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Bannon heavily involved in setting up Cambridge Analytica

With financial backing from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, Bannon co-founded Cambridge Analytica in 2013 as the US-branch of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group, a British company that advertises how it has conducted "behavioral change" programs in more than 60 countries.

Wylie described Cambridge Analytica as "Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer using a foreign, military contractor … to use some of the same techniques that the military uses … on the American electorate."

Bannon and Cambridge Analytica did not respond to requests for comment to this story.

SCL Group has consulted numerous government agencies and organizations on psychological operations and strategic messaging since the 1990s. The company has offered clients "research and analysis that yields intervention strategies aimed at specific behaviors," according to its website.

That work has included an examination of ways to reduce recruitment into violent jihadist groups in Pakistan in 2009, a communication program aimed at decreasing the number of improvised explosive devices built in Iraq, as well as political consulting throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, according to SCL documents.

SCL was commissioned to train a psychological operations group that supported the British military, according to a 2012 letter by the group's then-commanding officer.

The US State Department also contracted SCL in 2017 to conduct "target audience research" in order to better understand ISIS radicalization and recruitment. A State Department official told CNN the research included about 100 interviews in Europe and the Middle East.

"SCL's sales pitch essentially was 'Look, we go into foreign countries. We use our tools, our psychographic profiling, to manipulate public opinion.' Ultimately that's what Bannon wanted to do in the United States," said CNN political analyst Joshua Green, whose book 'Devil's Bargain' chronicles Bannon's role in Trump's election.

Cambridge Analytica has come under fire this month for its alleged use of personal data from tens of millions of Facebook users obtained through the company Global Science Research (GSR) without Facebook's permission. The New York Times and The Observer of London first broke the story.

Bannon, a former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO, told CNN last week that he doesn't remember purchasing personal information from Facebook while working for the company.

https://www.wktv.com/content/national/478429623.html