"Whoever Owns this Data Owns the Future"

​McClatchy DC reported July 13 that the Trump campaign data analytics operation is under scrutiny by the multiple investigations into possible coordination between the campaign and operatives working for the Russian government. “Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.”

The McClatchy DC article explains that investigators now know that the Kremlin mounted a cyberattack on the United States of “unprecedented scale and sophistication” which delivered false and misleading stories about Hillary Clinton to the social media accounts of millions of voters.

The McClatchy DC article can be found here.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html

Will Bunch summarized some of the issues in the investigation in Philly.com. His suggestion for understanding how the Russians interfered in our election, and how the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign may have coordinated with them inolves just three words: Follow the data.

Bunch quotes Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian:
“There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.”

The article from Philly.com can be found here.
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/the-key-to-the-trump-russia-scandal-follow-the-data-20170713.html

An article from Advertising Age explained in December of 2016 how the Trump campaign data analytics team used multiple data sources to assemble a data strategy to target voters with maximum impact and minimum cost.

After an October 5 meeting, the data team concentrated on three groups of voters they needed to convince to vote for their candidate. “There were three especially important voter segments they'd need to swing towards their candidate: unallocated voters, defined as people who were predisposed to listen to the Trump campaign and the GOP's message; ‘DJT Underperform’ voters, or Republicans still unconvinced about supporting Mr. Trump; and ‘HRC Change’ voters, defined as people leaning toward Hillary Clinton but also craving change in government."

Investigators now suspect, according to the McClatchy DC article from July 13, that the Russians targeted voters in swing states, even in key precincts. According to a source familiar with the criminal probe into Trump-Russia collaboration, investigators doubt that Russian operatives controlling the bots and trolls that distributed false and misleading news stories and memes satirizing Clinton could have “independently ‘known where to specifically target … to which high impact states and districts in those states.’”

The Advertising Age article can be found here.
http://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/trump-camp-s-inexperience-set-stage-rnc-data-win/307105/

A June 2017 article in The Verge  provides insight into how Deep Root Analytics, which worked on the campaign for the Republican National Committee, scooped up data from Reddit, but it is still unclear how this data was used to target voters.
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The scooped data was found when Deep Root Analytics left highly personal data about nearly 200 million U.S. voters on an unprotected cloud server in June. The exposed data, which includes multiple data points about far more voters than those registered Republican,  The Verge suggests that Deep Root Analytics may have been attempting to match Reddit profiles with voter information data, perhaps to categorize voters into the groups identified as important to turn toward Trump.

The article from The Verge can be found here.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/19/15829234/deep-root-analytics-leak-reddit-voter-targeting-gop

​The giant RNC data leak of nearly 200 million voters’ information was discovered in June of 2017 by Chris Vickery, a well-known cyber risk researcher working for the company Upguard, who has discovered these kinds of breaches before.
A detailed article about the RNC breach, along with a recorded question and answer period with Vickery, was published by the cyber security company Upguard, and updated July 12. The article can be found here.
https://www.upguard.com/breaches/the-rnc-files

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