Two Cambridge Analytica stories

My Observer review of Chris Wylie’s and Brittany Kaiser’s memoirs.

Hindsight is the only exact science, as these two books confirm. Chris Wylie and Brittany Kaiser are two youngish, idealistic, clever people who got involved in some very dark stuff orchestrated by unscrupulous operators. Eventually, both realised they had become accomplices to activities that were at best unethical and at worst illegal, realisations that prompted them to break loose and blow the whistle. And both their memoirs, though very different in style and tone, are attempts to atone for the societal damage their respective collaborations with the devil have done.

But there the similarities end…

Read on

Linkblog

Linkblog

Trump’s Cybersecurity czar bricks his iPhone

Another one of those stories you couldn’t make up.

The month after Rudy Giuliani was named the US president’s cybersecurity adviser, the former mayor of New York queued up outside an Apple Store in San Francisco to get staff to reset his iPhone because he couldn’t remember the passcode.

Giuliani had typed into the wrong code more than 10 times, seizing up the phone and an Apple staffer reset and restored the iPhone 6 using his iCloud backup, according to NBC News which today saw and posted a picture of the internal Apple memo concerning the visit.

The yarn – which has not been disputed – has left security experts stunned. As an adviser on cybersecurity to President Trump and more recently as his personal lawyer, Giuliani has direct access to the White House and, if reports are to be believed, is in charge of a parallel foreign policy effort involving a range of countries, most notably Ukraine.

Or, in other words, Giuliani’s phone is a prime target for surveillance efforts and he simply handed it over to a random Apple employee. Not only that but he couldn’t remember his own passcode, and has backed everything up to Apple’s iCloud. He is a walking security risk.

Not just a security risk.