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 Cambridge Analytica Files
‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
 Former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie 
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 05.44 EDTFirst published on Sat 17 Mar 2018 14.00 EDT
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.13:04 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – videoTwo 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.“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.
Cambridge Analytica: the key players]
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.An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test.] Examples, above and below, of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans?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?“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? Another example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test.]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 democracyChristopher 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.’” Steve Bannon: ‘He loved the gays,’ says Wylie. ‘He saw us as early adopters.’ Photograph: Tony Gentile/ReutersIt 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.
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.”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 to use the myPersonality database using another psychologist, Aleksandr Kogan, who communicated with Michal Kosinski, one of the co-authors of the original myPersonality research paper. But when negotiations broke down, Kogan offered a solution that many of his colleagues considered unethical. He offered to replicate Kosinski and Stillwell’s research and cut them and the university 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 university research; it was not for him and Stillwell personally.)
Dr Aleksandr Kogan An unethical solution? Dr Aleksandr Kogan Photograph: alex koganKogan 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.”
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 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”.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.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 lawPaul-Olivier DehayeHe 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?
“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.
“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.
• Revealed: 50m Facebook profiles harvested in major data breach• How ‘likes’ became a political weapon
• This article was amended: on 18 March 2018 to clarify the full title of the British Columbia Ministry of Education; and on 24 July 2019 to clarify details about the 2014 negotiations over possible use of the myPersonality materials.http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/cambridge-analyticano linx twitCambridge Analytica whistleblower: Russia may have accessed Facebook data of 87M Americansby Leandra Bernstein Wednesday, May 16th 2018Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, departs after meeting with House Judiciary Democrats, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (Circa) — Amid reports the data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice, a former research director turned whistleblower suggested the company engaged in voter suppression, "black ops" and coordinated its U.S. election operations with Russian government entities.Much has been said about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' data for sophisticated political targeting operations. On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that massive dataset could have been "easily" shared with a Russian intelligence-linked company.According to a Tuesday report by The New York Times, the FBI and Department of Justice appear to be in the "early stages" of an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into the company's business practices and financial dealings. Investigations of CA and its parent company, SCL, are currently underway in Britain, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya and India.Christopher Wylie indirectly confirmed the investigation of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica. Asked by reporters if he was cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, he replied, "I have been contacted by the FBI."In his testimony, Wylie again confirmed cooperating with U.S. authorities, saying he had provided relevant documents and information. He added, "It should be made clear, I am not the target of these investigations."Cambridge Analytica was asked to participate in the Wednesday hearing but after announcing bankruptcy and shutting its doors earlier this month declined the invitation.
View image on Twitter Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of Facebook's privacy scandal is closing. https://bit.ly/2w3WgXK 
1:45 PM - May 2, 2018
HOW RUSSIA MAY HAVE ACCESSED THE DATA
In his testimony Wednesday, Wylie faced questions about Cambridge Analytica's numerous ties to Russian government entities, at one point suggesting the Facebook data of 87 million Americans may have been acquired by the Russians.That massive data transfer may have been facilitated, knowingly or uknowingly by Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. Nix's London-based company was known for providing "strategic communications" and had defense contracts, commercial engagements and political campaign operations around the globe.Circa@Circa Senate panel agrees with US intel that Russia intervened in 2016 election to help Trump. https://bit.ly/2IoWTkc 
10:55 AM - May 16, 20182See Circa's other TweetsWylie described a "high level of engagement" between CA's executive, Alexander Nix and Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company. Lukoil, which has known ties to Russian intelligence services, was sanctioned in 2017 in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea.
According to Wylie's account, Nix was in "close contact" with Lukoil executives and in 2014 gave them a whitepaper written by Wylie outlining Cambridge Analytica's U.S. data mining and voter targeting project, which was reportedly of special interest.
Asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., if CA's dataset, with information on tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users was also shared with Lukoil, Wylie did not dismiss the possibility. He noted the information could have been "easily acquired" with or without CA's knowledge or consent.
"I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these datasets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that," Wylie said.CBS News@CBSNews Feinstein: Do you think it's possible Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica ended up in Russia?  Wylie: "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these data sets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that."
7:49 AM - May 16, 2018
In their conversations with Nix, Lukoil executives were informed of "the scale of the data and the location of the data," Wylie said. "What was made known was that this data could have been easily acquired by something as simple as a keylogger on Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan's computer when he was visiting Russia," he added.Aleksandr Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University and professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University and responsible for developing the Facebook quiz app that harvested thousands of datapoints from approximately 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users.
Around 2013, Kogan teamed up with Cambridge Analytica and gained access to the Facebook data. Facebook terminated its contract with Kogan in 2014 and in 2015 sent a letter requesting he delete the harvested data.
Facebook did not follow up and the user data, shared with Cambridge Analytica, was not deleted. Facebook officially suspended Cambridge Analytica's account in March 2018.

The Guardian@guardian Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election https://trib.al/uw0yqVr 
5:48 AM - May 6, 2018
Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US electionSocial network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over
theguardian.com109WIKILEAKS AND 'BLACK OPS'
Among Wylie's other concerns about SCL and Cambridge Analytica's tactics included the firm's so-called "black-ops" capabilities, which he said involved hackers breaking into computers to obtain intelligence or compromising material to use against opposition candidates."Some of the targets of these intelligence operations are currently heads of state in various countries," Wylie asserted, saying his former employer hired former members of Russian and Israeli intelligence services for these "special IT services."In addition, CA also recruited at least two individuals who were "closely associated" with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, according to Wylie.
 DNC sues Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks over alleged 2016 election conspiracy. http://bit.ly/2JaN0CC 
2:38 PM - Apr 20, 2018
These individuals were reportedly chosen because of their closeness to WikiLeaks, which was deemed a "hostile intelligence service," by former CIA director Mike Pompeo.The company has been accused of using a playbook that resembles the WikiLeaks dumping of hacked emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, notably in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica denied allegations of hacking.
VOTER SUPPRESSIONAmong the allegations Wylie made against his former employer is that it used social media data and complex algorithms to try to suppress the vote. The effort was reportedly done under the banner of "voter disengagement," and was cited by Wylie as one of the main reasons he left CA in July 2014.At that time, Cambridge Analytica was a relatively new company. It was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of the London-based SCL.In 2013, SCL's CEO, Alexander Nix, a British citizen, partnered with billionaire conservative donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer and then-Breitbart editor in chief Steve Bannon to set up Cambridge Analytica, or SCL USA. The firm worked on at least 44 congressional campaigns in 2014 and in 2016 managed the data and voter targeting services for President Donald Trump's campaign. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says Bannon wanted "weapons" to fight a "culture war" at the firm http://hill.cm/FRBTlQl Wylie suggested this arrangement violated U.S. campaign laws and the U.K.-based parent company to handle "all" of CA's clients. The company reportedly received memos from lawyers warning against using foreign nationals in its U.S. political operations, but it "installed a non-American as its CEO [Nix] and embedded non-U.S. citizens in American campaigns," Wylie said.Steve Bannon, who went on to serve as President Trump's chief strategist, was the company's vice president during Wylie's tenure and was reportedly very interested in how social media data could be used to identify, target and "exploit" certain subsets of the population, Wylie reported.Much of Cambridge Analytica's political targeting was informed by the work of Stanford University behavioral researcher Michael Kosinski. Among other things, Kosinski found it was possible to accurately determine a person's sexual orientation, political party and race by analyzing 68 Facebook "likes." Deeper analysis of "likes" resulted in predictive powers that led some to conclude Facebook knows you better than your family.CNN@CNN Facebook knows you better than you think:• With 10 likes, a computer model fundamentally knows you better than a colleague• With 70 likes, it knows you better than a friend or roommate• With 300 likes, Big Data knows you better than your spouse https://cnn.it/2IIWc0Y 
9:31 PM - Apr 10, 2018What you 'like' on Facebook says a lot about youBig Data can analyze your Facebook "likes" to accurately predict your race, religion, sexual orientation and more.
cnn.com
According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's targeting operations were "designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases." Before he left the company, there were "the beginnings of discussions" about how to use the profiling data for "voter disengagement," Wylie told lawmakers. This activity, he said, "was intended to focus on African-American voters." Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells Sen. @amyklobuchar that he left Cambridge Analytica in part because of the “beginnings of discussions about voter disengagement” with ads intended to suppress African American voters #tictocnewsAsked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if one of Bannon's goals was "to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the United States from voting," Wylie said that was his understanding. Questioned further about whether "voter suppression" was "a service that U.S. clients could request in their contracts" with the company, Wylie referenced documents indicating clients had made that request.There is room for doubt about the accuracy of Wylie's claims, according to testimony from Eitan Hersh, an expert in civic engagement and voter targeting at Tufts University."Persuasion is very, very hard," Hersh said, asserting CA's claims about its targeting accuracy seem "implausible.""From everything I have seen publicly disclosed about Cambridge Analytica, I am skeptical of the idea that its strategies of voter persuasion were unusually effective or contributed meaningfully to the election outcome," he asserted.It is not yet clear whether Wylie's allegations are being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice. The FBI is reportedly coordinating with British authorities in the U.K. investigation of Cambridge Analytica.According to reports, Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation is looking at Cambridge Analytica's data practices, finances and other activities.=this is a download link (spawns in browser)<a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/05-16-18-wylie-testimony" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/05-16-18-wylie-testimony</a>...9. SCL has a documented history of poor handling ofsensitive data. In 2014, SCL Group, the parent of CA,was criticised by the UK Defence Science andTechnology Laboratory for its inability to properly handlesensitive Ministry of Defence information. This Ministryof Defence assessment was conducted the same yearas the Facebook data harvesting scheme.RUSSIAN CONTACT30. At the time, Dr Kogan was also working on Russianstate-funded research projects. He was based at timesin St Petersburg and also would fly to Moscow. The8Russian team at St Petersburg was also building similaralgorithms using Facebook data for psychologicalprofiling. The Russian project had a particular focus onthe “dark triad” traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism andpsychopathy. The Russian project also conductedbehavioural research on online trolling.31. It should be noted that CA was very much aware of thiswork going on in Russia and in fact sought to pitch “theinteresting work Alex Kogan has been doing for theRussians” to its other clients.32. Contemporaneous to Dr Kogan’s data profiling work inRussia, CA was also in close contact with seniorexecutives at Lukoil, one of Russia’s largest oilcompanies. After receiving a request for informationfrom Lukoil executives in the spring of 2014, CAdiscussed with Lukoil its experience with foreigndisinformation, rumour campaigns, microtargeting and itsAmerican data assets. Mr Nix also emailed me to saythat he was passing on a white paper I wrote outliningthe US project to the CEO of Lukoil.33. It should be noted that Lukoil has formal informationsharing agreements with the Russian Federal SecurityService (“FSB”) and is known to conduct intelligencegathering on behalf of the FSB.34. It should also be noted that CA’s parent company, SCLGroup, has managed information operations projects inEastern Europe and the Baltic region and may havebeen an intelligence target at the time.35. This means that in addition to Facebook data beingaccessed in Russia, there are reasonable grounds tosuspect that (1) CA may have been an intelligence targetof Russian security services at the time of Project Ripon,(2) that Russian security services may have beennotified of the existence of CA’s Facebook data and/ormethods through CA’s frequent contact with Russian9companies, and (3) that it was made known that certaindata assets could have been accessed inside Russia orvia accessing Dr Kogan’s work and computers usingsomething as simple as a keylogger device (with orwithout his knowledge or consent).36. Other CA contractors have worked on pro-Russianpolitical operations in Eastern Europe, including work inUkraine with suspected Russian intelligence agents.This may have influenced some of CA’s research in theUSA. During its research projects in 2014, CA also setup focus groups, message testing and polling onAmericans’ views on the leadership of Vladimir Putin andRussian expansionism in Eastern Europe. Of note,Vladimir Putin was the only foreign leader tested by CA.37. In short, Cambridge Analytica (1) used Russianresearchers to gather its data, (2) openly sharedinformation on “rumour campaigns” and “attitudinalinoculation” with FSB-linked Russian companies andexecutives, (3) pitched Russian-led profiling projects toits other clients, (4) contracted people who worked forpro-Russian parties in Eastern Europe with suspectedRussian intelligence operatives, (5) referenced the useof former Russian intelligence agents in internaldocuments, and (6) went as far as to test Americans’views on Vladimir Putin’s leadership.38. CA’s behaviour is more disconcerting given that itsparent company SCL had extensive experience workingin counter-extremism and military projects for the Britishand American governments. It should have knownbetter.39. To be clear, no allegation is being made that any CApersonnel, including Mr Nix or Dr Kogan, knowinglycolluded with the FSB, GRU or other Russian agencies.However, what is clear is the gross risk of data breachesand foreign intelligence gathering created by CA’s10recklessness in the face of skilled intelligence and cyberoperations.

...VOTER DISENGAGEMENT40. CA did not operate in elections to promote democraticideals. Oftentimes, CA worked to interfere with voterparticipation, including by weaponising fear. In onecountry, CA produced videos intended to suppressturnout by showing voters sadistic images of victimsbeing burned alive, undergoing forced amputations withmachetes and having their throats cut in a ditch. Thesevideos also conveyed Islamophobic messages. It wascreated with a clear intent to intimidate certaincommunities, catalyse religious hatred, portray Muslimsas terrorists and deny certain voters of their democraticrights. I have seen this video, but to be clear, I had nopart in its creation, editing or deployment, and I leftbefore the company made use of it in the field.41. If it suited the client’s objective, the firm was eager tocapitalise on discontent and to stoke ethnic tensions.This was not just on its projects in Africa. As the CEO ofSCL said in a recorded conversation about the firm’swork in the USA in 2016:“It’s the things that resonate, sometimes to attackthe other group and know that you are going tolose them is going to reinforce and resonate yourgroup. Which is why […] Hitler attacked the Jews,because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews atall, but the people didn’t like the Jews […] So hejust leveraged an artificial enemy. Well that’sexactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim[…] Trump had the balls, and I mean, really theballs, to say what people wanted to hear.”42. I am aware that CA clients requested voter suppressionas part of their contracts. CA offered “voterdisengagement” as a service in the United States and11there are internal documents that I have seen that makereference to this tactic. My understanding of theseprojects, which I did not personally participate in, wasthat the firm would target African American voters anddiscourage them from participating in elections. MrBannon was Vice President of the company at the timeof these voter disengagement projects.FACEBOOK’S RESPONSE...no lnx nyt<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/books/review-christopher-wylie-targeted-brittany-kaiser-cambridge-analytica.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/books/review-christopher-wylie-targeted-brittany-kaiser-cambridge-analytica.html</a>In New Memoirs, Two Whistle-Blowers Offer Details From Inside Cambridge AnalyticaChristopher Wylie, at left, and Brittany Kaiser, who have each written a new memoir about their time working for Cambridge Analytica.Christopher Wylie, at left, and Brittany Kaiser, who have each written a new memoir about their time working for Cambridge Analytica.Credit...From left: Gabby Laurent; Julien Tse PhotographyBy Jennifer SzalaiOct. 9, 2019
The voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which filed for insolvency last year, looked like the stuff of liberal nightmares. Enumerating its salient features was like playing a game of cartoon-villain bingo. There was the pretentious and slightly ridiculous name, redolent of a Bond-movie syndicate; there was mysterious funding from the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, along with deep ties to Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist; and there was a chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was caught on hidden camera bragging about the unsavory lengths the company would be willing to go to sway an election — a political gun for hire in a Savile Row suit.
Two new memoirs by former Cambridge Analytica employees offer to illuminate the company’s shadiest dealings, though they differ wildly in both content and tone.Christopher Wylie is the whistle-blower who first revealed how the company harvested data from millions of Facebook users without their permission; his book, “Mind” (the second part of the compound word is a vulgarity), is freewheeling and profane. Brittany Kaiser came out as a whistle-blower, too, a week after Wylie did; her book, “Targeted,” is aggrieved and self-pitying. After reading Wylie’s memoir, you’ll have learned something; after reading Kaiser’s, you’ll wonder whether she herself has learned much of anything at all.
Wylie’s book recounts “how a liberal, gay, 24-year-old Canadian found himself part of a British military contractor developing psychological warfare tools for the American alt-right.” That contractor was SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company; Wylie started working for the London-based SCL in 2013, before Bannon (“Steve from America”) arrived with an injection of Mercer’s cash to create an American subsidiary for conservative causes.
Wylie, a former tech consultant for the Liberal Party in Canada who was pursuing a Ph.D. in fashion-trend forecasting, initially believed his role at SCL would align with his values. He explains how his interests in culture were a good fit for researching methods to de-radicalize insurgents in developing countries. There’s an aesthetic to jihadist propaganda videos that makes them seductive, he says; cultural signifiers can be deployed as a devastatingly effective recruitment tool.Of course, if you learn how to make a population more resistant to extremism, you could use that same knowledge to do the reverse. Some of Wylie’s pronouncements sound schematic and jarring, especially when he talks about “the rise of jihadism and the popularity of Crocs” as analogous “products of information flows,” but there’s often insight in the unexpected connections he draws, and it’s not hard to see why he and Bannon initially bonded over their shared obsession with culture. (“It felt as if we were flirting — but not, because that would be gross.”) Wylie’s appreciation for “the aesthetics of revolt” meant he was fascinated by the kind of anti-establishment voters Bannon wanted him to interview for research, including an incense-burning, kombucha-drinking suburban woman who insisted gay people “were going straight to hell.”This woman was found by cross-referencing data from government sources and private brokers. Cambridge Analytica would go on, notoriously, to get reams of Facebook data for its microtargeting efforts, using an app devised by a researcher at Cambridge University. The app looked like a personality test but ultimately functioned as a way to harvest all the Facebook data from the user who downloaded it — as well as all the data from the user’s Facebook friends.Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle “neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,” propagating an outraged solidarity. (The efficacy of these techniques is still a matter of debate.) He describes another project that the company called “voter disengagement” — that is, suppression of African-American voters. Republican clients, worried that demographic changes were spelling electoral trouble for them, asked Cambridge Analytica to find “ways to confuse, demotivate and disempower people of color.”It’s the kind of meddling that Cambridge Analytica’s parent company had been doing for years in the developing world, a form of colonialism that rich countries are more accustomed to perpetrating than experiencing themselves. Cambridge Analytica’s clients “were simply treating the American population in the exact same way they would treat the Pakistani or Yemeni populations on projects for American or British clients,” Wylie writes.He left the company in late 2014, as the nefarious projects mounted and the toxicity, he says, became too much to bear. “Nix was a monster,” Wylie writes. “Bannon was also a monster. And soon enough, were I to stay, I worried that I would become a monster, too.”A month later, Nix hired Brittany Kaiser to work in “business development.” Like Wylie, Kaiser says she was a liberal — though unlike Wylie, she so strenuously insists how fundamentally decent she is that her awkward remonstrations have a perverse effect on her credibility. She is frequently “humbled.” She is forever a “human rights activist.” She is worldly and smart and spectacularly connected while nevertheless “vulnerable” and helplessly “naïve.” All of this makes for a bizarre book: “Targeted” has the slightly sweaty smell of someone trying to launder her reputation.Kaiser knows she has a lot of explaining to do. She stayed with the company for more than three years, coming out as a whistle-blower only after a tough exposé by Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian delineated Cambridge Analytica’s attempts to sway a Nigerian election and highlighted Kaiser’s role in the plan. (Kaiser takes frequent swipes at Cadwalladr in “Targeted,” asserting, without offering much by way of evidence, that the journalist was “dead set on defaming me.”)The recent documentary “The Great Hack” includes footage of Kaiser speaking on a pro-Brexit group’s panel at a public event; another scene has her worrying about a visit she paid to Julian Assange a few months after the 2016 election. In “Targeted,” she acknowledges helping develop a relationship with the oil company Lukoil, which is famously linked to the Kremlin, but says she had no idea it was a Russian company.When it comes to personal revelations, the book is opaque and exceedingly repetitive, as if the prose had been pushed through the messaging mill of a P.R. firm. Kaiser concedes she did everything for the money — but even as she admits her actions might look “selfish,” she maintains she was ultimately selfless: Her salary, she says, was used to help her parents, who had been wealthy enough to send Kaiser to Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass., but had lost everything since and were living in dire financial straits.In their respective memoirs, Wylie and Kaiser cast aspersions on each other, which seems especially curious for two people who apparently have never met in person. Wylie even challenges the notion that Kaiser is a whistle-blower, depicting it as a conveniently timed rebranding; Kaiser calls Wylie a “disgruntled employee,” and seems incredulous that this “pink-haired high school dropout” was getting so much positive media attention. (That she calls herself “the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower” in her subtitle is extremely telling, though not in the way she intends.)Still, the documents Kaiser provided to authorities corroborated Wylie’s revelations, and regardless of her reasons for coming clean after breaking bad, she eventually talked to journalists on the record, when most other employees kept quiet. Whistle-blowers are often complicated people with a tangle of motives, and dueling memoirs aren’t necessarily the ideal place to tease out the definitive truth. As Kaiser put it to herself after she realized that refusing to ask meant she couldn’t tell: “It’s above my pay grade.”<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters</a><a href="https://www.metro.us/topics/cambridge-analytica" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Cambridge Analytica</a>, the Trump-aligned data firm which was found to have improperly harvested personal data from 87 million Facebook users, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon worked to suppress the black vote in the 2016 election, a former employee told Congress on Wednesday.Christopher Wylie, an ex-employee of Cambridge Analytica who blew the whistle on the company's misuse of Facebook, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company offered strategies to discourage certain segments of the population from voting. He said that Bannon, who was CEO of the firm at the time, directed those efforts."Mr. Bannon sees cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics. It was for this reason Mr. Bannon engaged SCL (Cambridge Analytica's parent company), a foreign military contractor, to build an arsenal of informational weapons he could deploy on the American population," said Wylie....Asked by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) if one of Bannon's "goals was to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the US from voting," Wylie replied, "That was my understanding, yes."In <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/16/politics/cambridge-analytica-congress-wylie/index.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">an interview with CNN</a> Wednesday night, Wylie said that Cambridge Analytica offered services to "discourage or demobilize certain types of people from voting" and that African-Americans were targets of those "voter disengagement strategies."Wylie added that campaigns and political action committees had requested voter-suppression services from the firm, although he didn't say which ones. He said he did not personally work on voter disengagement.Earlier this month, Cambridge Analytica announced it was shutting down in the US and UK. The company was primarily funded by Republican megadonor Steve Bannon and his daughter Rebekah, who sat on the company's board. Earlier this year, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was caught on hidden camera by the UK's Channel 4 <a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-fast-facts" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">boasting of using entrapment and extortion</a> to compromise political candidates.In March, a new company called <a href="https://www.metro.us/news/politics/meet-emerdata-rebranded-cambridge-analytica" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Emerdata</a><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/politics/meet-emerdata-rebranded-cambridge-analytica" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;"> was registered</a> with the <a href="https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10911848/filing-history" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">UK's Companies House</a>. Several Cambridge Analytica backers and executives were listed as officers of the company, including Nix and Rebekah Mercer.--<div class="r" style="font-size: small; margin: 0px; line-height: 1.57; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters&ved=2ahUKEwi7lqD4ieHmAhUMV80KHYc0DCIQFjAIegQIBxAB" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer;" /><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.3;"><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters&ved=2ahUKEwi7lqD4ieHmAhUMV80KHYc0DCIQFjAIegQIBxAB" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer;"></a><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters&ved=2ahUKEwi7lqD4ieHmAhUMV80KHYc0DCIQFjAIegQIBxAB" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer;"></a><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters&ved=2ahUKEwi7lqD4ieHmAhUMV80KHYc0DCIQFjAIegQIBxAB" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer;"></a><a href="https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters&ved=2ahUKEwi7lqD4ieHmAhUMV80KHYc0DCIQFjAIegQIBxAB" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; cursor: pointer;">Black voters intentionally suppressed by Bannon using ...</a></h3>
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font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: 0px; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px;">May 17, 2018 - </a><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FOxDOhlKRvUJ:https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters+&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:FOxDOhlKRvUJ:https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters%2B%26cd%3D9%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwi7lqD4ieHmAhUMV80KHYc0DCIQIDAIegQIBxAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">A whistleblower told Congress that Cambridge Analytica, the ... Christopher Wylie, an ex-employee of Cambridge Analytica who blew the whistle on ... and that African-Americans were targets of those "voter disengagement strategies. ... Earlier this year, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was caught ...</a></div>==