, 03.21.2018 11:12 AM

Political parties and data mining: a whodunit

Young Canadian Christopher Wylie has been much in the news lately – among other things, for single-handedly hammering Facebook’s market value, and causing lots of political earthquakes in the U.S.

When Wylie was kicking around the Liberal Party of Canada, I didn’t know him.  “Couldn’t pick him out of a police line-up,” I told an enterprising Canadian Press reporter calling around about Wylie.  “Which may be where he is heading.”

As a result of all the controversy, the Liberal Party is being asked if it went along with Wylie’s apparent plan to illicitly/illegally abscond with the personal information of millions of voters.  The Liberals should be be asked those questions. The people who create the privacy rules should be expected to know and apply those rules.

But – as I just told a Walrus writer – it is ridiculous to think that just the Canadian Liberals and the American Republicans were the only ones doing this seamy data mining.  They weren’t, I assured her.

Here, ipso facto, is a presentation I gave many years ago about what the Harper/Kenney Conservatives were up to – and long before Christopher Wylie showed up in Ottawa. The Tories, I think, were in this space before anyone else in Canada.

Winning the Ethnic Vote Presentation – March 23 2011 by Warren Kinsella on Scribd

5 Comments

  1. whyshouldIsellyourwheat says:

    Justin Trudeau has his own Cambridge Analytica. Tom Pitfield’s Data Sciences Inc. Tom Pitfield, lifelong buddy and head of Canada 2020.

    Data Sciences Inc. likely has already obtained Facebook’s entire social graph from Obama’s people who in 2012 did pretty much exactly what Cambridge Analytica did in 2016.

    http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-campaign-connected-with-young-voters/

    So the Liberals really had no need for Wylie’s services. He didn’t have any new tricks that they did not already have after a brief “show-and-tell” for $100K on the taxpayers dime.

  2. the salamander horde says:

    warren is quite right.. . to this day, Canadians have zero info on what the Reformatory Party of Stephen Harper has accumulated on its laughably named ‘Nation Builder’ voter data base or where all the data came from, or who the guy with the red goatee in Julian Fantino’s war room was.. some 40 miles as the crow flies from where Michael Sona became famous. Of course the Guelph riding campaign manager relocated vacated suddenly to Kuwait or that vicinity immediately after, never to return except to visit. Nor did we get answers to who altered the log in logs.. whereby Sona somehow attacked 240 or so ridings simultaneously from a single burner phone via the database. I guess some things are just unknowable when it come to politics and datawanking and vote suppression

    • Fred from BC says:

      That’s an awful lot of words to express what is basically the act of pointing your finger at anyone other than the Liberals and shouting, “but THEY did it FIRST!”…

      Doesn’t make it any more excusable, sorry.

  3. Daryl Gordon says:

    We are now in a day and age where the major parties in US politics spend billions on campaigns , just proportionaly less in countries like Canada and elsewhere. Some of the most vicious and underhanded tactics are used in party nominations and primaries against people who are purportedly on the same team.

    With those ” win at all costs ” attitudes ingrained in modern political organizations, one would be very naive if you did not expect that campaigns would use any and all means available to get an advantage over opponents.

    Ethics, decency and in some cases legality don’t appear to matter anymore. Is it just a coincidence that many modern successful politicians retire with great wealth acquired during their public service years? Is it just by chance that public servants also enjoy gold standard compensation, retirement and health benefits?

    If the politics business operated on the same fiscal basis as private business, would anything change?

  4. Sam White says:

    Amy MacPherson in her twitter alleges Wylie is being used by LPC to “conceal privacy, security, consent breach” with regards to their liberalist database.

    Which led me to an interesting article, a long read but mind blowing if there is any truth to it.

    https://freethepresscanada.org/2018/03/22/pm-trudeaus-cousin-exposes-metoo-scandal-involving-liberalist-data/

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