Tag: Cambridge Analytica

Trump’s Thin Red Line

~ Cheryle Johnson ~ Leave a comment

This afternoon I had a 3 hour nap with my cat that I guess is illness related because I got lots of sleep last night.

I have not felt good since I returned from Texas Sunday.  I presumed it to be the flu, but the high pollen count is also a possible culprit.  I just know I and a few other friends are not doing well right now.

I fell asleep to news chatter about the Mueller investigation and awoke to the same.  It seems Trump hasn’t dropped a bomb on the investigation -or Syria-yet.

After more than a year of news reading and watching  on this subject from multiple sources, I feel I am fairly up to speed on its various threads. Lord knows there are enough of them to stitch a crazy quilt.

But I think it comes back to a very basic question I have heard several times today: if Donald Trump has done nothing illegal, what has he to hide?  Why is he so angry and so anxious to fire someone -anyone- to make the Mueller investigation stop?

He has a government spokeswoman proclaiming today that the court-ordered raid on attorney Michael Cohen crossed the imaginary “red line” Trump himself drew, as if he is the legal mapmaker of this Department of Justice probe.

But if Cohen-as Trump’s private attorney-acted in the Stormy Daniels matter without his client’s knowledge or consent, as has been posited, why isn’t the person Trump angry with Michael Cohen? This is outside the legal parameters of client representation.

I would be angry at any lawyer that acted without my consultation or consent. Why isn’t Trump?

The sideshow to this matter was Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress because, of course, it is related to the scraping of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer owned data analysis company used by the Trump campaign. (Aside: remember that Mercer bankrolled Trump’s campaign heavily and was inextricably linked to Steve Bannon, who owned shares in Cambridge Analytica.)

The most pertinent question I thought asked was if there were over lap between data collected by Cambridge Analytica and Russian targeting wherein voters that delivered Trump’s Electoral College victory in swing states were concerned.

In other words, were those 77,000 people targeted by Russia propaganda provided by Cambridge Analytica that may have influenced their votes in the election, making Trump President?

Is Trump’s Presidency a legitimate one? Is the idea that it might not be what drives him to be insanely angry and unable to focus?

Or are there other illegitimacies he is afraid this investigation will uncover?

Either way one thing seems clear to me – we, the people, have the right to know what lies beyond Trump’s red line.

 

I Said Trump’s Win Was Cherry-Picked: I Was Right

~ Cheryle Johnson ~ Leave a comment

Not to toot my own horn, but if one went back in time on my Twitter feed, he/she would find from long ago my assertion that the Trump campaign was able to cherry-pick just the right districts it needed in key swing states to win the election.

I wasn’t sure how it was done.  But I did figure Cambridge Analytica may have played a part somehow.

Now we know they did it by using Facebook. And once again, Facebook knew and only acted when publicly it had no alternative.

It says a lot about Mark Zuckerberg and his company. He and it have no concern for the 50 million people whose data were mined and then abused by Cambridge Analytica and Team Trump.

The stakes in terms of money were too much to pass up.  As for user security – well, we gave ourselves over to a kid who launched Facebook in his dorm room ( and perhaps using methods actually developed by others, if the story-line of “The Social Network” is to be believed.)

In some ways, we have only ourselves to blame.

Living in a democratic society with a free-flow of information requires a willingness to be open with who we are as a people. Perhaps we were stupidly so in terms of our addictive use of Facebook.

But that genie is out of the bottle and not to be put back, especially in an ever advancing technological age of driverless cars, increasing AI and robotics. And our personal data pretty much everywhere.

Even with a willingness to accept we should exercise  more care and concern, we are very much at the mercy of anyone able to hack our cell phones or computers. Or the very “cloud” itself.

So, do we now have an illegitimate Presidency?  I don’t know how to answer that.  I am not a legal scholar.

But I do believe 2016 was not a free and fair election as we were used in the past to experiencing it. And the abuse of our openness combined with technology is the reason.

Now finding a solution in the immediate future to ensure U.S. elections are free and fair is critical.  We need this “fix” sooner rather than later to keep our society based on the democratic ideals I think everyone – Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike – choose as U.S. citizens to live by.

Please God send us leaders willing to do so.