The article is on a newly constructed website, separate from Alternate,
called The Grayzone Project dot com. There are 2 parts and for some reason,
I couldn't copy it. But there's a lot of good stuff there. Anyway, here's
the transcript of the interview describing it.
Miriam
BEN NORTON: Its The Real News. Im Ben Norton.
An explosive new investigative report by the journalist Max Blumenthal
exposes how Cambridge Analyticas parent company SCL Group ran a
counterinsurgency program in Yemen on behalf of a U.S.-based military
contractor. Cambridge Analytica was a political data company that dissolved
this year after it was exposed that the firm had been hired by the Donald
Trump campaign to manipulate the 2016 presidential election. Blumenthal
obtained exclusive documents revealing that Cambridge Analyticas parent
company, which is called SCL Group, honed the deceptive tactics that it
later used in the 2016 U.S. election first in Yemen, as part of a secret
surveillance operation called Project Titania. Max published these leaked
documents at his independent investigative journalism website The Grayzone
Project, which you can find at GrayzoneProject.com.
The surveillance operation run by SCL involved infiltrating local groups and
spying on the domestic population using deliberately deceptive tactics. The
operatives were instructed to use a, quote, cover story, unquote, to
gather information. The foreign operatives in Yemen were also told to
communicate with the British Embassy and register with the British Foreign
and Commonwealth Office, which suggests that the UK government contracted
SCL for the surveillance work. The documents furthermore show how SCL
exploited local NGOs inside Yemen as part of its surveillant operation. An
anonymous source also explained to Max how SCL tried to recruit them to pose
as a journalist to infiltrate Iran, another country in the Middle East, in
order to spy on the country and collect data. SCL Group specialize in what
it openly called, quote, psychological warfare, end quote, influence
operations, and did contract work with the UK government.
Joining us to discuss this is Max Blumenthal. Max is an award-winning
investigative journalist and the author of several books. He is also the
editor of the independent news website The Grayzone Project. Max published
his new report in two parts. You can find both at GrayzoneProject.com. With
Max I also cohost the podcast Moderate Rebels, and I contribute to his
website The Grayzone Project. Thanks for joining us, Max.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks for having me on.
BEN NORTON: So theres a lot to unpack here. There are a lot of different
names that viewers might not be familiar with. Some people might know of
Cambridge Analytica because in the past several months there was a big media
scandal over its role in infiltrating and influencing the 2016 U.S.
presidential election. Before we get to discuss this Yemen operation, this
counterinsurgency operation that you exposed, lets just talk a bit about
Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, the SCL Group. Can you explain
to the audience what Cambridge Analytica and SCL are?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I would basically describe SCL as a private intelligence
operation, or private intelligence agency. They call themselves a data firm,
but I think that kind of undersells their ability to conduct not just
surveillance, even kind of counterinsurgency operations, as I showed in
Project Titania, but also influencing elections. And its something that
they up until recently were pretty proud of doing. So proud that they
boasted of, for example, cultivating anti-Russian sentiment among the
Ukrainian population in the contested areas of eastern Ukraine on behalf of
the Ukrainian government, and participating in the Ukrainian Color
Revolution in 2004, which removed a Russian-oriented government and replaced
it in basically, you know, in basically a Western-backed de facto coup with
a Western-oriented government. SCL Group was front and center as part, in
part of that, in that operation, and they bragged about it on their website.
Theyve been active in Kenyan elections.
And it was only a matter of time before they-. And you know, theyve been
active in elections around the world, as well as counterinsurgency-style
operations, where they collect data on local populations in conflict areas.
And they freely acknowledged, I mean, I wouldnt say this investigation was
necessarily explosive. I think its really valuable to have these documents.
I dont know if anyone has produced original documents like these that
really lay out the plans for what SCL and its other private intelligence
partners were doing in conflict zones like Yemen. But SCL has freely
acknowledged its work in Syria and Libya and Iran on its website, as well.
We just didnt know what the nature of it was.
So what I was able to do is kind of fill in some of the blanks, dot some of
the Is and the Ts that were already on the webs-. That were already on the
website, and kind of really highlight the use of deception that SCL had
perfected in order to insinuate itself into areas that were difficult for
its Western clients to, its Western patrons to reach. SCL is the British
parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which more Americans would be
familiar with. Cambridge Analytica obtained the data through Facebook of 87
million Americans as part of an influence operation that it carried out
partly on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign. It was also working with Ted
Cruz, and it worked in several campaigns in 2014 in the U.S., and basically
was owned by Stephen Bannon and the Mercer operation of reclusive
billionaire Robert Mercer, who until recently was the patron of Stephen
Bannon and one of the major backers of the whole kind of apparatus that made
up the Trump 2016 campaign. Robert Mercers daughter Rebecca was a co-owner
of Cambridge Analytica, and was involved with SCL Group, and Bannon was also
co-owner.
So this scandal, naturally, was going to erupt in the Trump era, when
Democrats in Congress are really angry about the fact that Donald Trump won
it all and were looking into how he did it, and seeking to frame it as this
kind of nefarious operation and to paint Trump as a figure without popular
support. Well, first they look to Russia. And you know, as weve done in
interview after interview here, shown that there really wasnt a whole lot
there to demonstrate collusion. So they finally turned to something we have
been talking about for over a year, for a while, Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica was also involved in Brexit. The oligarchs who started
the Brexit campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, and Bannon learned a lot of
lessons there. So finally, the Democrats started looking at it. An insider
from Cambridge Analytica emerged and detailed a lot of the deceptive
practices they used. And then Channel 4 in the UK conducted a sting on
Cambridge Analytica. One of their executives was boasting of honey traps,
and all kinds of, you know, James Bond villain-style tactics that they
pledge to use.
And you know, I think what Ive done with this investigation is show that a
lot of the tactics it uses are just good old-fashioned counterinsurgency. I
interviewed Yasha Levine, whos the author of Surveillance Valley, which is
a great book on how the Internet grew out of counterinsurgency programs and
is used to surveil us. And Yasha said, yeah, this is, a lot of these tactics
that are laid out in the documents for Project Titania in Yemen, they look
like Vietnam-era counterinsurgency stuff. Nothing particularly significant,
but its still, you know, pretty sinister. And so when you kind of put all
of these different pieces together, and you consider the fact that one
organization working with this web of other private intelligence groups is
carrying out counterinsurgency, kind of surveillance-style operations, to
collect data on people in conflict areas in the Middle East. As one of my
sources told me, theyre also posing as journalists to go into areas like
Iran, and posing as students, either foreign exchange students or Arabic
language students, to collect data in Syria.
Theyre doing that, and then theyre starting to hone their craft in the
West, particularly in the UK and the U.S., through this cutout company,
Cambridge Analytica. It really starts to look like a case of blowback, where
the tactics that the West is applying against the populations its targeting
in the third world are coming back to its own elections. And theyre being
used to elect, in some cases, extreme right-wing candidates, and to carry
out influence operations and covert propaganda against a public that
believes that, you know, its acting democratically.
BEN NORTON: Yeah, so you raise a lot of important points there. And one of
the things I want to try to do is help unpack some of these details for
viewers. There are a lot of different companies and names and people
involved in this. Weve been talking about SCL, which stands for Strategic
Communication Laboratories. Thats the parent company of Cambridge
Analytica, which you mentioned is, it was co-owned by Steve Bannon and
Robert Mercer, who backed Donald Trump, also involved in Project Titania,
which is this counterinsurgency operation in Yemen. Also involved is a
U.S.-based military contractor Archimedes. This is the company that, that,
that the SCL Goup was in fact operating on behalf of. And then finally, of
course, you mention in your article, and its been documented elsewhere,
that SCL frequently had contracts with the U.K. government. So we see a web
of different operatives here, and we see multiple governments, including the
UK and the U.S. involved in some ways. Maybe if not the U.S. government is
directly involved, at least the UK government is involved. Can you speak a
little bit more about the the kind of web of, or the revolving door, rather,
between governments and private interests here, and how companies like SCL,
as you mentioned Yasha Levine has documented how these these tech companies
often serve as contractors for governments, and they advance those
governments interests through soft power.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Basically, I obtained the documents that were given to, I
suppose, I assume the employees of these two private intelligence firms,
SCL, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, and Archimedes.
Archimedes appeared to be, SCL appeared to be contracted through Archimedes,
and Archimedes was based, I think, in the Bay Area. Its a U.S.-based
company. And the mission, as laid out in these documents which I published
in full at GrayzoneProject.com, were instructions for entering Yemen in
2009, which was really the height of the Obama drone assassination program,
into the two provinces where the skies were shadowed by U.S. drones and the
ground was substantially occupied, or, or featured massive mobilization and
organization by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And what SCL seek to do
was to gather data on young males, and what attracted them to jihadist
activity and then they were going to develop a, what they called, I think, I
think they openly said counterpropaganda campaign. But an influencing
operation to turn the young males somehow against jihadist recruitment.
And this meant that they had to first find local researchers, Yemenis to
conduct research on the young males, basically getting them into schools and
different community centers to answer questionnaires which SCL and
Archimedes had drawn up. And they were specifically ordered, the SCL
operatives were specifically ordered to develop a cover story with the local
Yemeni researchers, and various cover stories were proposed so that the
researchers on the ground, the Yemeni population, would not know that they
were carrying out an actual counterinsurgency operation, possibly on behalf
of the UK government. All of these operatives from SCL were told to gather
at the British embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital.
So its pretty clear that something that the, either the British government
or whoever hired SCL was going on, that they sought to conceal-. And this
has had really negative ramifications in the past when the element of
concealment fell apart. For example, the polio eradication campaign in
Pakistan, which was being carried out by the CIA in order to extract the DNA
of Osama bin Ladens family. When the rural population of Pakistan
discovered that they, this wasnt, in fact, a polio eradication program, and
that the local Pakistanis were acting as a front for the CIA, jihadist
groups declared a boycott, and polio began to spread massively spread all
the way into Afghanistan. So you can, you know, you really have a kind of
precedent for, for, you know, a critical, for a critical look at a program
like this. I mean, theres a precedent for programs like this doing deep
damage to local populations, is what Im saying.
And so, you know, it all goes back to a web of private intelligence
operatives. Ive talked about SCL before, but theres also Archimedes. I
dont know if this firm still exists, but I found one character in a
communication I obtained who was sort of the contact between SCL and
Archimedes. His name was Tim Reason. Hes now at another firm I never heard
of before called Madison Springfield. Character, you know, theres theres
very little on this character. Ive seen him participate in some programs
for AFRICOM, which is the U.S. military kind of archipelago of U.S. military
bases in Africa. But I know very little about him. I did find him, however,
in the HBGary leaks, which were published by WikiLeaks in 2011. And HBGary
is another private intelligence firm. And basically, if you go into these
leaks, I dont know any normal people who have time to do this, but I kind
of had to do it to produce this investigation, youre just going to find a
bunch of private spies talking to each other about designing competing mass
surveillance programs at the dawn of the Arab Spring to spy on Arab youth,
gobble up their personal information, and then design influence operations
based on what theyve learned about Arab youth, who are considered sort of a
restive population engaged in this revolutionary process thats overturning
governments across the Arab world.
So Tim Reason turns up in all of these email threads with different
characters from private intelligence firms Id never heard of before, along
with staffers from Apple, who are from the Homeland Security division of
Apple. I didnt know Apple had a Homeland Security division before, or that
they were this involved, Google is also involved here, this involved in mass
surveillance. And it really its just that kind of just scratching the
surface. But its really a disturbing portrait of this private intelligence
web which is carried out, carrying out influence operations, covert
propaganda, and mass surveillance completely out of the sight of most of the
worlds population by design. And theyre being contracted by governments to
do so so the governments dont have to take any responsibility. I learned
about this all thanks to the work of Barrett Brown. And Barrett Brown went
to prison for 56 months because he received all of these hacked e-mails from
the Anonymous collective, and reported on them. For reporting on them. He
went to prison under Obama. And its thanks to Barrett Brown, and to
WikiLeaks, Julian Assange is now, you know, undergoing horrible conditions
at the Ecuadorian embassy in London thanks to pressure from the U.S. and UK
government. Its really thanks to these two that we know about these
programs, and that we know about the ROMAS/COIN mass surveillance program
that I wrote about that Tim Reason was involved in.
So really just by starting this investigation, looking at these SCL
documents, I learned about this entire wider web of covert influence
operations. And we really have to see Cambridge Analytica as just the tip of
the massive iceberg that might represent the greatest threat to whatevers
left of democracy.
BEN NORTON: Well, well have to end our conversation there. We were joined
by Max Blumenthal. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of
several books. He is also the editor of the website The Grayzone Project,
which you can find at GrayzoneProject.com. He just published a two-part
exposé on the SCL Group, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica,
exposing how it led a counterinsurgency and surveillance operation in Yemen.
Max also mentioned Yasha Levine, and we at The Real News have an interview
with Aaron Maté in which Aaron Maté and Yasha Levine discuss Yashas new
book Surveillance Vally, which is more about all of these issues we
discussed today, big tech companies and their relations to governments. But
thanks for joining us here at The Real News, Max.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks for having me.
BEN NORTON: Reporting for The Real News. Im Ben Norton.
