WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Massachusetts attorney general said on Saturday her office was launching an investigation after reports that Cambridge Analytica had harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users in developing techniques to support President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign.

"Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We are launching an investigation," Maura Healey said on Twitter in a post that linked to a New York Times report on the issue. [L1N1QZ02Q]

 

 (Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Paul Simao) </s> Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced Saturday that her office is opening an investigation into Facebook and the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which has ties to the Trump campaign.

"Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We are launching an investigation," Healey tweeted.

Healey's office did not immediately reply to CNN's request for further comment on the investigation.

On Friday, Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, said in a detailed statement that a University of Cambridge psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, had provided Facebook user data he gained through an app to third-parties, including Cambridge Analytica -- a breach of the social media site's policies on protecting people's information.

Although Cambridge Analytica told Facebook the data was destroyed, the social media site's statement said it recently received reports that indicated otherwise and was suspending the data firm, its parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories, Kogan, and another person he shared the information with, Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies Inc. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica denied that the organization is in violation of Facebook's terms and said it is in communication with the social media site. Cambridge Analytica was hired in summer 2016 as part of the Trump campaign's three-pronged data operation. </s> Data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users without permission to develop techniques to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, it has emerged.

In a Saturday report, London’s quoted whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, who helped set up Cambridge Analytica and worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalised political advertisements.

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on,” Wylie told The Observer.

said Cambridge Analytica used the data, taken without authorisation in early 2014, to build a software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

The data breach is one of the biggest in the history of Facebook Inc, and both reported on Saturday.

In the wake of the revelation, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said on Twitter that her office was launching an investigation. “Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” she said.

Facebook said on Friday that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica after finding data privacy policies had been violated.

The more than 50 million profiles represented about a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters, at the time, The Observer said.

said interviews with a half-dozen former Cambridge Analytica employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, revealed it not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of it.

said the data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University.

Through Kogan’s company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use, The Observer said.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong, the newspaper said.

It said Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it from being sold on or used for advertising.

Facebook said on Friday it had also suspended Cambridge Analytica’s parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared.

A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica said GSR “was contractually committed by us to only obtain data in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act and to seek the informed consent of each respondent.”

“When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook’s terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR,” he said.

“We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted,” the spokesman said.

He said “no data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Facebook did not mention the Trump campaign or any other campaigns in its statement.

“We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behaviour,” Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.

In a Twitter post, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos called the news reports “important and powerful” but said it was “incorrect to call this a ‘breach’ under any reasonable definition of the term.”

“We can condemn this behaviour while being accurate in our description of it,” he said.

Acknowledging an episode as a data breach can carry legal significance, as companies face a patchwork of state and federal requirements to notify customers and regulators when they detect that information has been compromised.

Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than US$6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica says it “provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House.”

Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital ad operation in 2016 and is his 2020 re-election campaign manager, declined to comment on Friday.

In past interviews with Reuters, he has said Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 campaign, and that the campaign used voter data from a Republican-affiliated organisation rather than Cambridge Analytica.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the US Senate Intelligence Committee, said the case was “more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West” and showed the need for Congress to pass legislation to bring transparency and accountability to online political advertisements.

A source close to the congressional investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign said the Trump campaign likely will need to address whether it was aware of Cambridge Analytica’s methods for obtaining its data or if the data was leveraged during the election.

The suspension means Cambridge Analytica and SCL cannot buy ads on the world’s largest social media network or administer pages belonging to clients, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice-president, said in a Twitter post.

Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioural microtargeting,” or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behaviour. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two-thirds of the US population.

It has worked on other campaigns in the United States and other countries, and is funded by Robert Mercer, a prominent supporter of politically conservative groups.

Facebook in its statement described a rocky relationship with Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie going back to 2015.

That year, Facebook said, it learned that Kogan lied to the company and violated its policies by sharing data he acquired with a so-called “research app” that used Facebook’s login system.

Kogan was not immediately available for comment.

The thisisyourdigitallife app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said Kogan gained access to profile and other information “in a legitimate way” but “he did not subsequently abide by our rules” when he passed the data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Wylie.

Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan’s app when it learned of the violation in 2015, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.

Although all certified they had destroyed the data, Facebook said it received reports in the past several days that “not all data was deleted,” prompting the suspension announced on Friday. </s> WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr has appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was “lawful and appropriate.”

That’s according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on Monday. The person couldn’t discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person said Barr has appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to conduct the inquiry.

The inquiry will focus on whether the government’s methods to collect intelligence relating to the Trump campaign were lawful and appropriate.

Durham has previously investigated law enforcement corruption, the destruction of CIA videotapes and the Boston FBI office’s relationship with mobsters.

He will continue to serve as the chief federal prosecutor in Connecticut. </s> Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Cambridge Analytica's CEO answered British MPs' questions about election influence last month

The attorney general for the US state of Massachusetts is launching an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by a firm employed by Donald Trump's election campaign.

Investigations by the Observer and New York Times newspapers claim details from 50 million profiles were gathered without the users' knowledge.

The company, Cambridge Analytica, was suspended from Facebook on Friday.

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica deny any wrongdoing.

The American data analysis firm - which is not associated with the famous British university - is well known for the role it played in President Trump's election campaign, where it provided intricate data on the thoughts of American voters.

Allegations against it centre on a professor from the University of Cambridge, Aleksandr Kogan, who designed a personality testing Facebook app called thisisyourdigitallife. The app was a private enterprise, and not part of his university work.

The app, created in November 2013 for the Facebook platform, asked users for permission to access their profile information - and also that of their friends'.

It is alleged that Mr Kogan then sold that data on to Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.

A whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica spoke to The Guardian, claiming that he worked with Mr Kogan "to harvest millions of people's profiles."

"We exploited Facebook... and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on," he said.

How did it access so many profiles?

Image copyright Getty Images

Mr Kogan's app requested permission from people taking his personality quiz to access some information from their Facebook profiles.

About 265,000 people had downloaded the app at the time - and it also asked for permission to request "more limited information" from the user's friends.

Facebook says this "is no longer possible" - but at the time, such a request was controlled by the privacy settings of that user's friends. So if a user had their account set to allow sharing with a friend's apps, and the friend gave permission to Mr Kogan's app, it could read some information.

Facebook's policies, however, said that this data can only be used for the app's stated purpose - and cannot be transferred or sold on.

Cambridge Analytica, however, said that once the company learned about how the data provided by Mr Kogan was sourced, it deleted all the relevant records, in December 2015.

It said none of that data was used in the services it provided to Mr Trump's campaign. It added that it did not use or hold data from Facebook profiles​.

But in a statement, Facebook wrote that it had "we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted".

A spokesperson for Facebook also said that the data collection was not a hack or a breach.

"People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked," the company said.

Britain's Observer newspaper reports that the incident was known about more than two years ago.

But the newspaper said Facebook's action to ban Cambridge Analytica and its parent group SCL this week happened four days after its reporters contacted the social network for comment about its upcoming story.

On Saturday, as the story emerged in newspapers, the UK Information Commissioner, the country's main data protection regulator, said it was "investigating the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used".

However, the statement did not mention Mr Kogan, his company, or Cambridge Analytica, instead saying it was part of an "ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes".

Alexander Nix, founder of Cambridge Analytica, was interviewed by a committee of British MPs last month on the firm's practices. </s> Once again the New York Times is getting out ahead of the story to reveal Attorney General Bill Barr has instructed U.S. Attorney John Durham to review the origins of the 2016 DOJ and FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign. [Durham Background Here]

The appointment looks like a way to keep the sensitive inquiry within Barr’s control as opposed to appointing a special counsel. John H Durham, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut, has handled previous investigations into the intelligence community.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful. John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.

His inquiry is the third known investigation focused on the opening of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign into possible ties between Russia’s election interference and Trump associates. The department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is separately examining investigators’ use of wiretap applications and informants and whether any political bias against Mr. Trump influenced investigative decisions. And John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, has been reviewing aspects of the Russia investigation. His findings have not been announced. […] Mr. Durham, who was nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 and has been a Justice Department lawyer since 1982, has conducted special investigations under administrations of both parties. Attorney General Janet Reno asked Mr. Durham in 1999 to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious informant: the organized crime leader James (Whitey) Bulger. In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned Mr. Durham to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes in 2005 showing the torture of terrorism suspects. A year later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. expanded Mr. Durham’s mandate to also examine whether the agency broke any laws in its abuses of detainees in its custody. (read more)

Again, cautious optimism this appointment is a step in the right direction.

We would be remiss if we didn’t note the prior DOJ head-fake when U.S. Attorney John Laush was assigned to review and deliver documents to congress. That effort resulted in absolutely nothing; the documents were never produced; the redactions were never removed; and the corrupt institutional schemes were unfazed by Laush’s assignment.

It would seem like most of the investigative material Mr. Durham might need is already present in the accumulated files from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Keep an eye open to see if John H Durham is given a staff, investigative resources and/or a budget therein. If this is a genuinely motivated effort there should be visible activity.

This better-damn-well-not be another years-long investigation, specifically structured and coordinated to extend the tick-tock timeline of investigative inquiry into another 2020 election year, while the deep state institutional protectors say: “Trust Durham“.

UPDATE: Prior letter from Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows to U.S. Attorney John H Durham in January of 2019, about the October 18, 2018, testimony from former FBI legal counsel James Baker where Baker’s lawyers identified Durham as a prosecutor investigating the claims of Baker leaking to media. </s> New York — British political consulting group Cambridge Analytica filed for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York, court documents showed.

The firm, whose attorney filed late on Wednesday, announced in early May that it would close and file for bankruptcy in the UK and the US after failing to recover from the Facebook data scandal.

The documents listed Cambridge Analytica’s estimated assets in the range of $100,001 and $500,000, with estimated liabilities between $1m and $10m. Earlier in May, the company, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, claimed its business had been ruined by "numerous unfounded accusations", which rendered operating the business "no longer viable".

The firm became embroiled in scandal in March when former analyst Christopher Wylie revealed it had used a Facebook personality prediction app to hijack up to 87-million Facebook users’ data — claims Cambridge Analytica denies.

Soon after, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was suspended after he was filmed by undercover reporters bragging about ways to win political campaigns, including through blackmail and honey traps.

Meanwhile, another whistle-blower said Britons’ personal data may have been misused by a pro-Brexit campaign ahead of the 2016 referendum in which Britain voted to leave the EU.

Wylie has also since told a Senate panel on interference in the 2016 US election that Cambridge Analytica had used Russian researchers and shared data with companies linked to Russian intelligence.

This week, the New York Times reported the US justice department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are investigating Cambridge Analytica — although it was unclear if the probe was linked to special counsel Robert Mueller’s into Trump campaign collusion with Russia. </s> Attorney General William Barr has appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was "lawful and appropriate," a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Monday.

Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to conduct the inquiry, the person said. The person could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Durham's appointment comes about a month after Barr told members of Congress he believed "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign in 2016. He later said he didn't mean anything pejorative and was gathering a team to look into the origins of the special counsel's investigation.

Barr provided no details about what "spying" may have taken place but appeared to be alluding to a surveillance warrant the FBI obtained on a former Trump associate, Carter Page, and the FBI's use of an informant while the bureau was investigating former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos.

Trump and his supporters have seized on both to accuse the Justice Department and the FBI of unlawfully spying on his campaign.

The inquiry, which will focus on whether the government's methods to collect intelligence relating to the Trump campaign were lawful and appropriate, is separate from an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general. The agency's watchdog is also examining the Russia probe's origins and Barr has said he expects the watchdog report to be done in May or June.

Congressional Republicans have also indicated they intend to examine how the investigation that shadowed Trump's presidency for nearly two years began and whether there are any legal concerns.

The recently concluded investigation from special counsel Robert Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and the Kremlin to tip the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Durham has previously investigated law enforcement corruption, the destruction of CIA videotapes and the Boston FBI office's relationship with mobsters.

In addition to conducting the inquiry, he will continue to serve as the chief federal prosecutor in Connecticut. </s> Cambridge Analytica LLC, the data firm embroiled in controversy following allegations of misuse of Facebook data during the 2016 presidential campaign, filed for bankruptcy protection in New York.

The company filed for chapter 7 protection Thursday night in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York along with the U.S. arm of its consulting business, SCL Group. The U.K. branch of the company had filed for protection from creditors in the U.K. earlier this month.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey launches an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by Cambridge Analytica, a firm employed by Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign.