Scl Quotes

British data analytics company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare. The American affiliate of SCL, of which Robert Mercer became principal owner, was christened Cambridge Analytica. (Bannon, too, took an ownership stake and a seat on the company’s board.) The

SCL takes on the task of convincing the entire country’s population to comply with lockdown rules by inventing a lie about an unleashed cloud of toxic chemicals. The mission’s objective is to prevent mass panic and casualties from the classified threat of smallpox. SCL feeds disinformation to the press and manufactures medical data. “Londoners stay indoors . . . convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal.

When the Oakes brothers ran a defense campaign to stop election violence in South Africa in 1994, they helped to bring about the peaceful election of Nelson Mandela. As Alexander had shown me when I first visited the SCL offices, Mandela himself had endorsed SCL.

But merely having Big Data wasn’t the solution, he said. Knowing what to do with it was the key. That involved more scientific and precise ways of putting people into categories: “Democrat,” “environmentalist,” “optimist,” “activist,” and the like. And for years, the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, had been identifying and sorting people using the most sophisticated method in behavioral psychology, which gave it the capability of turning what was otherwise just a mountain of information about the American populace into a gold mine.

Recently, Filipino politics kinda looks a lot like the United States,” he continued, rolling his eyes and gesturing with his hands. “You’ve got a president who was Trump before Trump was Trump, and you have relationships with people close to him with SCL and Cambridge Analytica. And you had a lot of data being collected—the second largest amount of data after the United States being collected in the Philippines. Also if you look at how SCL and Cambridge Analytica operated in a lot of countries . . . one of the things they talk about is that they use . . . they don’t go into a country as Cambridge Analytica. They don’t go into a country as SCL Group because it’s too obvious. So you use local partners—” “Proxies,” I clarified. “You use proxies,” he continued. “. . . They’re on camera admitting this. They go into countries, set up bullshit companies that are just fronts and they send in staff. It makes it very difficult for regulators or opposition parties to actually identify what’s happening. And as they also have admitted, once an election is done, they just get out. So they’re in. They’re out. They’ve got their guy in, and then you know they can come back and ask for favors.” “Okay,” I interrupted, “Alexander Nix [the Cambridge Analytica president] came to the Philippines at the end of 2015 before the campaigns began, and there was a photo of him—”13 “Yeah, he met with people there,” said Chris. “—the staff of Duterte,” I finished. “Yeah! What do you think he was doing there?” Chris asked.14

played a recording of Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. ‘Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,’ said Oakes. ‘So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.’ Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

AggregateIQ, but it signed an intellectual property agreement that granted SCL the rights to its work. SCL and, later, Cambridge Analytica frequently took advantage of a network of offshore companies registered under different names. Similar to the strategies employed by tax avoidance schemes, this network of companies around the world helped Cambridge Analytica bypass the scrutiny of electoral or data privacy regulators.