In Your Russian Face ... book

[Richard Stanley]

In the past decade or so much has been speculated on Facebook being a spook front for USA Deep State data mining of USA and global citizens. (Now, it appears to also be a platform for precisely targeted, yellow faux news - aka propaganda). The below excerpted article discusses the heavy investment of the Russian oligarchy into Facebook, and given the oligarchy's Deep Putin State linkages we once more enter into an 'inter' 'national' hall of mirrors.

This article also mentions interests in mineral exploitation by the Russian oligarchs, as well as the Erik Prince plan to conquer the 1 trillion dollar mineral rights of Afghanistan, ironically(?) under the same general crony capitalist principle that the Russian oligarchs came to their ill gotten mineral and other wealth after the fraud re-distribution of USSR assets. Yet, the Russians have become heroes to numerous ignoramus American 'patriot's, including via Russian infiltration of the Evangelical Right and special interests like the NRA.

It is starting to appear that the actual Trump connections to Russia, via his desires to develop Trumpian properties, at least, is a black rabbit hole - by design. I'm hoping to develop this further on my Trump thread, on the basis is that it was impossible for Trump to have been successful developing properties in Russia, as his 'branding' business model is 180 degrees wrong for the Russian real estate market. If he was really serious (for decades), then he would have adopted a different model and not employed intermediary clowns like Sater. He could have found out Sater was useless with one or two phone calls.

As Jan Irvin and Gene Odening agree, it's all about the good (elite yet non-Zionist) civilized exploitation of the Earth's assets. Nothing else matters. When Yah looks in the smokey hallway mirror, he sees Odin staring back.

...
In 2009, Facebook was struggling financially. The company sought outside investment and it came from Russian internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which invested $200 million for 2% in the company in 2009 (the stake has since climbed to between 5.4% to 10% depending on who you ask). Digital Sky’s CEO is Russian oligarch Yuri Milner but its largest shareholder and initial funder is Alisher Usmanov who is known “as the hard man” of Russia.

Usmanov is criticised for being a “racketeer and gangster”. He is a convicted criminal and was in jail in the former Soviet Union though he claims he was a political prisoner. He owns Britain’s Arsenal Football Club and investments in mines, metals factories, media properties, and mobile phones in Russia. He is the Chairman of ‘Gazpromholdings’, a subsidiary of state-run Gazprom, which has been sanctioned by the U.S.

“Usmanov became a billionaire oligarch in the gangster takeover of Russia’s “privatised” mineral assets. He is close to Putin, and has been used by him to buy up and neutralise much of the little remaining independent media in Russia. Usmanov does this in his own name or as Chairman of ‘GazpromInvestHolding’. Independent journalists have died in mysterious accidents following Usmanov takeovers,” says former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray who has taken on a personal crusade against the oligarch and was sued for his effort.

Usmanov owns 35 per cent of DST which makes him the indirect owner of a significant amount of Facebook through Digital Sky. “For a blackmailer who is a key tool in Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime, to have a share in Facebook is totally unacceptable,” says Murray.

Digital Sky’s CEO Milner presents a cleaner image to the world but is also very close to Putin, regularly attending meetings with Usmanov and the Russian president. DST is heavily invested in Silicon Valley including investments in Twitter, Groupon and many young startups. ...
https://narativ.org/2017/09/14/facebook-dirty-little-secret/​

 

[Richard Stanley]

So we have Trump campaign official, Teresa Hong and Kushner (see highlighted below) admitting that they used Cambridge Analytica, and that Facebook and Google personnel were brought in to assist the project. Now Mueller has a warrant for Facebook's campaign advertising data.

Kushner, below, says it was a $400 million operation, but according to Trump he hardly spent any of his own money.

...
The Facebook warrant "means that Mueller has concluded that specific foreign individuals committed a crime by making a 'contribution' in connection with an election," Mariotti wrote on Saturday.

"It also means that he has evidence of that crime that convinced a federal magistrate judge of two things: first, that there was good reason to believe that the foreign individual committed the crime. Second, that evidence of the crime existed on Facebook."

That has implications for Trump and his associates, too, Mariotti said.

"It is a crime to know that a crime is taking place and to help it succeed. That's aiding and abetting. If any Trump associate knew about the foreign contributions that Mueller's search warrant focused on and helped that effort in a tangible way, they could be charged."

Congressional intelligence committees are homing in on the campaign's data operation as a potential trove of incriminating information.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC earlier this month that he wants to know how sophisticated the Russian-bought ads were — in terms of their content and targets — to determine whether they had any help from the Trump campaign.

The House Intelligence Committee also wants to interview the digital director for Trump's campaign, Brad Parscale, who worked closely with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Kushner was put in charge of the campaign's entire data operation and is now being scrutinized by the FBI over his contacts with Russia's ambassador and the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank in December.

Facebook said in its initial statement that about 25% of the ads purchased by Russians during the election "were geographically targeted," and many analysts have found it difficult to believe that foreign entities would have had the kind of granular knowledge of American politics necessary to target specific demographics and voting precincts.

In a post-election interview, Kushner told Forbes that he had been keenly interested in Facebook's "micro-targeting" capabilities from early on.

“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner said.

“We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world," Kushner said. "

And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch," he added. ...
http://www.businessinsider.com/muel...ussia-linked-facebook-ads-and-accounts-2017-9​