Russian social media ad buys and allowed them to mobilize their Bot army to push engineered Fake News stories (real fake news-- not Trump's interminable, whining fake news) into every swing voters' Facebook and Twitter feeds in Michigan and Wisconsin.

[Trillo]

19. Marketing and the web

Thought I'd pop in and mention a fact. Many websites today which any of us visit use 1st, 2nd, 3rd party scripting. Besides Google, Facebook, and Twitter, there are usually others as well. The most aggressive websites require these scripts to all be allowed until the desired content is visible in the browser. Thus, anyone who merely visits these websites is giving away, at a minimum, information about their reading interests to many parties, not just the 1st party URL.

I'm logging out after this posting, so won't see any replies.