Thread: The Cambridge Analytica Files.

What the hell is going on in the world?

For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate

by Carole Cadwalladr


Sun 18 Mar 2018 09.44 GMT First published on Sat 17 Mar 2018 18.00 GMT


The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.


By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.


In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.


It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The great British Brexit robbery”, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.

By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”


He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May, it was revealed that the company had “reached out” to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election.

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.


Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.


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“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.


And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.


“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.


He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”


Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:


Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”


Simon Milner: “No.”


Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”


Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”




And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.


Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer.


It’s taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where it’s possible for him to finally come forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic – Robert Mueller’s in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after the Observer’s first article in this investigation.


It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind – to undo events that he set in motion. Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold.


There are many points where this story could begin. One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible.

Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics.


“Politics is like the mob, though,” he says. “You never really leave. I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree.”


Politics is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition.


It showed these odd patterns. People who liked 'I hate Israel' on Facebook also tended to like KitKats
“He’s one of the brightest people you will ever meet,” a senior politician who’s known Wylie since he was 20 told me. “Sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes a curse.”


Meanwhile, at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, two psychologists, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, were experimenting with a way of studying personality – by quantifying it.


Starting in 2007, Stillwell, while a student, had devised various apps for Facebook, one of which, a personality quiz called myPersonality, had gone viral. Users were scored on “big five” personality traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – and in exchange, 40% of them consented to give him access to their Facebook profiles. Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook “likes” across millions of people.

The research was original, groundbreaking and had obvious possibilities. “They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the centre told me. “There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked ‘I hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.


“There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.”


The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research. Boeing, a major US defence contractor, funded Kosinski’s PhD and Darpa, the US government’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski’s work.


But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the Lib Dems. It is fair to say that he didn’t have a clue what he was walking into.


An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans?
A visual message test from the app thisismydigitallife. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans?
“I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 19th century,” Wylie explains. “And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data.


“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”


Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems weren’t interested.


“I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI.”


Another Lib Dem connection introduced Wylie to a company called SCL Group, one of whose subsidiaries, SCL Elections, would go on to create Cambridge Analytica (an incorporated venture between SCL Elections and Robert Mercer, funded by the latter). For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same.


Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’”


An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans?
In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defence and elections operations. Its defence arm was a contractor to the UK’s Ministry of Defence and the US’s Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.


SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves.


Wylie holds a British Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa – a UK work visa given to just 200 people a year. He was working inside government (with the Lib Dems) as a political strategist with advanced data science skills. But no one, least of all him, could have predicted what came next. When he turned up at SCL’s offices in Mayfair, he had no clue that he was walking into the middle of a nexus of defence and intelligence projects, private contractors and cutting-edge cyberweaponry.


“The thing I think about all the time is, what if I’d taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this.”


A few months later, in autumn 2013, Wylie met Steve Bannon. At the time, he was editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which he had brought to Britain to support his friend Nigel Farage in his mission to take Britain out of the European Union.


What was he like?


“Smart,” says Wylie. “Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel.”


Wylie meeting Bannon was the moment petrol was poured on a flickering flame. Wylie lives for ideas. He speaks 19 to the dozen for hours at a time. He had a theory to prove. And at the time, this was a purely intellectual problem. Politics was like fashion, he told Bannon.


If you do not respect the agency of people, anything you do after that point is not conducive to democracy
Christopher Wylie
“[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”


But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group – the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.


I tell him that another former employee described the firm as “MI6 for hire”, and I’d never quite understood it.


“It’s like dirty MI6 because you’re not constrained. There’s no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It’s normal for a ‘market research company’ to amass data on domestic populations. And if you’re working in some country and there’s an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that’s just a bonus.”


When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though it’s one he can back up with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert for the US air force on a plane. “And the cyberwarfare guy is like, ‘Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare for elections.’”

It was Bannon who took this idea to the Mercers: Robert Mercer – the co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who used his billions to pursue a rightwing agenda, donating to Republican causes and supporting Republican candidates – and his daughter Rebekah.


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Nix and Wylie flew to New York to meet the Mercers in Rebekah’s Manhattan apartment.


“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”


Your type?


“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing.”


Robert Mercer was a pioneer in AI and machine translation. He helped invent algorithmic trading – which replaced hedge fund managers with computer programs – and he listened to Wylie’s pitch. It was for a new kind of political message-targeting based on an influential and groundbreaking 2014 paper researched at Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre, called: “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans”.


“In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room. Whereas it’s the opposite way around with Mercer,” says Wylie. “He said very little, but he really listened. He wanted to understand the science. And he wanted proof that it worked.”


And to do that, Wylie needed data.


How Cambridge Analytica acquired the data has been the subject of internal reviews at Cambridge University, of many news articles and much speculation and rumour.


When Nix was interviewed by MPs last month, Damian Collins asked him:


“Does any of your data come from Global Science Research company?”


Nix: “GSR?”


Collins: “Yes.”


Nix: “We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.”


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Collins: “They have not supplied you with data or information?”


Nix: “No.”


Collins: “Your datasets are not based on information you have received from them?”


Nix: “No.”


Collins: “At all?”


Nix: “At all.”


The problem with Nix’s response to Collins is that Wylie has a copy of an executed contract, dated 4 June 2014, which confirms that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with a company called Global Science Research (GSR), owned by Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, specifically premised on the harvesting and processing of Facebook data, so that it could be matched to personality traits and voter rolls.


He has receipts showing that Cambridge Analytica spent $7m to amass this data, about $1m of it with GSR. He has the bank records and wire transfers. Emails reveal Wylie first negotiated with Michal Kosinski, one of the co-authors of the original myPersonality research paper, to use the myPersonality database. But when negotiations broke down, another psychologist, Aleksandr Kogan, offered a solution that many of his colleagues considered unethical. He offered to replicate Kosinski and Stilwell’s research and cut them out of the deal. For Wylie it seemed a perfect solution. “Kosinski was asking for $500,000 for the IP but Kogan said he could replicate it and just harvest his own set of data.” (Kosinski says the fee was to fund further research.)


Dr Aleksandr Kogan
An unethical solution? Dr Aleksandr Kogan Photograph: alex kogan
Kogan then set up GSR to do the work, and proposed to Wylie they use the data to set up an interdisciplinary institute working across the social sciences. “What happened to that idea,” I ask Wylie. “It never happened. I don’t know why. That’s one of the things that upsets me the most.”


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It was Bannon’s interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie’s intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercer’s millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total – unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.


What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn’t authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What’s more, under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.


“Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.”


Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.


Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next – how it extracted psychological insights from the “seeders” and then built an algorithm to profile millions more.


For more than a year, the reporting around what Cambridge Analytica did or didn’t do for Trump has revolved around the question of “psychographics”, but Wylie points out: “Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldn’t you use it in your biggest campaign ever?”


In December 2015, the Guardian’s Harry Davies published the first report about Cambridge Analytica acquiring Facebook data and using it to support Ted Cruz in his campaign to be the US Republican candidate. But it wasn’t until many months later that Facebook took action. And then, all they did was write a letter. In August 2016, shortly before the US election, and two years after the breach took place, Facebook’s lawyers wrote to Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and told him the data had been illicitly obtained and that “GSR was not authorised to share or sell it”. They said it must be deleted immediately.


Christopher Wylie
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christopher Wylie: ‘It’s like Nixon on steroids’
“I already had. But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” says Wylie. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”


There were multiple copies of it. It had been emailed in unencrypted files.


Cambridge Analytica rejected all allegations the Observer put to them.


Dr Kogan – who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan – is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn’t know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he’s received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.


There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.


“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”


Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with “consumers”. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a “rumour campaign” spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election – in which the company worked – by spreading the idea that the “election would be rigged”. The final slide, branded with Lukoil’s logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its “deliverables”: “psychographic messaging”.


Robert Mercer with his daughter Rebekah.
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Robert Mercer with his daughter Rebekah. Photograph: Sean Zanni/Getty Images
Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.


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When I asked Bill Browder – an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals – what he made of it, he said: “Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities.”


Last month, Nix told MPs on the parliamentary committee investigating fake news: “We have never worked with a Russian organisation in Russia or any other company. We do not have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”


There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption.


Cambridge Analytica is “Chris’s Frankenstein”, says a friend of his. “He created it. It’s his data Frankenmonster. And now he’s trying to put it right.”


Only once has Wylie made the case of pointing out that he was 24 at the time. But he was. He thrilled to the intellectual possibilities of it. He didn’t think of the consequences. And I wonder how much he’s processed his own role or responsibility in it. Instead, he’s determined to go on the record and undo this thing he has created.


Because the past few months have been like watching a tornado gathering force. And when Wylie turns the full force of his attention to something – his strategic brain, his attention to detail, his ability to plan 12 moves ahead – it is sometimes slightly terrifying to behold. Dealing with someone trained in information warfare has its own particular challenges, and his suite of extraordinary talents include the kind of high-level political skills that makes House of Cards look like The Great British Bake Off. And not everyone’s a fan. Any number of ex-colleagues – even the ones who love him – call him “Machiavellian”. Another described the screaming matches he and Nix would have.


“What do your parents make of your decision to come forward?” I ask him.


“They get it. My dad sent me a cartoon today, which had two characters hanging off a cliff, and the first one’s saying ‘Hang in there.’ And the other is like: ‘Fuck you.’”


Which are you?


“Probably both.”


What isn’t in doubt is what a long, fraught journey it has been to get to this stage. And how fearless he is.


After many months, I learn the terrible, dark backstory that throws some light on his determination, and which he discusses candidly. At six, while at school, Wylie was abused by a mentally unstable person. The school tried to cover it up, blaming his parents, and a long court battle followed. Wylie’s childhood and school career never recovered. His parents – his father is a doctor and his mother is a psychiatrist – were wonderful, he says. “But they knew the trajectory of people who are put in that situation, so I think it was particularly difficult for them, because they had a deeper understanding of what that does to a person long term.”


Facebook has denied and denied this. It has failed in its duties to respect the law
Paul-Olivier Dehaye
He says he grew up listening to psychologists discuss him in the third person, and, aged 14, he successfully sued the British Columbia Ministry of Education and forced it to change its inclusion policies around bullying. What I observe now is how much he loves the law, lawyers, precision, order. I come to think of his pink hair as a false-flag operation. What he cannot tolerate is bullying.


Is what Cambridge Analytica does akin to bullying?


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“I think it’s worse than bullying,” Wylie says. “Because people don’t necessarily know it’s being done to them. At least bullying respects the agency of people because they know. So it’s worse, because if you do not respect the agency of people, anything that you’re doing after that point is not conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy.”


Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows, he says. And Wylie’s revelations only move it on again.


“Facebook has denied and denied and denied this,” Dehaye says when told of the Observer’s new evidence. “It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”




The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
Read more
Facebook denies that the data transfer was a breach. In addition, a spokesperson said: “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it’s a serious abuse of our rules. Both Aleksandr Kogan as well as the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”


Millions of people’s personal information was stolen and used to target them in ways they wouldn’t have seen, and couldn’t have known about, by a mercenary outfit, Cambridge Analytica, who, Wylie says, “would work for anyone”. Who would pitch to Russian oil companies. Would they subvert elections abroad on behalf of foreign governments?


It occurs to me to ask Wylie this one night.


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“Yes.”


Nato or non-Nato?


“Either. I mean they’re mercenaries. They’ll work for pretty much anyone who pays.”


It’s an incredible revelation. It also encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing – at a global scale, with added cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public – our intimate family connections, our “likes”, our crumbs of personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that’s expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically motivated billionaire.


The Facebook data is out in the wild. And for all Wylie’s efforts, there’s no turning the clock back.


Tamsin Shaw, a philosophy professor at New York University, and the author of a recent New York Review of Books article on cyberwar and the Silicon Valley economy, told me that she’d pointed to the possibility of private contractors obtaining cyberweapons that had at least been in part funded by US defence.


She calls Wylie’s disclosures “wild” and points out that “the whole Facebook project” has only been allowed to become as vast and powerful as it has because of the US national security establishment.


“It’s a form of very deep but soft power that’s been seen as an asset for the US. Russia has been so explicit about this, paying for the ads in roubles and so on. It’s making this point, isn’t it? That Silicon Valley is a US national security asset that they’ve turned on itself.”


Or, more simply: blowback.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...x-bannon-trump

Good job. Worthy of its own thread.

Report: Cambridge Analytica trying to block exposé by U.K.'s Channel 4

Cambridge Analytica is trying to prevent London's Channel 4 News from airing an undercover report in which the firm's chief executive speaks frankly about its practices, according to the Financial Times. Channel 4 says their reporters posed as potential clients and spoke with senior members of Cambridge Analytica's team, including CEO Alexander Nix. The exposé is scheduled to air Monday evening.


Cambridge Analytica has come under scrutiny after reports said it obtained data harvested by a third party from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission. Facebook has since suspended the firm for violating its privacy policy.


Carole Cadwalladr, a reporter for the Guardian, told CBSN on Saturday that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica threatened to sue the paper in a bid to prevent the publication of its exposé on the data. The Guardian story, based on interviews with whistleblower Chris Wylie, a former employee for the firm, was published online on Saturday.


"This continual pattern that we've seen with Facebook -- trying to shut the story down, finally when it has no choice, acknowledge it. They've just really got to do better," Cadwalladr said.


In a statement released late on Friday, Facebook said that it learned it had been "lied to" about Cambridge Analytica and an affiliate's activities in 2015, more than two years before suspending the firm from its platform, but did not alert users at the time.


The firm worked with President Trump's campaign in 2016, but Mr. Trump's data guru Brad Parscale told "60 Minutes" in October that the campaign never used the "psychographic" information that made Cambridge Analytica famous. He said the practice of psychographics "doesn't work," but said he doesn't believe it's "sinister."


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-...airing-expose/

What is Cambridge Analytica? The firm at the centre of Facebook's data breach

A closer look at the company that has hit the headlines after it was revealed that 50m Facebook profiles were harvested

Hilary Osborne
Sun 18 Mar 2018 15.00 GMT Last modified on Sun 18 Mar 2018 23.40 GMT

What is Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica is a company that offers services to businesses and political parties who want to “change audience behaviour”.
It claims to be able to analyse huge amounts of consumer data and combine that with behavioural science to identify people who organisations can target with marketing material. It collects data from a wide range of sources, including social media platforms such as Facebook, and its own polling.
With its headquarters in London, the firm was set up in 2013 as an offshoot of another company called SCL Group, which offers similar services around the world.
In an interview with the website Contagious, Cambridge Analytica’s founder, Alexander Nix said it had been set up “to address the vacuum in the US Republican political market” that became evident when Mitt Romney was defeated in the 2012 presidential election.
“The Democrats had ostensibly been leading the tech revolution, and data analytics and digital engagement were areas where Republicans had failed to catch up. We saw this as an opportunity.”
Why is it in the news?

Over the weekend, the Observer revealed that in 2014, 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested by a UK-based academic, Aleksandre Kogan, and his company Global Science Research.
Kogan assembled the information through an app on the site – it collected details of Americans who were paid to take a personality test, but also gathered data on those people’s Facebook friends.
Kogan had a deal to share this information with Cambridge Analytica. But according to a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, most of this personal information had been taken without authorisation. He said Cambridge Analytica used it to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
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Wylie, a Canadian who previously worked for Cambridge Analytica, has lifted the lid on this and other practices at the firm, which he describes as a “full-service propaganda machine”. He contradicts claims made in the past by Nix, who in February told British MPs that the company did not use Facebook data in its work.
In a statement published on Saturday, the company denied any wrongdoing and said it did not harvest Facebook data, and none was used in the 2016 presidential election. It said it fully complied with Facebook’s terms of service and it had deleted all the data it received from GSR.
Kogan also denied GSR had done anything wrong.
This isn’t the first controversy for the firm. It has been accused of offering to target foreign donors for the UK’s Brexit campaign and in November it was reported that Nix had contacted the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to ask if he could help with the release of emails linked to Hillary Clinton.
The company has also been accused of over-selling itself, with some in the tech world saying that it does not have as much influence as it claims.
What does Facebook say?




It has suspended Cambridge Analytica and several individuals from its site while it investigates. It denies there was a data breach, and says it had granted Kogan permission to access the information. However, in sharing it with Cambridge Analytica and allowing it to be used for commercial purposes, he broke the terms of the licence.
“People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” it said.
It said it learned about the issue in 2015 and removed the app and demanded that the data was destroyed.
Who runs Cambridge Analytica?

The company is part of SCL Group and shares some of its directors. The main player is 42-year-old Nix, an old Etonian who joined SCL in 2003 after studying at Manchester University and working in corporate finance. Nix developed the political arm of the business. Last year, he told Techcrunch of plans to publish a book about the company, provisionally titled ‘Mad men to maths men’.
The managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division is Mark Turnbull, who spent 18 years at the communications firm Bell Pottinger before joining SCL.
What are Cambridge Analytica’s links with Donald Trump?


Robert Mercer, a key Trump supporter and donor, gave $15m in funding to Cambridge Analytica. Mercer, who also funded the rightwing website Breitbart, was introduced to the firm by Steve Bannon. Bannon, who was on its board from 2014 to 2016, headed the last phase of Trump’s election campaign and then served as his chief strategist.
The company worked on three candidates’ campaigns for the presidency, including Trump’s. On its website it describes analysing millions of data points to identify the most persuadable voters and the issues they cared about and then sending them messages to “move them to action”. Voters in 17 states were polled every day, and online advertising and social media used to send them messages. The company claims that in this way it boosted donations and turn out and contributed to Trump’s victory.
As we now know, some of the data came from profiles to which the company was not supposed to have access, rather than being freely available to harvest.
What other campaigns has it been involved with?

The company has worked on political campaigns in countries including Kenya, Columbia, India and St Kitts & Nevis.
What about Brexit?

In February, Nix told MPs that his firm didn’t work for campaigners for a leave vote, although this has been hotly disputed by the co-founder of Leave.EU, Arron Banks.
What happens next?

There are likely to be questions for Cambridge Analytica and Facebook to answer. Nix may be asked by MPs to explain his position over Facebook data.
In the UK, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are one focus of an inquiry into data and politics by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Separately, the Electoral Commission is also investigating what role Cambridge Analytica played in the EU referendum.
In the US, Robert Mueller has asked for emails from the firm as part of his inquiry into Russia’s involvment in the 2016 election.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...ok-data-breach

Wow. This from just minutes ago.



Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wylie from using its platform.

"Suspended by Facebook. For blowing the whistle. On something they have known privately for two years," Wylie tweeted on Sunday.



It is the latest twist in a complicated story that has played out over the last few days via statements from Facebook (FB), an investigative report by The New York Times and London's The Observer, and revelations from the people involved.


Wylie co-founded and previously worked as a data analyst for Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. He shared evidence of the company's activities with the two newspapers, as well as reportedly with cybercrime investigators in the United Kingdom. Over the weekend, he also spoke on British television about how the company was reportedly able to harvest data from 50 million users.

Getting that data "allowed us to move into the hearts and minds of American voters in a way that had never been done before," Wylie said in an interview with the UK's Channel 4 on Saturday.


Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform on Friday, saying in a blog post that the company had learned in 2015 that user data was shared with a political data group in violation of Facebook's terms. Facebook said they received certifications at the time that all copies of the data had been destroyed.


In a statement, Cambridge Analytica maintains "that all Facebook data and their derivatives" was deleted. It also says it did not use any of that data in its work for Trump's campaign.


The revelations prompted renewed scrutiny of how Facebook was used to reach and influence voters ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.


Under fire from politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom, Facebook said on Sunday afternoon it was conducting an internal and external review to determine if Facebook data provided to Cambridge Analytica still existed.


The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica still possesses most or all of the data, according to interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors.


Facebook acknowledged in the blog post it has "received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted."


The fallout from the reports is ongoing, and for now, Facebook will be conducting its review without Wylie's help.


"Mr. Wylie has refused to cooperate with us until we lift the suspension on his account," Paul Grewal, a lawyer for Facebook, said in a statement provided to CNN Sunday. "Given he said he 'exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles,' we cannot do this at this time."


Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica co-founder - Mar. 19, 2018

Originally Posted by david44

data harvesting is not new

No one is claiming that but the revelations that are coming out is new indeed and just reinforces what I have been saying for years.

Originally Posted by bsnub

No one is claiming that but the revelations that are coming out is new indeed and just reinforces what I have been saying for years.

Yes perhaps I wasn't clear enough, an ongoing story, you are right...and ...left

WASHINGTON — Sitting in a hotel bar, Alexander Nix, who runs the political data firm Cambridge Analytica, had a few ideas for a prospective client looking for help in a foreign election. The firm could send an attractive woman to seduce a rival candidate and secretly videotape the encounter, Mr. Nix said, or send someone posing as a wealthy land developer to pass a bribe.

“We have a long history of working behind the scenes,” Mr. Nix said.

The prospective client, though, was actually a reporter from Channel 4 News in Britain, and the encounter was secretly filmed as part of a monthslong investigation into Cambridge Analytica, the data firm with ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The results of Channel 4’s work were broadcast in Britain on Monday, days after reports in The New York Times and The Observer of London that the firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual American voters.

The weekend’s reports about the data misuse have prompted calls from lawmakers in Britain and the United States for renewed scrutiny of Facebook, and at least two American state prosecutors have said they are looking into the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica.

Now, the Channel 4 broadcast appears likely to cast an even harsher spotlight on the company, which was founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, a wealthy Republican donor who put has put at least $15 million into Cambridge Analytica.

The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned their effectiveness.

Less noticed has been the work that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, the SCL Group, has done outside the United States. The operations of the two companies were set up with a convoluted corporate structure and are deeply intertwined.

Mr. Nix, for instance, holds dual appointments at the two companies. Cambridge Analytica is registered in Delaware and almost wholly owned by the Mercer family, but it is effectively a shell — it holds intellectual property rights to its so-called psychographic modeling tools, yet its clients are served by the staff at London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, who is a British citizen.

SCL Elections has clients around the world, and it has experimented with data-driven microtargeting techniques in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules are lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL have been happy to provide government-held data, according to former employees.

But in the footage broadcast by Channel 4, Mr. Nix offered services that go far beyond data harvesting. The Times did not work with Channel 4 on its report about Cambridge Analytica.

“Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company,” he told the Channel 4 reporter, who was not identified. “We can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists. There’s so many options we can look at.”

The Channel 4 reporter posed as a “fixer” for a wealthy Sri Lankan family that wanted to help politicians they favored. In a series of meetings at London hotels between November and January, all of which were secretly filmed, Mr. Nix and other executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica employs front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients.

The information that is uncovered through such clandestine work is then put “into the bloodstream to the internet,” said Mark Turnbull, another Cambridge executive, in an encounter in December 2015 at the Berkeley hotel in London.

“Then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again, over time, to watch it take shape,” he added. “It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘That’s propaganda.’ Because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘Who’s put that out?’”

The most damning footage, though, was of Mr. Nix’s suggestion that the company could entrap political rivals through seduction or bribery.

At a meeting in January, also at the Berkeley hotel, Mr. Nix was direct about the techniques SCL could use to aid a client.

“I mean, deep digging is interesting,” he said. “But you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true, and make sure that that’s video-recorded, you know. These sorts of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption, putting it on the internet, these sorts of things.”

Mr. Nix then suggested they could have someone pose as a wealthy developer. “They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance,” he said. “We’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras.”
Or, Mr. Nix said, they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house — we have lots of history of things.”

The reporter asked what kind of girls, and Mr. Nix said they could find some Ukrainian women. “I’m just saying, we could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us you know,” Mr. Nix replied. “You know what I’m saying.”

“They are very beautiful,” he said. “I find that works very well.”

To be sure, though, Mr. Nix said that he was speaking only in hypotheticals. “Please don’t pay too much attention to what I’m saying because I’m just giving you examples of what can be done and what, what has been done,” he said.

For Mr. Nix, the footage comes at an already perilous moment. Earlier this month, he told a parliamentary inquiry into fake news and Russian interference in Britain’s referendum to exit the European Union that Cambridge Analytica never used or possessed Facebook data.

But following the reports in The Times and Observer on Saturday, Damian Collins, the Conservative lawmaker leading the inquiry, said he planned to call Mr. Nix back to testify.

“It seems clear that he has deliberately misled the committee and Parliament,” Mr. Collins said in a statement this weekend.

Elizabeth Denham, the British information commissioner, told Channel 4 News that on March 7 she asked for access to Cambridge Analytica, setting a deadline of 6 p.m. Monday. Ms. Denham said she did not accept the response as satisfactory and so would be applying in court on Tuesday for a warrant.

“We need to look at the databases, we need to look at the servers and understand how the data was processed,” she said.

In a statement, Facebook said that it had “hired a digital forensics firm, Stroz Friedberg, to conduct a comprehensive audit of Cambridge Analytica.”

But Mr. Collins, who is chairman of the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee, said he was concerned that Facebook might gain access to data before the information commissioner did.

“What are they doing?” Mr. Collins asked on Channel 4 News. “Are they going in to physically recover data, to disturb the files? This investigation should be for the authorities.”

Mr. Collins said that the former Cambridge Analytica employee who came forward to disclose his company’s actions, Christopher Wylie, would be giving evidence to his committee. He said he wanted Mark Zuckerberg, or another senior executive from Facebook, to do the same.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/u...ander-nix.html

Here is the C4 expose....

but it was still the Russian though right...

Originally Posted by Neo

but it was still the Russian though right...

Suspected for a while it was Russians working with Cambridge Analytica's harvested information to get Trump elected. After all, Cambridge Analytica are mercenary and would sell to anyone.



Senate committee probes Facebook, Cambridge Analytica


The Senate Commerce Committee is sending written questions to Cambridge Analytica's parent company and Facebook about the revelation that the data consulting firm improperly gathered user data from the social giant.



“They’ve got responsibility to make sure that that information is used in an appropriate way, so we want to find out how it was gotten, how it was used, and we want Facebook obviously to be transparent about that.”
— Sen. John Thune



What they're saying: "We’ve got a questionnaire that we are sending out to the folks at Facebook and we’re going to have a series of questions for them to answer, and then we’re asking them to come in and brief us, and then we’ll decide based on that," said committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.)


The details: He said he wasn't sure yet whether Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg should testify before Congress, as some have called for. A committee spokesperson said the panel also planned to send questions to Cambridge Analytica parent SCL. A Facebook spokesperson said Monday night the company had received the questions and appreciated the opportunity to respond to them.

Why it matters: This is the most aggressive action by Republicans yet to investigate the reports about the Trump-linked analytics firm.


https://www.axios.com/senate-commerc...aa7de5af7.html

Goons are working all sides.

Cambridge Analytica creator has State Department contract

Strategic Communications Laboratories, best known for its work with its offshoot and collaborator Cambridge Analytica, appears to have an open contract with the State Department.DefenseOne first noted the contract on a government contracts database, where it is listed as still open.


Why it matters: Cambridge Analytica has domestically come under fire for fraudulently slurping data off of Facebook through user quizzes. But the United States is among the most lenient countries in the world when it comes to data privacy. SCL received a $500,000 contract for "target audience research" to help the State Department counter ISIS propaganda. It's possible the group's data harvesting methods will be as unpopular abroad as they have been in the U.S.



The backdrop: The deal is between SCL and State's Global Engagement Center. The Center was set up by the Obama administration in 2016 to fight ISIS's online presence, and the deal with SCL was signed in early 2017.

• When that deal was inked, SCL and Cambridge Analytica had just helped orchestrate a massive upset in the 2016 presidential election, and were viewed as power players in data analytics.
• On Sunday — more than a year after State Department deal — the New York Times reported that SCL had harvested data from user quizzes and misled users about how that data would be used.

A State Department official confirmed that SCL works with the Global Engagement Center "in connection with our mission to counter terrorist propaganda and disinformation overseas." The official stressed that the GEC is not doing business with Cambridge Analytica and that SCL is a major firm in analytics that has done work for several government agencies.

https://www.axios.com/cambridge-anal...source=sidebar

UK authorities seek warrant to search Cambridge Analytica offices

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s data protection authority plans to seek a warrant to search the offices on Tuesday of London-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham told Channel 4 News on Monday.



Channel 4 broadcast secretly taped interviews with senior Cambridge Analytica executives in which they boasted of their ability to sway elections in countries around the world with a menu of digital manipulation and traditional political trickery.


“I think we should all be shocked by this,” Denham told Channel 4.


The Information Commissioner’s Office is conducting a broad probe into the use of personal data in British political campaigns, which Denham said concerned both Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and 30 different organizations and political parties.


The New York Times and the British Observer newspaper reported on Saturday that the political analytics firm had harvested private data on more than 50 million Facebook users to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.


Cambridge Analytica and its executives did not immediately respond to requests by Reuters for comment.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-f...-idUSKBN1GV2OQ

Cambridge Analytica boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections
Bosses tell undercover reporters how honey traps, spies and fake news can be used to help clients

The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals.


Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used by the company to help clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them.


In one exchange, the company chief executive, Alexander Nix, is recorded telling reporters: “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”


The Channel 4 News investigation, broadcast on Monday, comes two days after the Observer reported Cambridge Analytica had unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles in one of the social media company’s biggest data breaches.


The company, and Nix, are from politicians in the US and the UK to explain how it handled the data and what role the information played in its campaigns, if any.


The Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham criticised Cambridge Analytica for being “unco-operative” with her investigation as she confirmed that her watchdog would apply for a warrant to help her examine the firm’s activities.


Cambridge Analytica has sold itself as the ultimate hi-tech consultant, winning votes by using data to pinpoint target groups and design messages that will appeal powerfully to their interests, although it denies using Facebook information in its work.


But in the undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, in association with the Observer, executives claimed to offer a much darker range of services.


In a series of meetings with a reporter posing as a representative of a wealthy Sri Lankan family seeking political influence, Cambridge Analytica executives initially denied the company was in the business of using entrapment techniques.


But Nix later detailed the dirty tricks the company would be prepared to pull behind the scenes to help its clients.


When the reporter asked if Cambridge Analytica could offer investigations into the damaging secrets of rivals, Nix said it worked with former spies from Britain and Israel to look for political dirt. He also volunteered that his team were ready to go further than an investigation.


“Oh, we do a lot more than that,” he said over dinner at an exclusive hotel in London. “Deep digging is interesting, but you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded.


“You know these sort of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption.”


Nix suggested one possible scenario, in which the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division, Mark Turnbull, would pose as a wealthy developer looking to exchange campaign finance for land. “I’m a master of disguise,” Turnbull said.

Another option, Nix suggested, would be to create a sex scandal. “Send some girls around to the candidate’s house, we have lots of history of things,” he told the reporter. “We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying.”


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Read more
He said these were hypothetical scenarios, but suggested his ideas were based on precedent. “Please don’t pay too much attention to what I’m saying, because I’m just giving you examples of what can be done, what has been done.”


Any work may have stayed out of the spotlight partly because Cambridge Analytica works hard to cover traces of its operations, Nix said, using a shifting network of names and front groups.


“We’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you,” Nix told the source in a first phone call.


Cambridge Analytica sometimes contracts under a different name, so that there are no records of its involvement, Turnbull said. That does not only protect the company, but also makes its work more efficient, he is recorded saying.


“It has to happen without anyone thinking it’s propaganda, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’ the next question is: ‘Who’s put that out?’”




He added: “It may be that we have to contract under a different name ... a different entity, with a different name, so that no record exists with our name attached to this at all.”


In a recent project in eastern Europe, the company sent a team but “no one even knew they were there, they were just ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out”, Turnbull said.


Covers include the setting up of fake academic projects, sometimes simply going in on tourist visas, as former employees have told the Guardian they did for US elections – apparently employed in violation of Federal law.


Nix also offered details regarding the services of professional ex-spies from Britain and Israel. “We have two projects at the moment, which involve doing deep deep depth research on the opposition and providing source ... really damaging source material, that we can decide how to deploy in the course of the campaign.”



Denham told Channel 4 News that she had issued a demand for access to Cambridge Analytica earlier this month. They were given until 6pm on Monday to respond to it, but she said the company had been “unco-operative” with the investigation and that she would be applying to the courts on Tuesday for a warrant. “We need to get in there. We need to look at the databases. We need to look at the servers and understand how data was processed or deleted by Cambridge Analytica. There are a lot of conflicting stories about the data,” she said.


Cambridge Analytica said the Channel 4 News investigation contained false claims, factual inaccuracies and substantial mischaracterisations.


It accused Channel 4 of setting out to entrap staff by initiating a conversation about unethical practices. It rejected any suggestion that the company used fake news, honey traps, bribes or entrapment.


It said: “We entirely refute any allegation that Cambridge Anlytica or any of its affiliates use entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honey-traps’ for any purpose whatsoever … Cambridge Analytica does not use untrue material for any purpose.”


Of the suggestions they used honey trap techniques, the company said: “Our executives humoured these questions and actively encouraged the prospective client to further disclose his intentions.”


In a later statement Cambridge Analytica accused Channel 4 News of attempting to entrap its executives by initiating a conversation about unethical practices, which it insisted the company did not use.


Admitting he misjudged the situation, Nix said: “In playing along with this line of conversation … we entertained a series of ludicrous hypothetical scenarios. I am aware how this looks … I deeply regret my role in the meeting and I have already apologised to staff. I should have recognised where the prospective client was taking our conversations and ended the relationship sooner.”


On Saturday, Cambridge Analytica denied it had done anything wrong in relation to the handling of Facebook data.


“Cambridge Analytica only receives and uses data that has been obtained legally and fairly. Our robust data protection policies comply with US, international, European Union, and national regulations,” it said.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...raps-elections

Originally Posted by Neo

but it was still the Russian though right..

Another one who did not read the fucking article all the way through.

So how does this influence your voter ? only politicians can persuade me by the comments they make . or is the average voter a bit thick? silly question really

Originally Posted by mcgoo

So how does this influence your voter ? only politicians can persuade me by the comments they make . or is the average voter a bit thick? silly question really

That's what I've been wondering. It's really just market research on a huge scale. It probably works very well with the mindless fb users who need to be told what to do next. In the end it's just a tool for targeted ad campaigns, so a person's gotta be receptive to advertising for it to work.

I would highly recommend people read the book 'everybody lies'

with most of the users of facebook , their motives are better known to these corporations than they know them themselves , and thus can be manipulated without them even knowing

rascism has been the deciding factor in many recent elections , but you would not find a majority of people who will admit they are racist

Originally Posted by uncle junior

so a person's gotta be receptive to advertising for it to work.

Indeed , you may be that rare person who is immune, the billions spent on advertising suggest it works .

Tweeking the emotions of the floating voter is obvious if you watch political stuff with the sound off, look at the images, colours etc

Nix , Nixxed

https://twitter.com/Channel4News?ref...Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Maybe Facebook is the problem...

I was offered a job with Cambridge Analytica 6 months ago, glad I didn't take it now. Doubt they'll have a UK operation in 6 months.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

I was offered a job with Cambridge Analytica 6 months ago, glad I didn't take it now. Doubt they'll have a UK operation in 6 months.

Proteinmale?