RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA TRIED TO MAKE A CRYPTO CURRENCY WITH CHINESE/MACAU MOB FIGURES AND THE MONEY DISAPPEARED
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CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA TRIED TO MAKE A CRYPTO CURRENCY WITH CHINESE/MACAU MOB FIGURES AND THE MONEY DISAPPEARED
Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Virtual Currency Plans
By NATHANIEL POPPER and NICHOLAS CONFESSOREAPRIL 17, 2018
Alexander Nix oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s effort to develop its own virtual currency when he was the company’s chief executive. Joshua Bright
SAN FRANCISCO — The embattled political data firm Cambridge Analyticaquietly sought to develop its own virtual currency in recent months through a so-called initial coin offering, a novel fund-raising method that has come under growing scrutiny by financial regulators around the world.
The offering was part of a broader, but still very private push that the firm was making into the nascent world of cryptocurrencies over the last year.
Much like its acquisition of Facebook data to build psychological profiles of voters, the new business line pushed the firm into murky ethical and legal situations. Documents and emails obtained by The New York Times show that Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to help promote another group’s digital token, the Dragon Coin, associated the firm with a famous gangster in Macau who has gone by the nickname Broken Tooth.
The goal of Cambridge Analytica’s own coin offering? Raise money that would pay for the creation of a system to help people store and sell their online personal data to advertisers, Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, said in an interview. The idea was to protect information from more or less what the firm did when it obtained the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users.
“Who knows more about the usage of personal data than Cambridge Analytica?” Ms. Kaiser said. “So why not build a platform that reconstructs the way that works?”
Revelations that consultants to the Trump campaign misused millions of Facebook users’ data set off an international furor. This is how The Times covered it.
The effort was overseen by Cambridge Analytica’s British chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was forced out of the company in March after he was caught on tape bragging about his company’s approach to political work in other countries, including the use of shell companies and strategies designed to entrap opponents. The Facebook data revelations and Mr. Nix’s comments appear to have put the virtual currency work, which was still in the early stages, on hold.
Initial coin offerings, or I.C.O.s, are a method of fund-raising in which companies sell their own virtual currencies. The tokens are generally structured like Bitcoin, using a so-called blockchain to record transactions. The coins are usually designed to be used as an internal payment method in software that the start-ups are building. Over the last year, companies have raised over $6 billion through I.C.O.s.
The New York Times Explains...
Coin offerings generally avoid the regulatory oversight that accompanies traditional fund-raising methods, opening the door for significant fraud. A number of coin offerings have been shut down by law enforcement, and there are several broad investigations of the industry by regulators around the world.
“There are only a handful of more controversial areas it could have expanded its business into,” said Tim Swanson, a consultant to companies in the industry, who was briefed on the Cambridge Analytica coin offering.
A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cambridge Analytica began working with coin offerings in the middle of last year. The business was guided by Ms. Kaiser, an American who led the company’s business development and previously appeared at a press eventwith organizers of the “Brexit” campaign to get Britain out of the European Union.:weebaynanimated:
Wan Kuok-koi, center, a Macau gangster, after his release from prison in 2012. Documents have listed Mr. Wan as a supporter of a Dragon Coin, a digital token promoted by Cambridge Analytica:weebaynanimated:.Laurent Fievet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Cambridge Analytica boasts that its “psychographic profiles” of voters and consumers allow for more persuasive and precisely targeted advertising. In marketing material sent to investors, the firm said Ms. Kaiser was “helping blockchain companies in using predictive modeling to target investors for token sales.”
Jill Carlson, a consultant who has worked with several blockchain companies, attended meetings where Cambridge Analytica pitched its services to virtual currency companies, including one that Mr. Nix attended.
Ms. Carlson said the Cambridge Analytica employees had bragged about their success in helping get President Trump elected and their ability to carefully target advertising campaigns using data from social networks like Facebook.
She also remembers they spoke about an array of potential campaigns. The most unusual idea involved sending virtual currencies to people in far-flung regions of Mexico. The payments would give people incentive to fill out surveys and get data that could then be used to help design campaigns for Mexican political candidates.:weebaynanimated:
Ms. Carlson said the pitch was contrary to the ideas of openness and transparency that drew her to virtual currency projects like Bitcoin.
Brittany Kaiser, who guided Cambridge Analytica’s work with initial coin offerings, has been critical of the company since leaving it in February.
Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
“The way that Cambridge Analytica was talking about it, they were viewing it as a means of being able to basically inflict government control and private corporate control over individuals, which just takes the whole initial premise of this technology and turns it on its head in this very dystopian way,” she said.
Cambridge Analytica did win over some clients. Last summer, Ms. Kaiser’s team began working with Dragon Coin, a new virtual currency that was designed to be used by gamblers. The coin was supposed to make it easier for people to get their money to casinos in Macau, an island that is technically a part of China with some independent political structures.
Cambridge Analytica had little public role in promoting Dragon Coin. But behind the scenes the company emailed potential partners and investors and arranged for some of them to take all-expenses-paid trips to a glitzy Dragon Coin event in Macau.
The South China Morning Post published a photo from the event showing Wan Kuok-koi in attendance. Mr. Wan is known as Broken Tooth Koi from his days as the leader of the famous 14K gang in Macau. He was released from prison in 2012 after serving a 14-year term.:shakingdamn::shakingdamn::shakingdamn:
The founder of Dragon Coin, Chris Ahmad, told Business Insider at the timethat Mr. Wan “is not involved in Dragon, and he is not financing Dragon in any way.”:rockwtfusay:
The Manhattan location of Cambridge Analytica, a British company. Its virtual currency work, which was still in the early stages, now appears to be on hold. Joshua Bright
But documents sent in September to potential investors by Dragon Coin’s co-founder Paul Moynan listed Mr. Wan as the sponsor of the initial coin offering and included his picture. :50centscust:Ms. Kaiser was included in the email. A separate Dragon Coin document that Mr. Moynan sent out at the same time listed Mr. Wan as one of a few high-profile supporters of the project.:weebaynanimated:
When reached recently, Mr. Moynan initially said that his email address had been hacked and that he did not recognize the documents. He later said the documents were a “hypothetical wish list” of a “junior staff” member.
“We will be conducting an internal investigation, as unfinished draft documents would never have been indicative of actual agreed partnerships,” he said.
Ms. Kaiser said that her work on the Dragon Coin event in Macau had been done in a personal capacity, and that the Dragon Coin team had told her that Mr. Wan was not involved with the project.
Dragon Coin claimed it raised more than $300 million from investors last fall. That total has been hard to verify. Like many coin offerings, Dragon Coin has failed to live up to its promises.:weebaynanimated:
The document sent to investors in September said Dragon Coin had secured a partnership with Visa to release a debit card that would work on the Visa network.:weebaynanimated: A spokeswoman for Visa said that there was no partnership and that no Dragon card had been approved, as is necessary for a card to be issued.
The documents last summer also said the Dragon app, which would let investors use its virtual coin, would be available in September. When that didn’t happen, the company promised the app in January — but it still has not appeared. In the meantime, the company has spent its money sponsoring a Formula E car racing team and a team climbing Mount Everest.
The setbacks did not stop Cambridge Analytica from plunging further into the virtual currency realm. The company’s New York office continued reaching out to potential investors and partners, emails show. And in January, Ms. Kaiser hosted a side conference dedicated to blockchain projects, known as CryptoHQ, at the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. Mr. Nix spoke on a panel at the event.
He said that the technology would be helpful in solving the very problems that Cambridge Analytica has since become the emblem of — the abuse of online personal data.
“We’re going to see a new type of economy emerging where people can start to take ownership of their data and monetize on their data,” Mr. Nix said, according to a tweet from the CryptoHQ account. “And that is only possible through the blockchain.”
The virtual currency that Cambridge Analytica was designing was aimed at exactly this problem, and would have also helped the company raise money from investors.
The company wrote a document describing the technical specifications of the coin, Ms. Kaiser said. Her account was confirmed by another person who worked on the project and agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. The work was overseen by Alexander Tayler, the firm’s chief data scientist and briefly the interim chief executive after Mr. Nix stepped down.
Ms. Kaiser left Cambridge Analytica in February and has been sharply critical of the company since then. As far as she knows, the coin offering has not moved forward. But she is still working on similar concepts at her new consulting firm, Bueno Capital.
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin
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Who funds The Federalist?
GOT EM!!!!!
GOT EM!!!!!
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BEN DOMENECH RUNS THE FEDERALIST...MARRIED TO MEGHAN MCCAIN
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Claremont Institute - Wikipedia
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin
Dorian Breh
Veteran
Damn
Ivana Trump thinks Vanessa will ‘have a problem’ finding a new man
By Dana Schuster
Ivana Trump doesn’t want Donald Trump to run for president again in 2020.
“I’ll tell you something, I don’t think it’s necessary,” she told The Post during an interview Wednesday at her Upper East Side townhouse.
“He has a good life and he has everything. Donald is going to be 74, 73 for the next [election] and maybe he should just go and play golf and enjoy his fortune,” the president’s ex-wife said.
Besides, she added, “I think he probably [misses] a little bit of freedom, I don’t think he probably knew how much is involved of being the president. It’s so [much] information — you have to know the whole world.”
Despite having divorced Donald in 1992 after he infamously cheated on her with Marla Maples, Ivana and “The Donald,” as she affectionately calls him, have remained close.
“We speak every month,” said the 69-year-old whose book “Raising Trump,”is out in paperback May 1.
In fact, it was Ivana — the mother of Donald’s children Donald Jr., 40; Ivanka, 36; and Eric, 34 — who called the president in March to inform him that Donald Jr.’s wife, Vanessa, was filing for divorce.
“Of course, he was not happy,” said Ivana.
She, too, is “very sad” about the split, but thinks her son will be fine. “Donald Jr. is a good-looking guy. He is successful. He is not going to have a problem to find a girl,” she said. “Maybe Vanessa might have a little problem because she has five kids . . . who is going to date and marry the woman who has five children? Especially since she is young [40] and she might want to have more.”
Her son’s impending divorce hits close to home for Ivana, as Donald Jr. is rumored to have had an affair with former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant Aubrey O’Day, whom he met while appearing on his father’s reality show.
“It’s always distressing, because I’ve been there,” said Ivana of the cheating allegations. “But who am I to judge and who knows what was the situation at that moment?
“It’s a long time ago now, so I think Vanessa knew it all along and maybe she just couldn’t get over the hurt to forgive him. But I honestly don’t know that many men who can keep their zippers up.”
Ivana’s sympathy for put-upon women extends to First Lady Melania Trump,in light of lawyer Michael Cohen’s admission that he paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep silent about her alleged affair with POTUS. Daniels claims the first time she and Donald had sex was in 2006, months after Melania gave birth to their son, Barron.
“I feel bad for [Melania] because I know how bad I did feel. It hurts a lot,” said Ivana.
“I divorced Donald immediately [after I discovered the Maples affair] because I told myself, ‘Am I going to live with the person [who] is going to say, ‘I’m going to go and play golf’ [leaving me to] think, ‘Is he really going to go and play golf?’ I cannot do it.
“I have pride and I have dignity and stuff like that, but so many women, around the world, they live with the men knowing that they are cheating and stuff like that. Everybody handles their situation their own way.”
Ivana admits that she never suspected Donald of infidelity during their 15-year marriage.
“Donald was always in the office and coming home, so I had no idea how he had the time to cheat,” she said. “I [found out from Post columnist] Cindy Adams. She saw me at a black-tie dinner and she said, ‘Do you know that Donald has an affair?’ And I just looked at her and turned on my heel. I didn’t speak to her for years.”
Ivana, however, does not have sympathy for Daniels: “She is not playing a fair game.” She added dismissively that Daniels is “paid to strip. . . She goes pole dancing or whatever she’s doing.”
The stress of being first lady and dealing with such public humiliation on a globally-scrutinized platform is not something Ivana longs for.
“Honestly, I prefer that she’s in [the White House rather than me],” she said of Melania. “I like to do what I want to do and like to go wherever I want to go with whomever I want to go.”
Melania, on the other hand, is a virtual prisoner according to Ivana.
“It’s a hard adjustment because she cannot go anywhere. She cannot go shopping, she cannot go out to the theater, she cannot go to restaurants because she has Secret Service and 15 cars in front and 15 in back. So she’s sort of a little bit stuck in the White House — and Donald is busy from morning to night and he’s a workaholic — so I’m not sure how much you really can do.”
One thing Melania isn’t doing is racking up magazine covers. According to a recent story in The Post, she has only graced the cover of one glossy — Vanity Fair Mexico — since becoming FLOTUS.
Ivana blames not just left-leaning media, but also Melania’s reticence.
“I don’t think it’s her fault,” she said. “I think she would do it in a minute if she would be asked. But . . . she doesn’t speak a lot and the magazines [want to interview someone who talks]. You can speak to me for hours and I talk. Some people are more quiet.”
Ivana also worries about her daughter Ivanka, who works as assistant to the president, losing her agency in the White House. In fact, she wishes Ivanka would give up any DC political aspirations and focus on her own companies, including her fashion lines.
“I would prefer if she would [move back to] New York. Politics is a very dirty business,” she said. “In [fashion], she would be her own boss.”
Ivana herself has eschewed politics. She told The Post in September that she had turned down the ambassadorship to the Czech Republic after Donald offered it to her.
She thinks that the president can hold his own in the political arena.
“He doesn’t take nonsense from anybody and he prefers to be friends [rather] than be enemies with Putin, or basically any leader around the world,” she said, adding, “I think [Russian president Vladimir] Putin is the toughest guy in the world. Really.
“It’s always better to be politically correct and be friendly,” she continued. “But Donald’s not going to take his crap, that’s for sure.”
These days, Ivana spends her time traveling between Miami, NYC and her home in the South of France.
“I’m not dating,” said Ivana, who has been divorced four times. “I have companions. They’re based all around the world.”
She still visits Mar-a-Lago, Donald’s opulent estate-turned-private-club in Palm Beach, Fla. “I play tennis and go to the spa and go for dinners with my friends there, but [only] during the week. On the weekends, everybody goes there and everybody wants a photograph with Donald and people go, ‘Ivana! My mother loves you, can I take a picture with you?’ ”
Besides, she prefers the action of Miami to Palm Beach.
“I don’t really say a single woman should go [to Palm Beach] because the wives are very jealous and they grab their husbands. They think somebody is going to steal them,” she said. “So I got a little bit bored in Palm Beach.”
When Ivana isn’t jet-setting, she’s busy being “Ivana-ma” and “Glam-ma,” as her nine grandkids call her.
“Being grandmother, you have the kids for two hours, three hours or for half a day and then when you have headache, you just ship them back to the mama and she has to change the diaper,” said Ivana.
She’s hopeful that her youngest son Eric and his wife, Lara — who gave birth to baby Luke in September— will add to the brood again soon.
“I hope so, yes, because he loves kids,” Ivana said. “And Lara, I never thought she would have many children because she’s very slim and she runs in the marathons and things like that. It’s hard for the body. [But] she had the baby and she’s very happy, and I think they will have more.”
Hopefully, the grandchildren’s names will past muster with Ivana.
“Somebody said, ‘Ivana, what did you think about [the] selection of the names for the grandkids?’ ” she said. “I’m not going to name which ones but some of them are just long and some of them are outdated, but again it’s [the parents’] child.” She added that Donald was originally against naming their first born son after himself.
“He said, ‘How about if he doesn’t turn out good?’ ” she recalled with a laugh.
Although Donald Jr., has been bad lately, Ivana isn’t about to reprimand her son.
“He knows with Vanessa he made a mistake so I would not punish him anymore. He has enough of the problem as it is and five kids to raise,” she said.
After her own split — complete with a reported $25 million settlement — from Donald, Ivana’s advice to her children when it comes to divorce is this: “Be fast, because it costs a lot of money.”
That Eastern Euro straight talk.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
CA working on a coin launch with Triads
We’ve all read and seen prosecutions of companies that have crossed the line but it seems like CA are actively investing in illegal activities. I think Nap made a post about Obama looking into whether CA were in bed with the Russian or Chinese state or both and it certainly makes you wonder...
On second thought maybe it was Wikileaks
Anyways something stinks
We’ve all read and seen prosecutions of companies that have crossed the line but it seems like CA are actively investing in illegal activities. I think Nap made a post about Obama looking into whether CA were in bed with the Russian or Chinese state or both and it certainly makes you wonder...
On second thought maybe it was Wikileaks
Anyways something stinks
fukkery Monday, let's get it
the bar has been raised so high.
any fukkery that takes place is going to be downright crazy.
AZBeauty
Stop lyin' nicca.
So Hannity was using HUD for his real estate deals? An entitlement agency according to some conservatives? I look forward to Cohen being the start of that weirdo's demise.
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Wow this interesting and provides a prospective about the rise of Crypto. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
been saying that bitcoin is more than likely some mechanism developed by SOME intelligence agency/foreign government in order to:
1. fund special programs that need to be off the books
2. launder proceeds from activities that governments can never admit to
3. a honeypot meant to induce transnational criminal organizations, foreign gov'ts, intel agencies etc to utilize the currency and thus allow the creator to track their activities
mark it down that once whoever truly created bitcoin realizes that their identity will be exposed etc, you will see the largest theft in human history...everyone is going to be wiped out