Is the 'American disease' already making Australian democracy ill?
During the recent South
Australian election, take a guess how many Labor policy announcements made the
front page of The Advertiser, the State’s only major newspaper? If you guessed
zero, you would almost be right. In fact, there were only two – a promise by
Labor to invest in TAFE, and even then it was half a tiny corner article, worth
36 words, with the other half given to a Liberal election pledge, and Labor’s
loans for solar panels and batteries, again a handful of words, and sitting
beside a Liberal promise. You’ll need a magnifying glass to spot the articles
on the front pages below..
Looking at those front pages it was easy to see what Victoria Rollison meant.
But was it more than just News Corp playing Murdoch's favourite game of Labor bashing?
Like
Turnbull in 2016, Marshall and his team have been criticised for not being
sufficiently aggressive about Labor’s failings. But they have run short, sharp
and effective negative TV commercials (the sort that bewilderingly never came
in the federal campaign) around the theme of “I’ve had enough, Jay” which
neatly captures the mood for a corrective change. This is a good example of how
paid advertising can deliver tough messages if politicians are reluctant.
Yet
a sense of coasting has worried many Liberal supporters and observers. When I
told a group of Adelaide Liberals last month that Marshall and his team seemed
insufficiently combative towards Labor and Xenophon, a frontbencher pulled me
aside afterwards and showed me his phone. He argued I misunderstood their
methods, that public assertions and media debates were not the main game. He
showed me his i360 app, a new campaigning tool that has
revolutionised the Liberals’ marginal seats campaigning.
Through i360 the
SA Liberals believe they have progressed to a new level of targeted
campaigning, leaping far ahead of what has been used before by either major
party in Australia. If they perform well, we can expect a technological and
tactical quantum leap forward at the next federal campaign.
In
his quick demonstration, the MP called up a marginal seat, much like finding a
suburb on Google Maps, then zoomed in to a street where pins identified
addresses deemed to house swinging voters. Deeper dives on households contained
genders, ages, voting intentions or lack thereof as well as policy interests.
The information is collated from the party’s existing Feedback system, updates
from doorknocking and calls, responses to surveys conducted via email, online
or phone calls plus census data and the harvesting of social media data. This
is Big Brother meets grassroots campaigning. Neither the data nor the
technology is much use without quality information fed in and strong analysis
leading to the right strategies, along with diligent personalised attention in
follow-up visits and communications.
This
is leading-edge campaigning, as i360’s website explains. “Data is the
difference,” it proclaims, describing its “extensive political identification”
through information collected from “in-person, phone and online surveys, as
well as through partner relationships in addition to lifestyle and consumer
data” purchased from “top-tier” providers. “Our data is further enhanced by our
suite of predictive models, filling in gaps and helping us build the most
complete profile for every individual possible,” it says.
Billionaire
US Republican sponsors Charles and David Koch are major investors in the firm,
which openly canvasses only for “free-market” candidates. The SA Liberals
purchased a product licence and have worked with i360 to modify
systems for compulsory and preferential voting. Motivated by the frustration of
2014 where, despite a huge popular vote win, just a few hundred votes in the
right seats would have made all the difference, Marshall has driven this
innovative approach. He and novice Liberal state director Sascha Meldrum
visited the US in August 2016 to assess the system before other campaign
strategists joined the training and implementation.
If the Liberals surprise on
the upside today, SA’s expertise will be immediately sought after for the
looming Victoria, NSW and federal campaigns.
Long
lead times help and the SA Liberals have had more than a year to build up data
and, crucially, follow up on targeted voters more than once. This is where
grassroots organisation, numbers on the ground and diligence are essential,
lest intelligence is wasted for lack of personal politicking, but the potential
for efficiency, personalised material and two-way feedback to shape policies
and messages is huge. Even in an age when you can get an app for everything, no
app can win you an election. And I still think public policy differentiation
and aggression are crucial.But if the Liberals form a majority even after the
unprecedented Xenophon disruption, expect to hear a lot more about i360 and
data-driven campaigning.
So what
exactly is i360?
This is what
it said of itself at www.i-360.com on 31 March
2018:
At i360® we believe
THE DATA IS THE DIFFERENCE. But what does that mean? Simply put, it means
integrating data in everything we do to produce the most effective outcomes for
every one of our clients.
At the core of the
i360 operation is a comprehensive database of all 18+ American consumers
and voters containing thousands of pieces of individual and aggregated
information that give us the full picture of who they are, where they live,
what they do and what is happening around them. Leveraging this and our
capabilities in data science, analytics, technology development and
advertising, we help clients take their efforts to the next level by embracing
the concept of truly borderless data.
i360 boast of these statistics:
Snapshot of section of i360 home page, 31 March 2018
i360 has a multiple presences on Facebook eg. i360online and i360Gov.com. [IP addresses are deliberately not supplied in this post and caution is urged if readers decide to vist these pages]
i360 aslo boasts of playing a "crucial" part in the South Australian election on its
"Newsroom" page.
This
is what is said of this company elsewhere………
Kochs
have a far more sophisticated operation called i360. And they track, as you
heard in the little clip from my film, 1800 pieces of data on you dynamically
and on a continuous basis. They basically know your credit card purchases, they
know your cable viewing habits. This is a lot deeper into your guts and soul
and privacy than even your Facebook profile from Cambridge Analytica. And also
you have a very similar operation used by Karl Rove. That's the guy that was
known as Bush's brain, though Bush calls him Turd Blossom. This is the, Karl
Rove was the engineer of some of the creepiest and possibly illegal activities
behind the Bush campaigns. He's still out there with his own database operation
called Data Trust, whose main client is the Republican National Committee.
These
operations do more than grab some of your private information or just your
Facebook profiles. Some of their activities have actually unquestionably bent
elections not just by convincing you do things, you know, their idea is to try
to zombify, you know, know everything about you and manipulate you. But
sometimes they go way, way beyond that in their operations to win elections….
They're
targeting you because they know very personal things about you. They literally
know, as Mark Sweetland says, we're not making that up as an example, it's
really true. For example, i360 knows if you downloaded porn and then order
Chinese food before you voted. They can use that information to manipulate how
you vote. And by the way, deviously, whether you vote at all. They can convince
you not to vote. That's a real powerful tool that they have. That's part of the
game, is convincing you not to vote. So that's one of things that they do…..
…they
can convince you. For example, a lot of the, lot of the targeting about Hillary
Clinton was not to get you to vote for Trump but to get voters who, for
example, voted for Bernie Sanders or others, to convince them not to vote at
all. And that was very, very effective, for example, in Wisconsin, where
according to a University of Wisconsin study, about 50000 people, mostly
students in Madison County and Milwaukee, didn't vote because they were
convinced that, that Hillary was evil enough that it just didn't matter. They
may be crying now, but the but the-…..
Encourage
apathy and saying that your vote doesn't matter. And that's one of the things
that they're very good at. But the other is very, some of it's not too subtle,
OK. For example, in Wisconsin the Koch brothers, a spinoff from i360, one of
the operators there working with Kochs sent out e-mails, and sent out social ,
sent out e-mails to people on their databases who own guns, who live in rural
areas and normally vote by mail-in ballot. And they sent them messages saying,
protect your guns. And these are also all Democrats. Protect your guns and
vote. Make sure you send your absentee ballot to this address on this date. The
address was wrong, and the date was too late to get your vote counted. So that
was one way that Scott Walker, for example, won his against his recall in the
recall referendum. Then they rolled it out. The same trick. Wrong date, wrong
address for your absentee ballots to minority and Democratic voters in North
Carolina. And then throughout the South.
So
some of this is really fraudulently stealing your vote away. And that's just,
that was the i360 spinoff. Then you have Data Trust, which is Karl Rove's
operation. they used an operation which I uncovered working with the Guardian
and BBC called caging. And what caging is is you send letters, Karl Rove used
his databases to target, for example, students, black students in black
colleges who were away from their school on summer vacation. They are
registered, these were students registered, for example, in the swing state of
Florida. And they knew that they weren't at their at their voting addresses
even though they are legal voters because they were home for the vacations.
They sent letters. When the letters marked Do Not Forward came back to the
Republican National Committee, those voters were challenge as not existing, and
they lost their vote. They sent these letters as well to black soldiers and
airmen at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. They sent letters to men at
homeless shelters you don't always get their mail. And as a result they used,
they used this information to challenge the right of those voters' ballots to
be counted. If they mailed them in their ballots would be junked. If they try
to show up to vote they were blocked from voting. That's the ugly, ugly and
truly actually illegal use of these databases, and that's just some examples
we've uncovered.
Well,
I think that Cambridge Analytica, which is like I say, the least sophisticated,
and they try to use brain massaging. By the way, they also use other tactics.
One of the services that they offer, I just you know, is to is to say that
they'll set up your opponent, political opponent, with hookers and tape them.
So it's not just, they've got that database and then they would, of course, use
their social networking thing to blow it all up. But it will have a huge impact
on the 2018 election. A bigger impact on 2020.
And
this includes other operations that these database guys are working on. One of
them you mentioned, a guy Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas. He is
Trump's what I call Vote Thief in Chief. He was officially appointed to run
Trump's so-called vote fraud commission. One of the databases he uses is a roll
crosscheck, where he gives lists of voters he says are registered or actually
vote in two states in a single election, which is illegal. He has claimed with
Donald Trump that three million people voted twice, mostly voters of color. And
I'm the only journalist to actually have, I have a copy of the of of his list
of double voters. The three million double voters. And it's people with names
like Jose Garcia, and David Lee, and John Black. These are just common names of
voters of color, but not, you know, obviously not common for Republicans.
But
you'll see names in this, for example, Maria Cristina Hernandez is supposed to
be the same voter as Maria Inez Hernandez. That person is supposed to be the
same voter who voted one in Virginia and one in Georgia. That's their claim.
And those voters named Garcia and Hernandez lose their vote. On that list, two
million of those accused voters, people accused of voting twice, don't have the
same middle name. Two million people accused don't have the same middle name,
and they are removing, this is important, they're actually removing hundreds of
thousands of people from the voter rolls as we speak. In fact without, without
this game, this database game called Crosscheck, which is Trump and Kobach's
database, Trump would not have won in 2016…..
It's
serious stuff. Because if it were simply a matter of targeted advertising,
convince you to vote for their candidate, that's all right.
But
Cambridge Analytica has been, their, their chiefs were caught on tape by
Channel 4, one of the outlets I work with, by Channel 4 investigators in
Britain, saying that they will create fake news about your opponent and use
their social networking abilities and use their particular targeting of
individuals, their social networking habits, to spread fake news about your
opponent. And they said we can do it in a way that no one will know that we've
been involved. They said they successfully did this already in other countries.
We don't even know how many countries because they make a point of keeping
their involvement hidden. This is very, very scary stuff. They are deliberately
creating, Donald Trump's screaming about fake news, but he employed the fake
news generator. That's the big problem. That's one of the very big problems of
Cambridge Analytica, and I know that we have that same problem with Data Trust,
i360, and some of the others.
