democracynow--2020-04-02--"Social Distancing Is a Privilege": Pandemic Highlights India's Class Divide as 1.3 Billion Lock Dow

"Social Distancing Is a Privilege": Pandemic Highlights India's Class Divide as 1.3 Billion Lock Down

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, democracynow.org , The War and Peace Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman , with Nermeen Shaikh .
We ’ re broadcasting from the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States , in New York City .
But we ’ re turning now to India , where 1.3 billion people have been locked down for more than a week to curb the spread of the coronavirus .
India is now reporting nearly 2,000 cases and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Narendra Modi apologized Sunday for the devastation India ’ s 21-day curfew has wrought for millions of people living in poverty and migrant workers who were stranded far from home when the lockdown was announced .
Some have reportedly died making the perilous journey home .
Last week , Modi ’ s government announced a $ 22.6 billion stimulus plan to provide cash payments and food to people in need .
More than 80 % of India ’ s workforce is informal , with most living off daily wages often less than $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wages they can not earn under the present curfew .
More than 4 million Indians are homeless .
One homeless man in Delhi told Reuters , quote , “ I would rather die from disease than hunger , ” as he joined dozens of others forced to congregate on the streets for free food distribution .
Millions more of India ’ s poor have been devastated by the lockdown .
This is Zahid Ali , who lives in a slum in the country ’ s capital , New Delhi .
AMY GOODMAN : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re joined by the Indian journalist Rana Ayyub .
She ’ s global opinions writer for The Washington Post .
Her recent piece in Foreign Policy is headlined “ Social Distancing Is a Privilege.
” Rana , welcome back to Democracy Now !
Tell us where you are in India .
AMY GOODMAN : And can you describe the situation there now ?
RANA AYYUB : Well , Amy , great to be joining the show again .
I ’ m in Mumbai , and I ’ ve been reported from the city @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Asia ’ s largest slums , with a population of close to 1 million people in one square mile .
And yesterday we had our first COVID-rated death in the slum .
And I can only imagine the consequences of this .
I was there about five days ago in Dharavi , where even talking about the concept of social distancing seems like an obscene concept , because here we have close to seven people living in one shanty with absolutely no access to water , soap , sanitation .
How do you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cleanliness and hygiene ?
And the people who live there earn not more than about $ 2 a day , daily wage workers , hand-to-mouth existence .
But , I mean , you rightly pointed out that many of them say that they ’ d rather die of the disease than of this hunger that has now been inflicted on them , because the government announced a lockdown on the 24th of March 24 at 8 p.m. in the evening , and that has only led to chaos .
The visuals that you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but across the country , are migrant laborers , workers , traveling all the way from the cities to their home towns , traveling thousands of kilometers , some with children on their backs , starving , without footwear .
I mean , it ’ s not a sight to behold .
And right now where I am , in Bombay , another 80 people have been quarantined in a separate slum .
So , yes , like I wrote in my piece , social distancing is privilege in India , because there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people in India , who , you know , have already have stocked their refrigerators , they have hand sanitizers , but the underprivileged , which is about 60 % of this country , can not afford this , can not afford social distancing .
Amy ?
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Yeah , Rana , I mean , as you just mentioned , the lockdown that Modi imposed at 8 p.m. last week led to this mass migration from cities to rural areas .
And as you write in your Foreign Policy piece , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ man was beaten to death by cops in West Bengal — NERMEEN SHAIKH : — when he stepped out to buy milk .
All the — NERMEEN SHAIKH : Could you talk about that , as well as the other kinds of police brutality that migrants have been subjected to , including being sprayed with a bleach disinfectant ?
RANA AYYUB : That ’ s right , Nermeen .
About close to five days ago , just about two days after the lockdown was announced , a man who stepped out of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was brutally beaten by the police , and he died once he reached home .
There are many who were subjected to police brutality all over the country , you know , especially migrant laborers .
Some laborers who were on their way from the city to the village were sprayed with disinfectants and bleach .
Now , this is such a contradiction from the upper-middle-class Indians who were literally airlifted from various countries and flown into India , and they were checked in , and the poor were sprayed — they sprayed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a disparity .
There is a way — there ’ s a differential treatment between the rich and the poor .
I mean , also look at the government hospitals in India , where the poor will now go for the treatment .
The WHO recommends that India needs to have one doctor to every thousand patients .
We have one doctor to 10,000 patients .
So , we have a million problems right now plaguing us , and the police brutality and the insensitivity , and the insensitivity of the Indian state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lockdown , and that was perhaps the only solution that India could afford right now in a situation like this , but I think India could have done a lot better .
For instance , the first COVID case in India was diagnosed on the 31st of January , and India took a month and a half to declare a health emergency , on the 15th of March .
Between this time , India was hosting Donald Trump , and millions of rupees were spent on this entire Trump-Modi bonhomie and the latest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was dominating international headlines for the anti-Muslim carnage in New Delhi , while in neighboring China they were already fighting the virus .
So India woke up to this pandemic a little too late , and we are staring at a grim future .
Also , to be fair to the government , now they are taking much-needed steps .
It ’ s a little too late , though , in the day .
NERMEEN SHAIKH : And , Rana , could you talk a little bit more about the health — broader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this out also in your piece in Foreign Policy , that India spends just 3.7 % of its GDP on health .
And just by way of comparison , the U.S. spends 17 % of its GDP on health , and yet we ’ ve seen how devastating the situation is in the U.S. in terms of its response to COVID-19 .
So that ’ s one issue .
And the second is that only one-fifth of deaths in India are even recorded including with causes , so it might be , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say how many people in India have died from COVID-19 .
RANA AYYUB : Absolutely , Nermeen , you ’ re right , because India , one of — India has seen millions of cases of respiratory diseases .
It is home to some of the highest cases of diabetes and hypertension .
Tuberculosis is something — thousands of Indians die due to tuberculosis and the fact that we have still not ramped up our healthcare .
I mean , as of today , India has tested only about 35,000 people in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ means India is not testing enough .
Like various epidemiologists have suggested and various doctors and healthcare specialists in India have suggested , that it will be impossible to gauge whether Indians are dying of respiratory diseases or COVID-related symptoms , because , one , we ’ re not testing enough , and , second , our healthcare system is not good enough to have taken care of the diseases that mostly plague the underprivileged in this country .
So , that ’ s something that we really need to look at , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country was facing some of its worst healthcare problems , the government of India has had different priorities .
It was spending billions of rupees constructing statues of Lord Ram in Uttar Pradesh , where children are dying of encephalitis and there are no oxygen cylinders in the hospital ; in Gujarat , where the tallest statue of Sardar Patel was constructed in a show of jingoism and nationalism .
So , throughout this show of nationalism , when the government was spending billions of rupees on statues , which is not needed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ amount of money on its healthcare .
When 1.3 billion people of your population , and out of it 60 % live below the poverty line , you can not afford to be insensitive to a prospective pandemic like this , which has now hit us .
And we are in a very bad shape , as I talk , Nermeen .
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you , Rana Ayyub , for joining us .
Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist , global opinions writer for The Washington Post , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Cover Up .
Her recent piece in Foreign Policy is headlined “ Social Distancing Is a Privilege.
” We will link to that article in Foreign Policy .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. We’re broadcasting from the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, in New York City. But we’re turning now to India, where 1.3 billion people have been locked down for more than a week to curb the spread of the coronavirus. India is now reporting nearly 2,000 cases and at least 50 deaths.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologized Sunday for the devastation India’s 21-day curfew has wrought for millions of people living in poverty and migrant workers who were stranded far from home when the lockdown was announced. Some have reportedly died making the perilous journey home.
Last week, Modi’s government announced a $22.6 billion stimulus plan to provide cash payments and food to people in need. More than 80% of India’s workforce is informal, with most living off daily wages often less than $2 or $3 a day, wages they cannot earn under the present curfew. More than 4 million Indians are homeless. One homeless man in Delhi told Reuters, quote, “I would rather die from disease than hunger,” as he joined dozens of others forced to congregate on the streets for free food distribution. Millions more of India’s poor have been devastated by the lockdown. This is Zahid Ali, who lives in a slum in the country’s capital, New Delhi.
ZAHID ALI: [translated] Everybody is disturbed here. Children of many people are sick, but they do not have the money or the means to take them to the hospital — no rickshaw, no vehicle, nothing. When they return to their houses, there is no food. So what will one do? And what will one eat? This is hopeless. It is better altogether to just kill people.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by the Indian journalist Rana Ayyub. She’s global opinions writer for The Washington Post. Her recent piece in Foreign Policy is headlined “Social Distancing Is a Privilege.”
Rana, welcome back to Democracy Now! Tell us where you are in India.
RANA AYYUB: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you describe the situation there now?
RANA AYYUB: Well, Amy, great to be joining the show again. I’m in Mumbai, and I’ve been reported from the city, especially from Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums, with a population of close to 1 million people in one square mile. And yesterday we had our first COVID-rated death in the slum. And I can only imagine the consequences of this. I was there about five days ago in Dharavi, where even talking about the concept of social distancing seems like an obscene concept, because here we have close to seven people living in one shanty with absolutely no access to water, soap, sanitation. How do you talk to them about social distancing and cleanliness and hygiene?
And the people who live there earn not more than about $2 a day, daily wage workers, hand-to-mouth existence. But, I mean, you rightly pointed out that many of them say that they’d rather die of the disease than of this hunger that has now been inflicted on them, because the government announced a lockdown on the 24th of March 24 at 8 p.m. in the evening, and that has only led to chaos. The visuals that you see, not just in Bombay, but across the country, are migrant laborers, workers, traveling all the way from the cities to their home towns, traveling thousands of kilometers, some with children on their backs, starving, without footwear. I mean, it’s not a sight to behold. And right now where I am, in Bombay, another 80 people have been quarantined in a separate slum.
So, yes, like I wrote in my piece, social distancing is privilege in India, because there is a structural divide. The privileged people in India, who, you know, have already have stocked their refrigerators, they have hand sanitizers, but the underprivileged, which is about 60% of this country, cannot afford this, cannot afford social distancing. Amy?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Nermeen?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, Rana, I mean, as you just mentioned, the lockdown that Modi imposed at 8 p.m. last week led to this mass migration from cities to rural areas. And as you write in your Foreign Policy piece, when the lockdown began, a 32-year-old man was beaten to death by cops in West Bengal —
RANA AYYUB: That’s right. That’s right.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: — when he stepped out to buy milk. All the —
RANA AYYUB: That’s right.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you talk about that, as well as the other kinds of police brutality that migrants have been subjected to, including being sprayed with a bleach disinfectant?
RANA AYYUB: That’s right, Nermeen. About close to five days ago, just about two days after the lockdown was announced, a man who stepped out of his house to buy milk for his children was brutally beaten by the police, and he died once he reached home. There are many who were subjected to police brutality all over the country, you know, especially migrant laborers. Some laborers who were on their way from the city to the village were sprayed with disinfectants and bleach. Now, this is such a contradiction from the upper-middle-class Indians who were literally airlifted from various countries and flown into India, and they were checked in, and the poor were sprayed — they sprayed bleach on them. So there is a disparity. There is a way — there’s a differential treatment between the rich and the poor. I mean, also look at the government hospitals in India, where the poor will now go for the treatment. The WHO recommends that India needs to have one doctor to every thousand patients. We have one doctor to 10,000 patients.
So, we have a million problems right now plaguing us, and the police brutality and the insensitivity, and the insensitivity of the Indian state — of course, it announced a lockdown, and that was perhaps the only solution that India could afford right now in a situation like this, but I think India could have done a lot better. For instance, the first COVID case in India was diagnosed on the 31st of January, and India took a month and a half to declare a health emergency, on the 15th of March. Between this time, India was hosting Donald Trump, and millions of rupees were spent on this entire Trump-Modi bonhomie and the latest programs. In the middle, India was dominating international headlines for the anti-Muslim carnage in New Delhi, while in neighboring China they were already fighting the virus. So India woke up to this pandemic a little too late, and we are staring at a grim future. Also, to be fair to the government, now they are taking much-needed steps. It’s a little too late, though, in the day.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Rana, could you talk a little bit more about the health — broader health issues in India? You point this out also in your piece in Foreign Policy, that India spends just 3.7% of its GDP on health. And just by way of comparison, the U.S. spends 17% of its GDP on health, and yet we’ve seen how devastating the situation is in the U.S. in terms of its response to COVID-19. So that’s one issue. And the second is that only one-fifth of deaths in India are even recorded including with causes, so it might be, even in the future, very difficult to say how many people in India have died from COVID-19.
RANA AYYUB: Absolutely, Nermeen, you’re right, because India, one of — India has seen millions of cases of respiratory diseases. It is home to some of the highest cases of diabetes and hypertension. Tuberculosis is something — thousands of Indians die due to tuberculosis and the fact that we have still not ramped up our healthcare. I mean, as of today, India has tested only about 35,000 people in a country of 1.3 billion population, which means India is not testing enough. Like various epidemiologists have suggested and various doctors and healthcare specialists in India have suggested, that it will be impossible to gauge whether Indians are dying of respiratory diseases or COVID-related symptoms, because, one, we’re not testing enough, and, second, our healthcare system is not good enough to have taken care of the diseases that mostly plague the underprivileged in this country.
So, that’s something that we really need to look at, because, I mean, while the country was facing some of its worst healthcare problems, the government of India has had different priorities. It was spending billions of rupees constructing statues of Lord Ram in Uttar Pradesh, where children are dying of encephalitis and there are no oxygen cylinders in the hospital; in Gujarat, where the tallest statue of Sardar Patel was constructed in a show of jingoism and nationalism. So, throughout this show of nationalism, when the government was spending billions of rupees on statues, which is not needed, India could have spent the same amount of money on its healthcare. When 1.3 billion people of your population, and out of it 60% live below the poverty line, you cannot afford to be insensitive to a prospective pandemic like this, which has now hit us. And we are in a very bad shape, as I talk, Nermeen.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Rana Ayyub, for joining us. Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist, global opinions writer for The Washington Post, author of Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up. Her recent piece in Foreign Policy is headlined “Social Distancing Is a Privilege.” We will link to that article in Foreign Policy.


democracynow--2020-04-02--As U.S. Reels from COVID-19, Trump Backs Gilead's Exclusive Patent on Treatment & Suspends EPA Rules

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : The coronavirus pandemic has now spread to more than 200 countries and regions , On Wednesday , the head of the World Health Organization , or WHO , predicted a death toll of epic proportions .
AMY GOODMAN : The United States has the most coronavirus cases in the world , almost double the next country .
Nearly 2,400 people have died here in New York , New Jersey and Connecticut — half the national total .
More than 1,300 of those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
With the nation ’ s healthcare system already stretched to capacity protective gear in short supply , President Trump and his health advisers say more than 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could die from the coronavirus over the next weeks .
This is White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx speaking on Tuesday .
AMY GOODMAN : This comes as millions of people have lost their jobs .
Last week ’ s unemployment claims saw the largest single-week increase in unemployment claims in American history — times five — with an estimated 3.3 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ million claims are expected to be filed this week .
For more , we ’ re joined by Robert Weissman , president of Public Citizen , who ’ s been following all of this very closely from his home in Washington , D.C. , where he ’ s joining us now , again , from his home , where he can protect himself , his family , and stop community spread .
Rob , I ’ m so glad to be talking to you , but not under these circumstances .
Can you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president this week , for the first time , admitting the enormity of the crisis that we ’ re in ?
The latest news , Lee Fang of The Intercept writing that the U.S. was exporting military equipment as late as March 17th .
President Trump now admitting we ’ re talking about 100,000 to a quarter of a million Americans dead in the next weeks , can you start off by just responding to this and then talking about the so-called stimulus bill that was passed , Nancy Pelosi saying they need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saying there ’ s no way that ’ s going to happen ?
Talk about the state of this country right now .
ROBERT WEISSMAN : Well , thanks , Amy .
It is great to be with you , and of course not how we ’ d like to do it .
You know , when it comes to Trump , we ’ ve called for him to resign , as a clear and present danger to the public health of the country .
You know , we supported his impeachment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s not hard to be a leader in times of crisis .
It calls on you to do great things , or even mediocre things .
The script is pretty well written for you , but he can ’ t follow it , because he doesn ’ t have empathy for other human beings .
Everything that happens on the planet , for him , is about him .
And as a result , we ’ ve had disastrous leadership , the utter failure of the government to take leadership @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he says it is , you know , to make sure that we produce masks for people who need them — it is not a hard thing to do — to make sure we have ventilators for everyone who needs them .
We did not have a proper stockpile , but we should have moved , at a national wartime footing , to move into production to get sufficient ventilators .
We were able to do it in World War II , 70 years ago .
We ’ re far more technologically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it hasn ’ t happened .
And it hasn ’ t happened because we don ’ t have national leadership .
We don ’ t have a leader who is able to speak in terms of solidarity and bringing us together , even as we ’ re isolated , which is exactly what we need right now .
And we don ’ t have a leader who ’ s able to acknowledge the science and tell the truth .
He ’ s come around in the last few days , and hopefully he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months-long failure to acknowledge what ’ s going on , obviously and clearly , has set the nation on a far more deadly trajectory than it would otherwise be on .
So , it ’ s hard to say enough bad things about how the president has handled this .
And it didn ’ t have to be .
This is not about how progressive you are .
You just have to be someone who understands what it is to be a leader in times of crisis , do the things that need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ utterly incapable of doing that .
Obviously , this has rocked the economy , and it ’ s going to get worse and go on for we don ’ t know how long .
I think it ’ s a mistake to only think about the worst-case scenarios , but the worst-case scenarios are certainly very frightening .
The Congress has done some extraordinary things and some really pretty bad things in response .
This last relief or stimulus bill that was just passed , called the CARES Act , was extraordinary to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speed with which Congress acted .
So , it ’ s a $ 2 trillion bill that will actually make available about $ 6 trillion [ inaudible ] to the economy .
For a first cut , that ’ s pretty good at scale .
It does a lot of good things in terms of getting money out to states , getting moneys out to hospitals and having a very strong unemployment program .
So , as people are being thrown off their jobs , they ’ re going to be able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that will give them 100 % of what they were making , at least for the next four months .
There ’ s a lot of bad stuff is in that bill , too .
It was pretty clear how it should have been structured .
If there was a decision made that we need to keep businesses intact , which I think is a reasonable call , they need financing to get through this time , because we want them to maintain — remain as going concerns , and we want the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one thing we wanted out of them was to keep people on the payroll , and this program does not require businesses to keep people on the payroll as a condition of receiving government loans .
It has some conditions that are included so that companies can ’ t spend the money they get on dividend payments and stock buybacks ; however , it permits the treasury secretary to waive those conditions if he sees fit , and we can ’ t feel very good about how that ’ s going to go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as you mentioned , millions of people are unemployed , millions more are expected to lose their jobs .
And what is happening , the scale and the scope of these job losses are reportedly unprecedented in U.S. history .
And to take just one example of the scale of the loss , the U.S. Travel Association has warned that the U.S. tourism industry will be — the loss to the U.S. tourism industry will be more than $ 900 billion , which is seven times what it was following 9/11 .
Meanwhile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what ’ s likely to happen as a result of this and the Great Depression — not just the Recession of 2008 , but the Great Depression .
What kind of response do you think could compensate for what millions and millions of Americans are going to suffer in the long term ?
ROBERT WEISSMAN : Right .
Well , there is no parallel to this in terms of the scope and that it ’ s affecting every single person in the United States and every single person around the world .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ huge portions of the economy .
So it ’ s different than the Great Depression , or even the Great Recession [ inaudible ] market , or the system ’ s not working .
We ’ ve got an external problem , and we ’ re making an intentional , appropriate and necessary decision to shut down economic activity .
The only force that can solve that problem is the government .
This first stimulus bill is a partial response .
But obviously , when you have a total problem , you really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people who are the most vulnerable , have the least possible cushion .
So , providing unemployment insurance is great ; it doesn ’ t adequately deal with the problem of all kinds of people who have been outside of the workforce all along but were able to get by one way or another and who are not likely to be able to get unemployment insurance .
It doesn ’ t take care of , you know , the issues you ’ re raising about prisoners and other super vulnerable segments of society @ @ @ @ @ @ @ population of immigrants , and especially people who are undocumented , who are going to have a lot of trouble accessing some of the financial supports that are available .
And people are going to fall through the cracks .
So we ’ ve got to get more money out , and we need protections for people to be able to stay in their homes .
The bill that passed does a lot for people who are homeowners to help give them some break on mortgage payments .
It doesn ’ t adequately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generally going to be lower-income than the class of mortgage payers .
A lot of localities and states are trying to address the rent problem , but not all of them .
So a lot of people are going to be really stuck unless we have much stronger moves forward to protect vulnerable people .
AMY GOODMAN : Rob , I want to ask you about Gilead .
Facing mounting pressure from elected officials and dozens of groups , including yours , Public Citizen , Gilead scientists backed down from holding onto the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a drug it ’ s developing to treat COVID-19 .
Joe Grogan , a member of Trump ’ s coronavirus task force , worked as a Gilead Sciences lobbyist from 2011 to 2017 .
The status would have allowed the corporation to profit exclusively off the drug for seven years and blocked manufacturers from developing generic versions that can be more accessible to patients and control the drug ’ s price .
Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted , quote , “ It is truly outrageous that after taxpayers put tens of millions of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s FDA is exploiting a law reserved for rare diseases to privatize a drug to treat a pandemic virus .
The Trump Administration must rescind this corporate giveaway to Gilead and make any treatment and vaccine free for everybody.
” Again , that was presidential candidate Bernie Sanders ’ statement .
But can you explain what this whole controversy is about , what the role of Trump ’ s — one of his top advisers , his domestic security adviser , Grogan , is now and was as a Gilead lobbyist ?
ROBERT @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So , Gilead has one of the possible treatments under study .
So this is not a vaccine .
The treatment very well may not work , but it ’ s one of the ones that has the best promise , among a not very good group .
So , what Gilead did was it sought protection , what ’ s called orphan drug status , which is available for rare diseases , for drugs that treat populations of under 200,000 .
And they submitted their application for this rare disease status @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases of COVID-19 in the United States .
Obviously they knew the population was going to go far higher than that , but they got in under the wire .
And the way the law is written , not taking into account a situation like this , if you apply when the population is under 200,000 , you get this orphan drug designation , whether or not the population later on goes above 200,000 .
It was astounding .
What you get for orphan drug designation is a seven-year exclusivity , a monopoly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some ways more powerful than a patent monopoly .
So we and others protested that .
They quickly backed down , because there ’ s just no way they were going to be able to get away with that .
They still have patents and other monopolies .
So , if the drug turns out to be useful , they will have a monopoly , unless we impose more pressure on them or the government takes action to override the monopoly and ensure that other generic producers are able to get the drug @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and around the world .
The last element of this , which is so important , and it applies to this product and most of the vaccine efforts that are underway , and Senator Sanders ’ tweet points this out , this drug has benefited from a huge amount of government funding on the research and development side .
The vaccines have been overwhelmingly researched [ inaudible ] and its development overwhelmingly provided by U.S. federal government .
So , in the case of Gilead , who ’ s trying to receive this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government for a product that the U.S. government had actually paid for most of the R & D on .
And we ’ re facing the same possibility with a vaccine , if we get one anytime soon .
AMY GOODMAN : And can you talk about the effect of this drug , not only in this country and around the world , the bigger issue of how countries get access to drugs , and the role of this domestic security adviser , I mean , talking about the revolving door of who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who gets drugs — in other words , life-and-death issues ?
ROBERT WEISSMAN : Right .
So , in terms of the revolving-door issue , we have — you know , President Trump ran on the idea that he was going to take it to the drug companies , because he was a tough guy .
He ’ s done nothing .
But one reason he ’ s done nothing is he ’ s got drug company executives and lobbyists running his policy .
So he ’ s got Joe Grogan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lobbyist for Gilead , running policy on drug pricing out of the White House .
And he has a former drug company executive , Alex Azar , running the Department of Health and Human Services .
So it ’ s little surprise these are the kind of policies we ’ re getting .
When it comes to the vaccines , which are more important than this product from Gilead , which very well may not work — you know , eventually we ’ re going to get a vaccine that works — the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is it made available ?
So , is it exclusively controlled by one manufacturer that can charge whatever it wants , or is the government going to say , “ No , not only did we pay for this , but this is a public health — an international public health emergency with no parallel .
You ’ ll get some money , but we ’ re going to make this available to everyone around the world ” ?
Hopefully , no one has to pay for it .
But the [ inaudible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ companies , from the government will be modified in light of the fact that the government paid for the R & D , and we ’ re going to require any company that might have monopoly control over it to license that product to other qualified manufacturers around the world , because we ’ re going have a problem not just with price , but with production .
Once we have a vaccine that works , we want it available to everybody around the world right away .
And there is no manufacturer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capacity to be able to do that .
So we need lots of producers right away , including , in fact , we need the U.S. government to start scaling up production , to do it at the scale we need for this one-time international emergency .
AMY GOODMAN : Last Thursday , the Environmental Protection Agency announced sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules , telling companies they ’ ll effectively be allowed to regulate themselves during the coronavirus pandemic .
Under the new rules , big polluters will no longer be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rules and other requirements .
The EPA has set no end date for the policy .
Then , on Tuesday , the EPA announced a rollback of an Obama rule that forced auto manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles .
Under the new rules , big polluters will no longer be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements .
Meanwhile , Trump says he ’ s invited U.S. oil executives to the White House to discuss how he can help their devastated industry , and protests against pipelines are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this time as a threat to national security .
Before we wrap up , Rob , if you can address this critical issue , the largest rollback we ’ ve seen of environmental rules in history ?
ROBERT WEISSMAN : Yeah , just startling .
It ’ s another revolving door story .
We have a coal lobbyist who ’ s running the Environment Protection Agency , and he said , “ We ’ re not going to enforce the rules right now.
” It ’ s framed as a reporting requirement , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not going to be enforced , for no good reason .
The argument is that people are too busy and stretched to do reporting .
Doesn ’ t really hold up under any kind of scrutiny .
And it means that for those producers who are still making stuff , they ’ re going to be putting a lot more toxic materials into the water and into the air .
Now , a separate thing is this rollback of the clean car standard , which you mentioned .
That is the most important @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government has ever undertaken , by far .
It would both reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles , and it would save consumers hundreds of billions of dollars in reduced payments at the pump .
The Trump administration has sought from the beginning to roll this back , and they saw fit to do it now under the cover of the COVID crisis .
It is an utter disgrace , and it will have very long-lasting implications , unless it itself is undone , which I think it will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a next president .
AMY GOODMAN : And at the same time you have the U.N. climate summit being canceled in Glascow , in Scotland , because of the coronavirus pandemic .
ROBERT WEISSMAN : Right .
You know , one thing we ’ re seeing from this is , of course , this has no parallel , but there are some similarities with what we ’ re going to deal with with the climate catastrophe that ’ s coming at us and the need for government to step in .
There is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with this crisis right now .
They can ’ t manage the economy .
They can ’ t make planning and management decisions that require some overview of what ’ s going on .
Only the federal government can do that .
And it is exactly the same with the climate crisis .
And when we come out of this , in fact , when we look at the next stimulus bill , we ’ re going to have to start talking about thinking not just how we deal with this immediate crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , finally , belatedly , take scaled-up action to prevent the climate crisis from hitting us even harder and more devastatingly than this one is .
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you so much , Robert Weissman , president of Public Citizen , joining us from his home to protect against community spread .
I hope you ’ ll bear with the little glitches of sound and video .
This is the price that ’ s paid to get out serious , real , independent information in a time of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When we come back , we look at the Global South .
We will start in India , the largest lockdown of a population in U.S. [ sic ] history .
AMY GOODMAN : “ Everything ’ s Ruined ” by Fountains of Wayne .
The band ’ s co-founder , Adam Schlesinger , died on Wednesday after a battle with COVID-19 .
He was 52 years old .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The coronavirus pandemic has now spread to more than 200 countries and regions, On Wednesday, the head of the World Health Organization, or WHO, predicted a death toll of epic proportions.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: Over the past five weeks, we have witnessed a near-exponential growth in the number of new cases, reaching almost every country, territory and area. The number of deaths has more than doubled in the past week. In the next few days, we will reach 1 million confirmed cases and 50,000 deaths.
AMY GOODMAN: The United States has the most coronavirus cases in the world, almost double the next country. Nearly 2,400 people have died here in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — half the national total. More than 1,300 of those deaths were here in New York City. With the nation’s healthcare system already stretched to capacity protective gear in short supply, President Trump and his health advisers say more than 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could die from the coronavirus over the next weeks. This is White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx speaking on Tuesday.
DR. DEBORAH BIRX: So, as mortality, the fatalities to this disease, will increase, and then it will come back down, and it will come back down slower than the rate at which it went up. And so, that’s — that is really the issue: how much we can push the mortality down.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as millions of people have lost their jobs. Last week’s unemployment claims saw the largest single-week increase in unemployment claims in American history — times five — with an estimated 3.3 million people filing for benefits. Another 5 million claims are expected to be filed this week.
For more, we’re joined by Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, who’s been following all of this very closely from his home in Washington, D.C., where he’s joining us now, again, from his home, where he can protect himself, his family, and stop community spread.
Rob, I’m so glad to be talking to you, but not under these circumstances. Can you start off by just responding to the president this week, for the first time, admitting the enormity of the crisis that we’re in? The latest news, Lee Fang of The Intercept writing that the U.S. was exporting military equipment as late as March 17th. President Trump now admitting we’re talking about 100,000 to a quarter of a million Americans dead in the next weeks, can you start off by just responding to this and then talking about the so-called stimulus bill that was passed, Nancy Pelosi saying they need a second one, and Mitch McConnell saying there’s no way that’s going to happen? Talk about the state of this country right now.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, thanks, Amy. It is great to be with you, and of course not how we’d like to do it.
You know, when it comes to Trump, we’ve called for him to resign, as a clear and present danger to the public health of the country. You know, we supported his impeachment, but this is a whole different thing. It’s not hard to be a leader in times of crisis. It calls on you to do great things, or even mediocre things. The script is pretty well written for you, but he can’t follow it, because he doesn’t have empathy for other human beings. Everything that happens on the planet, for him, is about him. And as a result, we’ve had disastrous leadership, the utter failure of the government to take leadership in treating this as the wartime emergency that he says it is, you know, to make sure that we produce masks for people who need them — it is not a hard thing to do — to make sure we have ventilators for everyone who needs them. We did not have a proper stockpile, but we should have moved, at a national wartime footing, to move into production to get sufficient ventilators. We were able to do it in World War II, 70 years ago. We’re far more technologically advanced. It’s crazy that it hasn’t happened. And it hasn’t happened because we don’t have national leadership. We don’t have a leader who is able to speak in terms of solidarity and bringing us together, even as we’re isolated, which is exactly what we need right now. And we don’t have a leader who’s able to acknowledge the science and tell the truth. He’s come around in the last few days, and hopefully he’ll stay there, but his months-long failure to acknowledge what’s going on, obviously and clearly, has set the nation on a far more deadly trajectory than it would otherwise be on. So, it’s hard to say enough bad things about how the president has handled this. And it didn’t have to be. This is not about how progressive you are. You just have to be someone who understands what it is to be a leader in times of crisis, do the things that need to be done, and he is utterly incapable of doing that.
Obviously, this has rocked the economy, and it’s going to get worse and go on for we don’t know how long. I think it’s a mistake to only think about the worst-case scenarios, but the worst-case scenarios are certainly very frightening. The Congress has done some extraordinary things and some really pretty bad things in response. This last relief or stimulus bill that was just passed, called the CARES Act, was extraordinary to the extent of its size and the speed with which Congress acted. So, it’s a $2 trillion bill that will actually make available about $6 trillion [inaudible] to the economy. For a first cut, that’s pretty good at scale. It does a lot of good things in terms of getting money out to states, getting moneys out to hospitals and having a very strong unemployment program. So, as people are being thrown off their jobs, they’re going to be able to get — apply for and get unemployment that will give them 100% of what they were making, at least for the next four months.
There’s a lot of bad stuff is in that bill, too. It was pretty clear how it should have been structured. If there was a decision made that we need to keep businesses intact, which I think is a reasonable call, they need financing to get through this time, because we want them to maintain — remain as going concerns, and we want the economy to keep functioning. The number one thing we wanted out of them was to keep people on the payroll, and this program does not require businesses to keep people on the payroll as a condition of receiving government loans. It has some conditions that are included so that companies can’t spend the money they get on dividend payments and stock buybacks; however, it permits the treasury secretary to waive those conditions if he sees fit, and we can’t feel very good about how that’s going to go.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Robert Weissman, as you mentioned, millions of people are unemployed, millions more are expected to lose their jobs. And what is happening, the scale and the scope of these job losses are reportedly unprecedented in U.S. history. And to take just one example of the scale of the loss, the U.S. Travel Association has warned that the U.S. tourism industry will be — the loss to the U.S. tourism industry will be more than $900 billion, which is seven times what it was following 9/11. Meanwhile, many observers are drawing comparisons between what’s likely to happen as a result of this and the Great Depression — not just the Recession of 2008, but the Great Depression. What kind of response do you think could compensate for what millions and millions of Americans are going to suffer in the long term?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Right. Well, there is no parallel to this in terms of the scope and that it’s affecting every single person in the United States and every single person around the world. We are, in fact, shutting down huge portions of the economy. So it’s different than the Great Depression, or even the Great Recession [inaudible] market, or the system’s not working. We’ve got an external problem, and we’re making an intentional, appropriate and necessary decision to shut down economic activity. The only force that can solve that problem is the government.
This first stimulus bill is a partial response. But obviously, when you have a total problem, you really need a total solution, starting with people who are the most vulnerable, have the least possible cushion. So, providing unemployment insurance is great; it doesn’t adequately deal with the problem of all kinds of people who have been outside of the workforce all along but were able to get by one way or another and who are not likely to be able to get unemployment insurance. It doesn’t take care of, you know, the issues you’re raising about prisoners and other super vulnerable segments of society. We’ve got a massive population of immigrants, and especially people who are undocumented, who are going to have a lot of trouble accessing some of the financial supports that are available. And people are going to fall through the cracks.
So we’ve got to get more money out, and we need protections for people to be able to stay in their homes. The bill that passed does a lot for people who are homeowners to help give them some break on mortgage payments. It doesn’t adequately deal with renters, who are obviously generally going to be lower-income than the class of mortgage payers. A lot of localities and states are trying to address the rent problem, but not all of them. So a lot of people are going to be really stuck unless we have much stronger moves forward to protect vulnerable people.
AMY GOODMAN: Rob, I want to ask you about Gilead. Facing mounting pressure from elected officials and dozens of groups, including yours, Public Citizen, Gilead scientists backed down from holding onto the exclusive status the Trump administration granted it for a drug it’s developing to treat COVID-19. Joe Grogan, a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, worked as a Gilead Sciences lobbyist from 2011 to 2017. The status would have allowed the corporation to profit exclusively off the drug for seven years and blocked manufacturers from developing generic versions that can be more accessible to patients and control the drug’s price. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted, quote, “It is truly outrageous that after taxpayers put tens of millions of dollars into developing remdesivir, Trump’s FDA is exploiting a law reserved for rare diseases to privatize a drug to treat a pandemic virus. The Trump Administration must rescind this corporate giveaway to Gilead and make any treatment and vaccine free for everybody.” Again, that was presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ statement. But can you explain what this whole controversy is about, what the role of Trump’s — one of his top advisers, his domestic security adviser, Grogan, is now and was as a Gilead lobbyist?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, this is extraordinary. So, Gilead has one of the possible treatments under study. So this is not a vaccine. The treatment very well may not work, but it’s one of the ones that has the best promise, among a not very good group. So, what Gilead did was it sought protection, what’s called orphan drug status, which is available for rare diseases, for drugs that treat populations of under 200,000. And they submitted their application for this rare disease status when there were fewer than 200,000 identified cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Obviously they knew the population was going to go far higher than that, but they got in under the wire. And the way the law is written, not taking into account a situation like this, if you apply when the population is under 200,000, you get this orphan drug designation, whether or not the population later on goes above 200,000. It was astounding. What you get for orphan drug designation is a seven-year exclusivity, a monopoly that’s separate from and in some ways more powerful than a patent monopoly. So we and others protested that. They quickly backed down, because there’s just no way they were going to be able to get away with that. They still have patents and other monopolies. So, if the drug turns out to be useful, they will have a monopoly, unless we impose more pressure on them or the government takes action to override the monopoly and ensure that other generic producers are able to get the drug on the market in the United States and around the world.
The last element of this, which is so important, and it applies to this product and most of the vaccine efforts that are underway, and Senator Sanders’ tweet points this out, this drug has benefited from a huge amount of government funding on the research and development side. The vaccines have been overwhelmingly researched [inaudible] and its development overwhelmingly provided by U.S. federal government. So, in the case of Gilead, who’s trying to receive this special grant of exclusivity from the U.S. government for a product that the U.S. government had actually paid for most of the R&D on. And we’re facing the same possibility with a vaccine, if we get one anytime soon.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the effect of this drug, not only in this country and around the world, the bigger issue of how countries get access to drugs, and the role of this domestic security adviser, I mean, talking about the revolving door of who gets money and who doesn’t, who gets drugs — in other words, life-and-death issues?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Right. So, in terms of the revolving-door issue, we have — you know, President Trump ran on the idea that he was going to take it to the drug companies, because he was a tough guy. He’s done nothing. But one reason he’s done nothing is he’s got drug company executives and lobbyists running his policy. So he’s got Joe Grogan, as you say, formerly a chief lobbyist for Gilead, running policy on drug pricing out of the White House. And he has a former drug company executive, Alex Azar, running the Department of Health and Human Services. So it’s little surprise these are the kind of policies we’re getting.
When it comes to the vaccines, which are more important than this product from Gilead, which very well may not work — you know, eventually we’re going to get a vaccine that works — the question is going to be: How is it made available? So, is it exclusively controlled by one manufacturer that can charge whatever it wants, or is the government going to say, “No, not only did we pay for this, but this is a public health — an international public health emergency with no parallel. You’ll get some money, but we’re going to make this available to everyone around the world”? Hopefully, no one has to pay for it. But the [inaudible] to the drug company, or companies, from the government will be modified in light of the fact that the government paid for the R&D, and we’re going to require any company that might have monopoly control over it to license that product to other qualified manufacturers around the world, because we’re going have a problem not just with price, but with production. Once we have a vaccine that works, we want it available to everybody around the world right away. And there is no manufacturer who’s got anything like the capacity to be able to do that. So we need lots of producers right away, including, in fact, we need the U.S. government to start scaling up production, to do it at the scale we need for this one-time international emergency.
AMY GOODMAN: Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules, telling companies they’ll effectively be allowed to regulate themselves during the coronavirus pandemic. Under the new rules, big polluters will no longer be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The EPA has set no end date for the policy. Then, on Tuesday, the EPA announced a rollback of an Obama rule that forced auto manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. Under the new rules, big polluters will no longer be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. Meanwhile, Trump says he’s invited U.S. oil executives to the White House to discuss how he can help their devastated industry, and protests against pipelines are being further decriminalized [sic] at this time as a threat to national security. Before we wrap up, Rob, if you can address this critical issue, the largest rollback we’ve seen of environmental rules in history?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, just startling. It’s another revolving door story. We have a coal lobbyist who’s running the Environment Protection Agency, and he said, “We’re not going to enforce the rules right now.” It’s framed as a reporting requirement, but effectively means that pollution rules are not going to be enforced, for no good reason. The argument is that people are too busy and stretched to do reporting. Doesn’t really hold up under any kind of scrutiny. And it means that for those producers who are still making stuff, they’re going to be putting a lot more toxic materials into the water and into the air.
Now, a separate thing is this rollback of the clean car standard, which you mentioned. That is the most important climate change initiative that the United States government has ever undertaken, by far. It would both reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, and it would save consumers hundreds of billions of dollars in reduced payments at the pump. The Trump administration has sought from the beginning to roll this back, and they saw fit to do it now under the cover of the COVID crisis. It is an utter disgrace, and it will have very long-lasting implications, unless it itself is undone, which I think it will be, either in the courts or by a next president.
AMY GOODMAN: And at the same time you have the U.N. climate summit being canceled in Glascow, in Scotland, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Right. You know, one thing we’re seeing from this is, of course, this has no parallel, but there are some similarities with what we’re going to deal with with the climate catastrophe that’s coming at us and the need for government to step in. There is no way for private corporations to deal with this crisis right now. They can’t manage the economy. They can’t make planning and management decisions that require some overview of what’s going on. Only the federal government can do that. And it is exactly the same with the climate crisis. And when we come out of this, in fact, when we look at the next stimulus bill, we’re going to have to start talking about thinking not just how we deal with this immediate crisis, but how we — to now, finally, belatedly, take scaled-up action to prevent the climate crisis from hitting us even harder and more devastatingly than this one is.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much, Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, joining us from his home to protect against community spread. I hope you’ll bear with the little glitches of sound and video. This is the price that’s paid to get out serious, real, independent information in a time of a pandemic.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at the Global South. We will start in India, the largest lockdown of a population in U.S. [sic] history.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Everything’s Ruined” by Fountains of Wayne. The band’s co-founder, Adam Schlesinger, died on Wednesday after a battle with COVID-19. He was 52 years old.


democracynow--2020-04-02--Headlines for April  2, 2020

Headlines for April  2, 2020

Here in New York City , the epicenter of pandemic in the United States , over 1,400 people have died .
Governor Andrew Cuomo warned state residents Wednesday to expect a high death rate through July .
Mayor Bill de Blasio has repeatedly warned city hospitals are in dire need of millions of masks , hundreds of thousands of gowns and hundreds of ventilators , and could run out of supplies by April 5 .
For many medical workers , the breaking point has already arrived .
One New York City doctor tweeted a photo of the personal protective equipment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her shift : a New York Yankees-branded rain poncho .
Across the Hudson River , seven hospitals in New Jersey reached capacity Wednesday and were forced to divert COVID-19 patients to other hospitals .
New Jersey ’ s coronavirus death toll has topped 350 , and Governor Phil Murphy said Wednesday his state also faces critical shortages .
Gov .
Phil Murphy : “ Do we have enough ventilators ?
No .
Do we have enough PPE ?
No .
Do we have enough beds ?
No .
Do we have enough healthcare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
”

Here in New York City, the epicenter of pandemic in the United States, over 1,400 people have died. Governor Andrew Cuomo warned state residents Wednesday to expect a high death rate through July.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has repeatedly warned city hospitals are in dire need of millions of masks, hundreds of thousands of gowns and hundreds of ventilators, and could run out of supplies by April 5. For many medical workers, the breaking point has already arrived.
One New York City doctor tweeted a photo of the personal protective equipment she was handed when she arrived for her shift: a New York Yankees-branded rain poncho.
Across the Hudson River, seven hospitals in New Jersey reached capacity Wednesday and were forced to divert COVID-19 patients to other hospitals. New Jersey’s coronavirus death toll has topped 350, and Governor Phil Murphy said Wednesday his state also faces critical shortages.


democracynow--2020-01-07--Propaganda Machine: The Military Roots of Cambridge Analytica’s Psychological Manipulation of Voters

We continue our discussion of data harvesting , targeted advertising and voter manipulation — practices used by firms like Cambridge Analytica .
The secretive data firm collapsed in May 2018 after The Observer newspaper revealed the company had harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users ’ knowledge or consent to sway voters to support Trump during the 2016 campaign .
A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company ’ s operations , including its work with President Trump ’ s former national security adviser John Bolton .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , co-directors of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary “ The Great Hack ” ; Brittany Kaiser , the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in “ The Great Hack ” and author of “ Targeted : The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower ’ s Inside Story of How Big Data , Trump , and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again ” ; and Emma Briant , a visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College .
Her upcoming book is titled “ Propaganda Machine : Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry .
”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guests for this hour are Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. They are the award-winning filmmakers who made The Great Hack. It has just been shortlisted for an Oscar and nominated for the British Oscar, the BAFTA. Brittany Kaiser is with us. It is her first major interview since she’s begun a major document leak, troves of documents about Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in various elections around the world. In a moment, we’re going to ask her about John Bolton and Iran. John Bolton, by the way, has just said he will testify at an impeachment trial in the Senate, which has turned the Senate on its head for the moment. And we’re joined by Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College, who specializes in researching propaganda. Her forthcoming book, Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.
Emma, as you listen to this conversation, your work in Cambridge Analytica has been going on for a long time. Can you relate what they were doing, also Facebook, in manipulating populations, as we move into this current election — we don’t even have to say “2020 election” anymore because we’re in 2020 — and how this work is basically PSYOP, psychological operations?
EMMA BRIANT: Thank you, Amy. Yes, I actually first came across the company SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, in 2007 as part of my master’s and then doctoral research. And I’ve been following their techniques and how they evolved over the years. And what I’ve realized when I started to discover the political work that they were doing, beyond the counterterrorism campaigns that I was studying, was just horrifying to me. The potential for what, you know, escalated during the sort of 2010s is just phenomenal.
So, we started to see them doing these big data projects for the military and so on. And this was, you know, quite a change of direction for them from their earlier work, which was a lot more about qualitative data, doing interviews with people, and so forth, for their research. And it started to change the kind of target audience analysis, this kind of analytics of what — if you like, the persuadables, the people that you want to target your communications at, how those groups were being profiled by the military, then was being taken out and deployed in elections.
And this is deeply disturbing to me because of the fact that I think that these companies have been established with a particular motive in mind, with a particular way of doing things and methodology. And to be repurposing that, when you have been doing work with DARPA, the defense research agency in the U.S., as well as the British equivalent, the DSTL, to develop these kinds of techniques, and then you’re going off and taking them to clients that are working in shady political campaigns around the world and working for human rights abusers, it’s really very disturbing — and then, of course, moving back into our own elections. So, I —
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about that.
EMMA BRIANT: Yeah. So, in 2017, I started to realize that they were working in — they had worked on Brexit and that they worked on the Trump campaign. And I started to do a lot more interviews with the company, including meeting Brittany for the first time. And also I met the filmmakers from The Great Hack. And I was weighed down by the responsibility for what I was discovering from my interviews. I was interviewing people like Nigel Oakes, who, as you can see in the — from the evidence that I submitted to the British Parliament, was telling me about the unethical activities that they were doing around the world for — for instance, for Kenyatta —
AMY GOODMAN: In Kenya.
EMMA BRIANT: — and the role that they played — in Kenya — and the role that they played also in the election of Donald Trump. And he was telling me about how they had basically deployed the same kinds of techniques of the Nazis in the U.S. election. Now, this horrified me. And I had to go further and further and haven’t stopped researching this.
And I think the most important thing is also to put this in the context of their military work, because, actually, these firms are working in multiple domains. You have commercial data use, you have military data use, and you have political data use in the same company. And we have no regulation over what is happening in the United States with companies like this. And there is little transparency over these companies in the United Kingdom, too, which is how we’ve ended up with this real catastrophe for democracy.
So, the issue is that we don’t know how data was being abused by this company. We know some examples of it. We certainly know that they had a slack regard for consent, from the — you know, what’s been revealed in The Great Hack and by Carole Cadwalladr. And the data was being repurposed from research done by academics for their political campaigns. Where else might they have been repurposing data from? And this is the thing that really scares me the most, is that this is rampant, I think, across the industry. I see many, many more companies out there that are working in these multiple domains with little accountability.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go back to October, when New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Did anyone on your leadership team know about Cambridge Analytica prior to the initial report by The Guardian on December 11, 2015?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I believe so, in that some folks were tracking it internally.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And —
MARK ZUCKERBERG: I’m actually — as you’re asking this, I do think I was aware of Cambridge Analytica as an entity earlier. I just — I don’t know if I was tracking how they were using Facebook specifically.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: When was the issue discussed with your board member Peter Thiel?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I don’t — I don’t know that offhand.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: You don’t know. This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t — you don’t know?
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s AOC, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, questioning Jeffrey [sic] Zuckerberg. Brittany Kaiser, was he telling the truth?
BRITTANY KAISER: I have found that during multiple rounds of questioning, that he —
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Zuckerberg, that is.
BRITTANY KAISER: — that Mark Zuckerberg continues to deny the amount of strategies that he is aware of, the amount of data abuses that he is aware of. And just saying that “My team will get back to you,” without being honest with the public, is a massive disaster, not only for his own PR, but for our democracies and for moving forward in a productive manner.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what Ocasio-Cortez was getting at when she was talking about Peter Thiel.
BRITTANY KAISER: So, Peter Thiel, as far as I am aware, was the head of Trump’s technology advisory council. There were multiple meetings where Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was either being invited or attempting to be invited to those meetings, through the Mercers, through Kellyanne Conway, through Steve Bannon.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were with Rebekah Mercer, right, on Trump inauguration night?
BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. The Mercers and a lot of other people who had played a very large role in the funding and in the campaigning for Donald Trump were reaching as far as they possibly could to technology tools in order to achieve their goals.
AMY GOODMAN: And are they doing it now?
BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. I think if anybody thinks that this is different than 2016, they are sorely mistaken. In 2016, everybody saw how successful Cambridge Analytica’s tactics are, so now there’s hundreds of Cambridge Analyticas around the world, especially acting in the U.S. elections right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t we talk about John Bolton and Iran, the files that you’re releasing, that you had during your Cambridge Analytica days? Can you set up this video that we want to play?
BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, the files on Ambassador John Bolton show the work that Cambridge Analytica was paid to undertake for the John Bolton super PAC. That was work that started in 2013. It was actually one of the biggest first projects that Cambridge Analytica undertook in the United States. And that was to find five different psychographic groupings of voters and target them with psychographic messaging meant to resonate with your psyche and engage you, depending on whether you’re open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable or neurotic.
And those videos were targeted over television and YouTube pre-roll in order to convince people, one, that national security was the most important political issue; two, that Ambassador John Bolton was the biggest authority on these topics; and, three, that whoever John Bolton was endorsing — for example, Thom Tillis — would be a better candidate — than Kay Hagan, for example, in that specific race. So, these ads were paid in order to manipulate people into being more interested in his hawkish foreign policies than in their own best interest.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the ad, that is not radio-friendly because it’s mainly music with script over it? But this is an ad for Thom Tillis, right?
BRITTANY KAISER: Yes. And it was an ad targeted at a group of people identified as being highly neurotic, and, therefore, it is black and white. It’s eerie. You get very emotional music, that shows surrender flags on all of America’s most prominent landmarks.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play it, and I’ll read what it says on the screen. So we’ll listen to that music and play the ad, and you can then comment further.
There’s white flags going up, white flag on the Brooklyn Bridge, over the White House — over Congress. And it says, “America’s never surrendered before. What happens if we start now? On November 4, vote Thom Tillis.”
An ad paid for, 2014, by the John Bolton super PAC. The ad was titled “White Flags.” Tillis went on to win his Senate race.
BRITTANY KAISER: Yes, he did, indeed. And they used these tactics in a very successful manner. In fact, the John Bolton super PAC paid for a third party to rate how successful Cambridge Analytica had been. And they saw, on this ad specifically, that there was over a 36% uplift in engagement on these ads versus the communications that they had already been running.
And so, what scares me so much is that I know that these tactics are being used right now. We are being manipulated in order to support going to war with Iran. We are being manipulated in order to believe that this type of violence is acceptable and that we should support candidates that support this violence.
AMY GOODMAN: There are some who have suggested that President Trump did this, possibly in part because he’s so deeply concerned about his impeachment trial, and this specifically could be targeted for John Bolton, the former national security adviser, who almost immediately tweeted, “We have been working on this for a long time,” talking about the assassination, and that Trump is afraid of what he might say, and so this would appease him.
BRITTANY KAISER: Another important tranche of documents that I released are in the Iran folder, which actually shows that Cambridge Analytica and other right-wing organizations, like America Rising, that does all of the opposition research for the GOP, were polling to see how many people in the United States were interested in the Iran deal, to drop sanctions, or if they were against the Iran nuclear deal and more interested in war. So you can see the types of questions that were asked, and that they were using that to model and identify people who could be persuaded to go against Iran, and whether or not that would be favorable for electoral fodder, I should say. And right now that same polling is happening. So, if you are identified as being a persuadable, you are going to see more of this propaganda in order to convince you that war is in our best interest, when it obviously is not.
AMY GOODMAN: Emma Briant, what makes this different from regular polling? Why do you see this as evil?
EMMA BRIANT: It’s not polling I think is evil; it’s what it’s being used for. I’d like to put this in a little bit of a wider context, if I may, and talk a little bit about what I know about SCL and —
AMY GOODMAN: You have 30 seconds, and then we will do Part 2.
EMMA BRIANT: — Iran. Oh, OK, sure. So, basically, they were working also in the Gulf from 2013. And it’s really important to note that the Saudis and the UAE were also very keen to oppose the Iran deal, and Trump’s election was followed by a huge spike in arms sales to the Saudis. And I think that this being a military contractor is extremely important to remember in the light of these recent developments on Iran. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s where we’re going to leave it now, but we’re going to pick it up in Part 2, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org. This has been an astounding discussion. I want to thank Emma Briant in Washington, Brittany Kaiser for joining us, and Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. The Great Hack is their film. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.


democracynow--2020-01-07--“The Great Hack”: Big Data Firms Helped Sway the 2016 Election. Could It Happen Again in 2020?

The documentary “ The Great Hack , ” which was shortlisted from the Oscars , explores how the data firm @ @ @ @ @ the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election @ @ @ @ @ May 2018 after The Observer newspaper revealed the company had harvested some 87 million Facebook @ @ @ @ @ knowledge or consent .
Cambridge Analytica then used the data to sway voters to support @ @ @ @ @ campaign .
We speak with “ The Great Hack ” co-directors Karim Amer and Jehane @ @ @ @ @ Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the hour looking at Cambridge Analytica, the British company that was co-founded by the well-known President Trump special adviser Steve Bannon. He was vice president of Cambridge Analytica, which came out of a military contracting group and now is accused of having been involved, essentially, with PSYOPs, using tens of millions of people’s information that it harvested from Facebook.
Our guests are the award-winning filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, who are directors of The Great Hack, which has just been nominated for a BAFTA, the Oscar equivalent in Britain, and has been shortlisted for an Oscar, and Brittany Kaiser, a whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica for more than three years. In Washington, we’re joined by Emma Briant, who has been looking at Cambridge Analytica for years.
Let me ask you, Jehane, why you decided to spend years of your life looking at Cambridge Analytica and making this film, The Great Hack, and why you called it that.
JEHANE NOUJAIM: Well, this has, for me, been a film, I feel, 20 years in the making. Twenty years ago, I made a film with Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker called Startup.com, which was about the beginning of the dotcom world starting and where people wanted to be God online and start internet companies and make millions and millions of dollars. And fast-forward 20 years, and they are God online.
But I’ve always been obsessed with how we get our information. And soon after Startup.com, I made Control Room, which was about looking at the Iraq War, and depending on whether you were looking at Al Jazeera or Fox News or CNN, you had a completely different understanding of reality on the ground. And I had this question of how — if you don’t have some kind of shared understanding of truth, how can there be nuanced conversation and discussion, which is what’s necessary for a democracy to function?
Flash-forward to us making The Square, and at that time social media was a tool for change, positive change. I mean —
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking Tahrir Square in Egypt.
JEHANE NOUJAIM: Tahrir Square. This is where we met, and we made the film, The Square. And at that time, even when I was arrested, Twitter was used to find me. So, it was a very positive tool for change.
Then we see the pendulums kind of swing in the other direction, and we see that social media can be used in a very different way. And it was used by the Army, and then we started to see it being used in the Brexit campaign and the Trump campaign. And we started hear this word “hack” and the hacking of these elections. But what we realized was that the real hack that we needed to look at was the hack of the mind and what is happening inside our newsfeeds and what happens when people are creating their own truths because they’re being microtargeted.
And we started to look at this company Cambridge Analytica. And what we found there was fascinating, because we realized that there was this invisible story that’s happening inside our computer screens, inside our heads, which is leading to everybody having a completely different understanding of reality based on their newsfeeds.
And that’s when we met Brittany Kaiser, who at the time was just about to become a whistleblower and come out about what she knew. She was basically saying, “I’m going to Thailand, and if you want to talk to me, then come meet me here. I can’t tell you exactly where it’s going to be, where I’m going, but land at this airport.” We met her there, and that’s where the film began.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to go to a clip of The Great Hack, your film. In this, Brittany Kaiser explains the concept of the persuadables.
BRITTANY KAISER: Remember those Facebook quizzes that we used to form personality models for all voters in the U.S.? The truth is, we didn’t target every American voter equally. The bulk of our resources went into targeting those whose minds we thought we could change. We called them the persuadables.
They’re everywhere in the country, but the persuadables that mattered were the ones in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. Now, each of these states were broken down by precinct. So you can say there are 22,000 persuadable voters in this precinct, and if we targeted enough persuadable people in the right precincts, then those states would turn red instead of blue.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s a clip from The Great Hack. Brittany Kaiser, explain further this idea of persuadables.
BRITTANY KAISER: So, you might have heard them referred to as “swing voters.” In brand advertising, they’re called “switchers,” because it’s easy to persuade someone to try something new or to change their mind. So, identifying persuadables is what everybody does in data science for political modeling. Every political consultant in the books is trying to do this, identify the people whose minds can be changed, because quite a lot of people have not made up their mind yet. And when you’re trying to introduce a character as controversial as Donald Trump, the idea was, find the people who could be convinced, even though they had probably never voted for anyone like him before.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about your trajectory. I mean, Karim and Jehane, you do this very well in the film, but it is a very unlikely path to a firm that may well have been illegal in what it did, in working with Facebook, harvesting all this information, that ultimately helped to get Trump elected. But that’s not really where you came from. In the film, I’m looking at pictures of you and Michelle Obama. You were a key figure in President Obama’s social media team in his election campaign.
BRITTANY KAISER: I have always been a political and human rights activist. That’s where I came from, so it was really easy to snap back into that kind of work. I actually was in the third year of my Ph.D., writing about prevention of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, when I first met the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix. My Ph.D. ended up being about how you could get real-time information, so how you could use big data systems, in order to build early-warning systems to give people who make decisions, like the decision that was just made about Iran — give them real-time information so that they can prevent war before it happens. Unfortunately, no one at my law school could teach me anything about predictive algorithms, so I joined this company part-time in order to start to learn how these early-warning systems could possibly be built.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain. Explain your meeting with Alexander Nix, who is the head — came from the defense contractor — right? — SCL, and then was the head of Cambridge Analytica, who said, “Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets.”
BRITTANY KAISER: Yes, he did. Not that becoming, but he has always been an incredibly good salesman. In one of my first meetings with him, he showed me a contract that the company had with NATO in order to identify young people in the United Kingdom who were vulnerable to being recruited into ISIS, and running counterpropaganda communications to keep them at home safe with their families instead of sneaking themselves into Syria. So, obviously, that type of work was incredibly attractive to me. And I thought, “Hey, data can really be used for good and for human rights impact. This is something I really want to learn how to do.”
AMY GOODMAN: But soon you were on your way to the United States with Alexander Nix, meeting with Corey Lewandowski, who at the time was the campaign manager for Donald Trump. When did those red flags go up for you?
BRITTANY KAISER: There were red flags here and there, especially when I would call our lawyers, who were actually Giuliani’s firm at the time, in order to ask for advice on what I could and could not do with certain data projects. And I always got told, “Hey, you’re creating too many invoices.”
But what really landed the plane for me was, a month after Donald Trump’s election, everybody at Cambridge Analytica who had worked both on the Trump campaign and on the Trump super PAC, which ran the “Defeat Crooked Hillary” campaign — they gave us a two-day-long debrief, which I write about in detail in my book Targeted, about what they did. They showed us how much data they collected, how they modeled it, how they identified people as individuals that could be convinced not to vote, and the types of disinformation that they sent these people in order to change their minds. It was the most horrific two days of my life.
AMY GOODMAN: So what did you do after that?
BRITTANY KAISER: I spent a while trying to figure out if there was still anything I could salvage from what I learned there. Was it still possible to use these tools for good? And when I realized that the company had gone way too far in the wrong direction, I started working with journalists in order to go through and figure out what I had in my documents that could possibly assist in saving democracy in the future.
AMY GOODMAN: You testified before the British Parliament. You were subpoenaed by Robert Mueller. You’ve been involved in a lot of information giving during these investigations. In an odd way, would you describe yourself as a persuadable?
BRITTANY KAISER: Definitely. And that’s actually a story that is very prevalent in my book. Most people don’t like to think that they are persuadable. We all like to think that we can’t be manipulated. But, trust me, we’re not as digitally literate as we like to think that we are. That’s why I released the Hindsight Files, because I want everyone to realize how easy it is for us to be manipulated and that we need to be aware in order to protect ourselves.
AMY GOODMAN: Karim Amer, for people who are still sitting here and going, “Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, what does this have to do with each other, Zuckerberg testifying before Congress?” explain then what was the magic sauce. What happened here between these two companies? What did Cambridge Analytica do? And I’ll also ask Brittany this question. And what did Facebook understand was done? And what did they do about it?
KARIM AMER: Well, I think, you know, the situation that we find ourselves in is one in which all of our behavior, which is essentially what data is, recordable human behavior, is constantly being tracked and gathered. And that’s part of the deal or the devil’s bargain we’ve made in this new economy, where we give our data up, and in return we get services. Now, most of us go ahead and we sign these terms and conditions that we don’t really read or don’t really understand what they’re about. What we’ve realized is that we’re giving up a certain level of autonomy that we may not have understood the implications of.
Now, what is that autonomy? What that is, it is insight into everything you do all the time. It’s something that’s tracking you, from the most public of spaces, when you’re posting, to the most intimate of spaces, when you’re watching porn or when you’re messaging somebody or when you’re staring at photos of a loved one or someone else. All of that behavior is constantly being tracked.
And it is used to create essentially a voodoo doll of you that can predict your behavior with quite a lot of accuracy. The proof of that is that that is the business model of Facebook and Google. It is about predicting your behavior and selling access to that prediction. Think of it as being in a casino that is constantly running, trying to make bets on what you’re going to do next. Now, that casino access is being sold in real time to all kinds of brands around the world.
What Cambridge identified was that they could take voter data, and they could take personality data, and they could map them together and create the most accurate profiles. That’s why they bragged about having 5,000 data points about every U.S. voter, which was one of their unique offerings. And with that insight, they realized that if you knew which districts you had to target and how to target the key people in those districts with the perfect messaging, you had the greatest chance of success.
And where that leaves us to is, we used to live in a world where a political leader had to write one big, one great story to inspire a great people to go on to a great cause. Now we live in a world where a politician can customize a story to every single individual voter and do it in a way which is operating in darkness without transparency.
What do we mean by darkness? We mean that 'til this day we still do not know what ads were placed on Facebook in 2016, who was targeted, who paid for those ads, how it was conducted, were these ads paid for by a foreign country or not, what happened, what didn't happen. And I think we deserve to know. Why? Because we’ve seen that this has become a place of weaponized information, that can be used to not only promote amazing ideas, but to convince people not to vote, which is active voter suppression.
And what’s troubling is that this is an information crime. Whether it’s legal or illegal doesn’t matter, in my opinion, because many things in our country’s history were legal once before, including slavery, and yet we’ve realized that it was not OK for them to be legal. So, at the current moment, Facebook is a crime scene. Facebook has the answers. Facebook knows what happened to our democracy. And yet it is still unwilling to participate in giving us the evidence we need.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to another one of your clips, Jehane and Karim, one of the clips of The Great Hack. This is one of the main subjects of the documentary, professor David Carroll.
DAVID CARROLL: I was teaching digital media and developing apps, so I knew that the data from our online activity wasn’t just evaporating. And as I dug deeper, I realized these digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. We are now the commodity. But we were so in love with the gift of this free connectivity that no one bothered to read the terms and conditions.
AMY GOODMAN: David Carroll is featured in this documentary, The Great Hack. In 2018, we spoke to David Carroll at Democracy Now!, associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design. He’s filed a full disclosure claim against Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. I asked him what he was demanding. And a clip of this also appears in The Great Hack.
DAVID CARROLL: A full disclosure. So, where did they get our data? How did they process it? Who did they share it with? And do we have a right to opt out? So, the basic rights that I think a lot of people would like to have, and the basic questions that a lot of people are asking.
AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to find out just what happened with these demands, these questions he had, when he took them to Britain to take on Cambridge Analytica, and how he, as well as Brittany Kaiser and others, took Cambridge Analytica down. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.


democracynow--2020-01-07--Meet Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Releasing Troves of New Files From Data Firm

New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate voters across the globe , from the 2016 election in the United States to the Brexit campaign in Britain and elections in over 60 other countries , including Malaysia , Kenya and Brazil .
A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company ’ s operations , including its work with President Trump ’ s former national security adviser John Bolton .
The documents come from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser , who worked at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2018 .
We speak with Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer , co-directors of the Oscar shortlisted documentary “ The Great Hack ” ; Brittany Kaiser , the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in “ The Great Hack ” and author of “ Targeted : The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower ’ s Inside Story of How Big Data , Trump , and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again ” ; and Emma Briant , a visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College whose upcoming book is titled “ Propaganda Machine : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Industry .
”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate voters across the globe, from the 2016 election in the United States to the Brexit campaign in Britain to elections in over 60 countries, including Ukraine, Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil.
Cambridge Analytica was founded by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon of Breitbart News was one of the company’s key strategists and claims to have named the company. The company collapsed in May 2018 after The Observer newspaper revealed the company had harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent. Cambridge Analytica used the data to sway voters during the 2016 campaign.
A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company’s operations across the globe, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. The documents come from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, who worked at the firm for three-and-a-half years before leaving in 2018. Kaiser is featured prominently in the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar. This is the trailer for the film.
DAVID CARROLL: Who has seen an advertisement that has convinced you that your microphone is listening to your conversations? All of your interactions, your credit card swipes, web searches, locations, likes, they’re all collected, in real time, into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: The real game changer was Cambridge Analytica. They worked for the Trump campaign and for the Brexit campaign. They started using information warfare.
DAVID CARROLL: Cambridge Analytica claimed to have 5,000 data points on every American voter.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: I started tracking down all these Cambridge Analytica ex-employees.
CHRISTOPHER WYLIE: Someone else that you should be calling to the committee is Brittany Kaiser.
NEWSCASTER: Brittany Kaiser, once a key player inside Cambridge Analytica, casting herself as a whistleblower.
BRITTANY KAISER: The reason why Google and Facebook are the most powerful companies in the world is because last year data surpassed oil in value. Data is the most valuable asset on Earth. We targeted those whose minds we thought we could change, until they saw the world the way we wanted them to. I do know that their targeting tool was considered a weapon.
PAUL HILDER: There is a possibility that the American public had been experimented on.
DAVID CARROLL: This is becoming a criminal matter.
CHRISTOPHER WYLIE: When people see the extent of the surveillance, I think they’re going to be shocked.
BRITTANY KAISER’S MOTHER: And I still fear for your life.
BRITTANY KAISER: Yeah.
BRITTANY KAISER’S MOTHER: With the powerful people that are involved.
BRITTANY KAISER: But I can’t keep quiet just because it will make powerful people mad.
BRITTANY KAISER’S MOTHER: I know.
RAVI NAIK: Data rights should be considered just fundamental rights.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: This is about the integrity of our democracy. These platforms which were created to connect us have now been weaponized. It’s impossible to know what is what, because nothing is what it seems.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer to the Netflix documentary The Great Hack. Well, we’re joined right now by four guests, by the film’s directors, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. They’re the co-directors of The Great Hack, which was just nominated for a BAFTA today. That’s t the British equivalent of the Oscars. And it has been shortlisted for the Oscars. Jehane’s past films with Karim Amer include The Square. She also did Control Room. Brittany Kaiser is the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in the film. She’s the author of Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again. And we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College who specializes in researching propaganda. Her forthcoming book is called Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Brittany, you have just begun to release a trove of documents from Cambridge Analytica, involves scores of countries, including the United States, including John Bolton, including Iran. Talk about how — why you decided to begin this release and what are in these documents.
BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. I decided to release the Hindsight Files because it’s now 2020. I’ve been waiting and working with investigators and journalists around the world for the past two years. And what I’ve seen is that we don’t have enough change in order for voters to be protected, ahead of not just November, but in 27 days the first votes that are cast for the 2020 election.
I really think that digital literacy is the most important point that I’m trying to make here. If you understand the tactics and the strategies that are being used to manipulate you, then you can protect yourself from that. And I want to be able to empower voters ahead of casting their first vote this year.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about these documents, where they came from and what’s in them.
BRITTANY KAISER: These are all documents from my time at Cambridge Analytica. I worked at the company for over three years. So, it’s internal communications and negotiations for data-driven communications projects all around the world. It’s proposals, contracts and case studies of what has been done to intervene in democracy.
And I think it’s so important for people to understand that while sometimes these tactics are benign, sometimes they are incredibly malignant. And there’s evidence of voter suppression, fake news and disinformation, using racism, sexism.
And I just want to make sure that there is real action that is going to be taken, not just ahead of this next election, but for countries all around the world. We need privacy legislation so badly. We need to regulate Big Tech and have an ability to enforce our voting laws online, because right now we can’t. And unfortunately, companies like Facebook are not doing enough to protect us.
AMY GOODMAN: So, for people who are new to what Cambridge Analytica is, why don’t you describe why it is and why you have these documents, what Cambridge Analytica’s role was in all of these countries, including the United States?
BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, Cambridge Analytica was one of the companies under the SCL Group, Strategic Communication Laboratories. This is a company that has been around for over 25 years, and they started by using data-driven strategies in order to understand people’s psyche, how they make decisions and how they can be persuaded to take certain actions or to prevent people from taking certain actions.
AMY GOODMAN: It was a defense contractor.
BRITTANY KAISER: Originally they started in defense, yes. And once they found out how successful that was — that was actually in the Nelson Mandela election in ’93, ’94 in South Africa, they were preventing election violence for a defense contract — they realized that that was very useful in elections. And those strategies developed over two-and-a-half decades in order to no longer just do good things and good impact work, but, unfortunately, to undermine our democracies.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip from the documentary The Great Hack. In this clip, the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr talks about Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL. We also hear the voice of former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who was previously a director of SCL.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: SCL started out as a military contractor, SCL Defence.
ALEXANDER NIX: We have a fairly substantial defense business. We actually train the British Army, the British Navy, the U.S. Army, U.S. Special Forces. We train NATO, the CIA, State Department, Pentagon. It’s using research to influence behavior of hostile audiences. How do you persuade 14-to-30-year-old Muslim boys not to join al-Qaeda? Essentially communication warfare.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: They had worked in Afghanistan. They had worked in Iraq. They had worked in various places in Eastern Europe. But the real game changer was they started using information warfare in elections.
ALEXANDER NIX: There’s a lot of overlap, because it’s all the same methodology.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: All of the campaigns which Cambridge Analytica/SCL did for the developing world, it was all about practicing some new technology or trick, how to persuade people, how to suppress turnout or how to increase turnout. And then, it’s like, “OK, now I’ve got the hang of it. Let’s use it in Britain and America.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s a clip from The Great Hack. We’re going to go to break and then come back. We’re also joined by the directors. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Stay with us.