Category Archives: Malcolm Turnbull

US polling firm connected with Cambridge Analytica, working in Australia

I was reading an article by The Guardian yesterday morning, about a company associated with American Republicans polling Australians, for their views about same-sex marriage. The Republican-linked element of the story piqued my interest, bear with me, I will come back to the polling. I looked up the name of the company, WPA Intelligence, there wasn’t much about them, until I happened across a Medium article titled ‘WPA Opinion Research Announces Name Change to WPA Intelligence.’ It was written in April this year by Chris Wilson, he was the director of research and analytics for the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz. He took leave from WPA Opinion Research for the role and worked closely with Cambridge Analytica (CA) throughout the campaign, he received more than US$1 million for his work during the campaign. He is well known as a Republican, political strategist and pollster, and regularly appears on Fox News.

Much has been learned about Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s use of micro-targeting and data, but not so much about the inroads made during the Cruz campaign.

The Cruz campaign hired CA to assist it with data collection, it surveyed 150,000 households across America and scored them on five personality traits, known as OCEAN:

Openness (how open are you to new experiences)

Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?)

Extroversion (how sociable are you?)

Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?)

Neuroticism (are you easily upset?)

The Cruz campaign amended the CA template by renaming some psychological categories, and adding subcategories to the list such as ‘stoic traditionalist’ and ‘true believer.’ It also did field surveys in key states to finesse their predictive model. The Cruz algorithm was then applied to an ‘enhanced voter file.’ These files can contain as many as 50,000 data points, collected from voting records, popular websites like Facebook, magazine subscriptions, car ownership and what food and clothing that voters like.  

Another tactic employed by the campaign was geo-fencing, this allows you to send targeted messages to a city block or a building. For example, the Republican Jewish Coalition was meeting at the Ventian Hotel in Las Vegas, so they sent out web-based ads that could only be seen from inside the hotel complex. The ads emphasised Cruz’s faithfulness to Israel. They also had a Cruz Crew mobile app for supporters to download, with points and prizes, once they handed over access to their contact lists.   

CA also made behavioural psychologists readily available for advice, as ads were being scripted and had their staff embedded in the Cruz headquarters. When Cruz dropped out and ceded to Trump, CA joined Trump’s campaign, with a data set they named ‘Alamo’. The campaign not only utilised all of the strategies above and invested millions of dollars into social media. Facebook, Google and YouTube representatives were sent to their headquarters, liaising with CA staff, they were given the VIP treatment and guided as to how to effectively use their platforms. One of the campaign’s digital leaders, Theresa Wong, believes that they couldn’t have won the election without Facebook.  Robert Mercer, who started out backing Cruz, also joined the campaign and was Trump’s biggest donor. He has a US$10 million stake in CA and provided the financial backing for Breitbart news. More details are in the first link at the end of this article.            

CA were in Australia in March this year, and they met with Liberal party officials for a dinner and attended an ADMA (Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising), data analytics conference.

“Senior Liberals will be talking to Mr Nix and the Cambridge Analytica team while they’re out here in Australia, and will be interested to talk with them about their capacities and what they’re offering people in the Australian political system,” said Tony Nutt, party’s federal director.  

The Liberal Party federal director, Tony Nutt resigned from his position in April this year, on the eve of a report that investigated last year’s dismal Liberal party election campaign.

Returning to the push-polling by WPA Intelligence, it asked seven questions. The first question is about whether you have a favourable or unfavourable view of Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The second one asks if you intend to vote in the postal survey and the third one asks whether you support or oppose, don’t plan on voting or are unsure about your vote. It then provides two statements:

“Denying some people the option to marry is discriminatory and creates a second class of citizens”; and

“Legalising same-sex marriage may lead to negative consequences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”

After hearing these it asks again if you support or oppose same-sex marriage. The poll finishes with questions about your age and sex for verification purposes. It sounds as though the same-sex postal survey is being used as a message-testing tool, to help gather data about Australians. The data insights from the poll can then be used to better tailor messages to voters, in the future. Should a foreign country be meddling in the democracy of other countries? Is it not akin to Russian meddling in the American elections? And should CA or other foreign companies be profiting from elections in other countries?

How much was WPA Intelligence paid for this work and what is the overall strategy of the federal government, and their foreign partners? I hope that taxpayers aren’t paying to be manipulated by our own government. I’ll finish this with some insights about the recent Kenyan elections that CA and many other players were involved in.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, hired CA to help him win the Kenyan election, he won the election in a landslide, but Kenya’s Supreme Court has since nullified the results due to fraud. I’m not inferring that CA was behind this, they were paid US$6 million for their services, a small drop in the ocean compared with the US$1 billion spent overall on the election. It was the most expensive in Kenya’s history, and now it has to be held again. The court found problems with the transmission and the tallying of votes. Some paper votes weren’t recorded at all. Missing forms were submitted after the election, without watermarks or serial numbers, meaning that they were probably fake.  

GeoPoll found that ninety-percent of Kenyan’s also encountered false news reports on platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram. Facebook even had to take out a full page ad in a Kenyan newspaper offering tips to spot fake news. Nobody knows who was behind the fake news, but it’s thought to be a foreign company because it described a Raila Odinga presidency (the opposition leader), as apocalyptic in a sophisticated video ad. Again, I’m not inferring that CA was behind this either, but the modus operandi does sound familiar. The apocalyptic style of messaging is favoured by the likes of Steve Bannon, David Bossie, Robert Mercer and Citizens United. More detail can be found in number four of my series below.              

Below are links that provide much more detail about CA and things such as dark posts on Facebook. These are tailored, micro-targeted posts that only you can see, and much more. I will be coming back to this series, once I finish my piece about income management imposed on Australians.    

Cambridge Analytica arrives in Australia

Series: What is propaganda in 2017 and how did we get here? (1)

Jared Kushner, Facebook and Hacking: Propaganda in 2017 and how we got here (2)

US propaganda 100 years ago and how the media was influenced (3)

Kochtopus and getting to know some more players (4)

How history, communism and tax exempt foundations have led us here (5)

Many thanks to all of the sourced researchers, publications and artists involved in this article and in my series.

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The NBN is on the wrong path…

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Image from smh.com.au

After the coalition won government in 2013, the then Communications Minister and now current Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull promised that every Australian would have access to the National Broadband Network (NBN) by the end of 2016. This clearly won’t be happening and it’s understandable with such a large piece of infrastructure to get your cost projections wrong (including old Australian Labor Party (ALP) figures). Tasmania was to be the first state to have the NBN rolled out by the end of 2015, this has now been pushed out to September 2018. The coalition’s NBN main points of difference with their plan compared to the ALP plan was to roll it out sooner, with faster download speeds and cheaper.

The original budget for the government’s version of the NBN, which is a mixture of technologies and favours FTTN (fibre to the node) over FTTH (fibre to the house) was $29.5 billion this has blown out to $56 billion and counting. Now news is coming out from the less than 15% of Australian’s that do have the NBN, that it’s providing speeds less than the days of dial up or their ADSL2+.

Mr Bell, of Belmont North near Lake Macquarie, New South Wales lays the blame squarely at the feet of Malcolm Turnbull. He says:“My children are becoming cynical about promises made by…the Prime Minister about the fast FTTN NBN roll out. Could you please make enquiries of the appropriate officers or Ministers, as to whether the FTTN NBN will provide a worse service compared to the ADSL+2 it is replacing? At the moment that seems to be the case.”

Mr Alderton also lives in Belmont and is suffering the same challenges, He says:“What a joke, peak times download speeds around 4 Mbps, that’s less than my old ADSL2.”

Mr Wallace of Valentine, near Newcastle, thinks that the problem might be widespread. He says:“There are serious problems with the rollout across Newcastle due to the Fibre to the Node model used here…thinking about switching back to ADSL2+.”

There has been much talk about the copper wire network and how much of it needs replacing to achieve Mr Turnbull’s MTM (multi-technology mix) version of the NBN instead of the ALP version with optic fibre cable. Let’s not forget either that the ALP government had already paid Telstra $11.2 billion to essentially decommission the copper and HFC (hybrid-fibre-coaxial) networks. A figure of $55 million was given by the Turnbull government to replace the copper however a leaked document from late last year suggests a 1000% blowout with the cost being more like $641 million. The figure is so large because it’s for 8.5 million metres of copper of which is enough to lay down between Perth and Pakistan and back again. There has also been Optus HFC network documents leak revealing that the government will need to replace it to achieve it’s MTM at a cost of up to $375 million.   

So far the government and Mr Turnbull have failed in their promises with their alternative NBN. One of the reasons that Mr Turnbull has used in the past for favouring FTTN, is that AT&T also favour it yet they now offer GigaPower which is a complete FTTH network. It previously offered FTTN but it also already had mainly fibre optic cables running for most of the network, with just the last mile or so with copper cables.

It’s pretty clear that a simple roll out of fibre optic cabling replacing the old copper and pay TV networks as you went, would be easier than not only resurrecting old technology but attempting to mix it together. Fair enough if it achieves higher speeds, a cheaper budget and is delivered in a timely manner but it hasn’t to date. It’s bleeding money, yet creating profit for the likes of Telstra and Optus while Australian’s that do have the NBN are now worse off than what they were to begin with. A truly connected Australia would surely inspire further innovation and instead of the focus being on the cost it’s about time that it was looked at as an investment. An investment in the future of the people of Australia.