Brittany Kaiser

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see Gt Hack, claims to have refused to work w/ alt rt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3/19 video</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYjDvx6PgyI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYjDvx6PgyI</font></a></div><div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></div><div><font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman">S</font></font>potlight: Big Brother is Watching (bloomberg )</div><div>
<div id="info" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer"><div id="info-text" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer"><div id="date" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer"><span id="dot" class="style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer">Sep 17, 2018</span></div></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DN 6 part</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1:</font></div><div><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/7/the_great_hack_cambridge_analytica"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/7/the_great_hack_cambridge_analytica</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate voters across the globe, from the 2016 election in the United States to the Brexit campaign in Britain and elections in over 60 other countries, including Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company’s operations, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. The documents come from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, who worked at the firm for three-and-a-half years before leaving in 2018. We speak with Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, co-directors of the Oscar shortlisted documentary “The Great Hack”; Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in “The Great Hack” and author of “Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again”; and Emma Briant, a visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College whose upcoming book is titled “Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.”</font></span></div><div><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></span></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We welcome you all to&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Democracy Now!</em>&nbsp;Brittany, you have just begun to release a trove of documents from Cambridge Analytica, involves scores of countries, including the United States, including John Bolton, including Iran. Talk about how — why you decided to begin this release and what are in these documents.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Absolutely. I decided to release the Hindsight Files because it’s now 2020. I’ve been waiting and working with investigators and journalists around the world for the past two years. And what I’ve seen is that we don’t have enough change in order for voters to be protected, ahead of not just November, but in 27 days the first votes that are cast for the 2020 election.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I really think that digital literacy is the most important point that I’m trying to make here. If you understand the tactics and the strategies that are being used to manipulate you, then you can protect yourself from that. And I want to be able to empower voters ahead of casting their first vote this year.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;So, talk about these documents, where they came from and what’s in them.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;These are all documents from my time at Cambridge Analytica. I worked at the company for over three years. So, it’s internal communications and negotiations for data-driven communications projects all around the world. It’s proposals, contracts and case studies of what has been done to intervene in democracy.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And I think it’s so important for people to understand that while sometimes these tactics are benign, sometimes they are incredibly malignant. And there’s evidence of voter suppression, fake news and disinformation, using racism, sexism.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And I just want to make sure that there is real action that is going to be taken, not just ahead of this next election, but for countries all around the world. We need privacy legislation so badly. We need to regulate Big Tech and have an ability to enforce our voting laws online, because right now we can’t. And unfortunately, companies like Facebook are not doing enough to protect us.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;So, for people who are new to what Cambridge Analytica is, why don’t you describe why it is and why you have these documents, what Cambridge Analytica’s role was in all of these countries, including the United States?</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Absolutely. So, Cambridge Analytica was one of the companies under the&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>&nbsp;Group, Strategic Communication Laboratories. This is a company that has been around for over 25 years, and they started by using data-driven strategies in order to understand people’s psyche, how they make decisions and how they can be persuaded to take certain actions or to prevent people from taking certain actions.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;It was a defense contractor.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Originally they started in defense, yes. And once they found out how successful that was — that was actually in the Nelson Mandela election in ’93, ’94 in South Africa, they were preventing election violence for a defense contract —&nbsp;they realized that that was very useful in elections. And those strategies developed over two-and-a-half decades in order to no longer just do good things and good impact work, but, unfortunately, to undermine our democracies.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;I want to turn to a clip from the documentary&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</em>. In this clip, the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr talks about Cambridge Analytica’s parent company&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>. We also hear the voice of former Cambridge Analytica&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CEO</span>&nbsp;Alexander Nix, who was previously a director of&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>.</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243); letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CAROLE</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CADWALLADR</span>:</strong>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>&nbsp;started out as a military contractor,&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>&nbsp;Defence.</font></p></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243); letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 30px !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">ALEXANDER</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NIX</span>:</strong>&nbsp;We have a fairly substantial defense business. We actually train the British Army, the British Navy, the U.S. Army, U.S. Special Forces. We train&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NATO</span>, the&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CIA</span>, State Department, Pentagon. It’s using research to influence behavior of hostile audiences. How do you persuade 14-to-30-year-old Muslim boys not to join al-Qaeda? Essentially communication warfare.</font></p></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243); letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 30px !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CAROLE</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CADWALLADR</span>:</strong>&nbsp;They had worked in Afghanistan. They had worked in Iraq. They had worked in various places in Eastern Europe. But the real game changer was they started using information warfare in elections.</font></p></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243); letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 30px !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">ALEXANDER</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NIX</span>:</strong>&nbsp;There’s a lot of overlap, because it’s all the same methodology.</font></p></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243); letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 30px !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CAROLE</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CADWALLADR</span>:</strong>&nbsp;All of the campaigns which Cambridge Analytica/<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>&nbsp;did for the developing world, it was all about practicing some new technology or trick, how to persuade people, how to suppress turnout or how to increase turnout. And then, it’s like, “OK, now I’ve got the hang of it. Let’s use it in Britain and America.”</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;So, that’s a clip from&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</em>.&nbsp;</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div>
</div><div><div class="story_with_left_panel" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 30px;"><div id="story_text" style="box-sizing: border-box; z-index: -1; float: left; min-height: 1px; width: 617.688px;"><div class="left_panel" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; width: 185.297px; float: left; margin: 5px 20px 40px 0px;"><div class="hidden-xs" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="mobile_anchor_target" id="topics_lg_screen" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h5 style="box-sizing: border-box; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.5px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TOPICS</font></h5><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Topic" href="https://www.democracynow.org/topics/whistleblowers" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Whistleblowers</font></a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Topic" href="https://www.democracynow.org/topics/big_tech" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Big Tech</font></a></li></ul></div><hr style="box-sizing: content-box; height: 3px; margin: 15px 0px 20px; border: none; clear: both; background: rgb(236, 238, 239); width: 65px;" /><div class="mobile_anchor_target guests" id="guests_lg_screen" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h5 style="box-sizing: border-box; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.5px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GUESTS</font></h5><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><div class="guest" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px;"><div class="guest_information" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Appearance" href="https://www.democracynow.org/appearances/jehane_noujaim" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Jehane Noujaim</font></a><div class="grey_description" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 19px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman">co-director of&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</span>, which has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. Her previous films include&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Square</span>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Control Room</span>.</font></div></div></div></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><div class="guest" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px;"><div class="guest_information" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Appearance" href="https://www.democracynow.org/appearances/brittany_kaiser" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Brittany Kaiser</font></a><div class="grey_description" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 19px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who is featured in the documentary&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</span>. Her book is titled&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again</span>.</font></div></div></div></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><div class="guest" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px;"><div class="guest_information" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Appearance" href="https://www.democracynow.org/appearances/karim_amer" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Karim Amer</font></a><div class="grey_description" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 19px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman">co-director of&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</span>, which has been shortlisted for an Academy Award.</font></div></div></div></li></ul></div><hr style="box-sizing: content-box; height: 3px; margin: 15px 0px 20px; border: none; clear: both; background: rgb(236, 238, 239); width: 65px;" /><div class="mobile_anchor_target" id="links_lg_screen" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h5 style="box-sizing: border-box; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.5px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">LINKS</font></h5><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Related Link" href="https://twitter.com/Karim_Amer33" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Karim Amer on Twitter</font></a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Related Link" href="https://twitter.com/JehaneNoujaim" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Jehane Noujaim on Twitter</font></a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Related Link" href="https://twitter.com/EmmaLBriant" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Emma Briant on Twitter</font></a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a data-ga-action="Story: Related Link" href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062965790/targeted/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">"Targeted"</font></a></li></ul></div></div></div><div class="fine_print" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 12px; font-style: italic;">
</div><div class="story_summary" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="text" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 27px; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The documentary “The Great Hack,” which was shortlisted for the Oscars, explores how the data firm Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Cambridge Analytica collapsed in May 2018 after The Observer newspaper revealed the company had harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent. Cambridge Analytica then used the data to sway voters to support President Trump during the 2016 campaign. We speak with “The Great Hack” co-directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, as well as Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser.</font></p></div></div><div class="mobile_anchor_target" id="transcript" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h5 class="transcript" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; line-height: 1;">
</h5><div class="text" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 27px; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;This is&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Democracy Now!</em>, democracynow.org,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The War and Peace Report</em>. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the hour looking at Cambridge Analytica, the British company that was co-founded by the well-known President Trump special adviser Steve Bannon. He was vice president of Cambridge Analytica, which came out of a military contracting group and now is accused of having been involved, essentially, with PSYOPs, using tens of millions of people’s information that it harvested from Facebook.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our guests are the award-winning filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, who are directors of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</em>, which has just been nominated for a&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BAFTA</span>, the Oscar equivalent in Britain, and has been shortlisted for an Oscar, and Brittany Kaiser, a whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica for more than three years. In Washington, we’re joined by Emma Briant, who has been looking at Cambridge Analytica for years.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let me ask you, Jehane, why you decided to spend years of your life looking at Cambridge Analytica and making this film,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</em>, and why you called it that.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">JEHANE</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NOUJAIM</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Well, this has, for me, been a film, I feel, 20 years in the making. Twenty years ago, I made a film with Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker called&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Startup.com</em>, which was about the beginning of the dotcom world starting and where people wanted to be God online and start internet companies and make millions and millions of dollars. And fast-forward 20 years, and they are God online.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But I’ve always been obsessed with how we get our information. And soon after&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Startup.com</em>, I made&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Control Room</em>, which was about looking at the Iraq War, and depending on whether you were looking at Al Jazeera or Fox News or&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CNN</span>, you had a completely different understanding of reality on the ground. And I had this question of how — if you don’t have some kind of shared understanding of truth, how can there be nuanced conversation and discussion, which is what’s necessary for a democracy to function?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Flash-forward to us making&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Square</em>, and at that time social media was a tool for change, positive change. I mean —</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;You’re talking Tahrir Square in Egypt.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">JEHANE</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NOUJAIM</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Tahrir Square. This is where we met, and we made the film,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Square</em>. And at that time, even when I was arrested, Twitter was used to find me. So, it was a very positive tool for change.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then we see the pendulums kind of swing in the other direction, and we see that social media can be used in a very different way. And it was used by the Army, and then we started to see it being used in the Brexit campaign and the Trump campaign. And we started hear this word “hack” and the hacking of these elections. But what we realized was that the real hack that we needed to look at was the hack of the mind and what is happening inside our newsfeeds and what happens when people are creating their own truths because they’re being microtargeted.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And we started to look at this company Cambridge Analytica. And what we found there was fascinating, because we realized that there was this invisible story that’s happening inside our computer screens, inside our heads, which is leading to everybody having a completely different understanding of reality based on their newsfeeds.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that’s when we met Brittany Kaiser, who at the time was just about to become a whistleblower and come out about what she knew. She was basically saying, “I’m going to Thailand, and if you want to talk to me, then come meet me here. I can’t tell you exactly where it’s going to be, where I’m going, but land at this airport.” We met her there, and that’s where the film began.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Well, I want to go to a clip of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</em>, your film. In this, Brittany Kaiser explains the concept of the persuadables.</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Remember those Facebook quizzes that we used to form personality models for all voters in the U.S.? The truth is, we didn’t target every American voter equally. The bulk of our resources went into targeting those whose minds we thought we could change. We called them the persuadables.</span></font></p></blockquote><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243); padding-top: 30px !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They’re everywhere in the country, but the persuadables that mattered were the ones in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. Now, each of these states were broken down by precinct. So you can say there are 22,000 persuadable voters in this precinct, and if we targeted enough persuadable people in the right precincts, then those states would turn red instead of blue.</font></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;So, you might have heard them referred to as “swing voters.” In brand advertising, they’re called “switchers,” because it’s easy to persuade someone to try something new or to change their mind. So, identifying persuadables is what everybody does in data science for political modeling. Every political consultant in the books is trying to do this, identify the people whose minds can be changed, because quite a lot of people have not made up their mind yet. And when you’re trying to introduce a character as controversial as Donald Trump, the idea was, find the people who could be convinced, even though they had probably never voted for anyone like him before.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;So, talk about your trajectory. I mean, Karim and Jehane, you do this very well in the film, but it is a very unlikely path to a firm that may well have been illegal in what it did, in working with Facebook, harvesting all this information, that ultimately helped to get Trump elected. But that’s not really where you came from. In the film, I’m looking at pictures of you and Michelle Obama. You were a key figure in President Obama’s social media team in his election campaign.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;I have always been a political and human rights activist. That’s where I came from, so it was really easy to snap back into that kind of work. I actually was in the third year of my Ph.D., writing about prevention of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, when I first met the former&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CEO</span>&nbsp;of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix. My Ph.D. ended up being about how you could get real-time information, so how you could use big data systems, in order to build early-warning systems to give people who make decisions, like the decision that was just made about Iran — give them real-time information so that they can prevent war before it happens. Unfortunately, no one at my law school could teach me anything about predictive algorithms, so I joined this company part-time in order to start to learn how these early-warning systems could possibly be built.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Well, explain. Explain your meeting with</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Alexander Nix, who is the head — came from the defense contractor — right? —&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">SCL</span>, and then was the head of Cambridge Analytica, who said, “Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets.”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Yes, he did. Not that becoming, but he has always been an incredibly good salesman. In one of my first meetings with him, he showed me a contract that the company had with&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">NATO</span>&nbsp;in order to identify young people in the United Kingdom who were vulnerable to being recruited into&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">ISIS</span>, and running counterpropaganda communications to keep them at home safe with their families instead of sneaking themselves into Syria. So, obviously, that type of work was incredibly attractive to me. And I thought, “Hey, data can really be used for good and for human rights impact. This is something I really want to learn how to do.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;But soon you were on your way to the United States with Alexander Nix, meeting with Corey Lewandowski, who at the time was the campaign manager for Donald Trump. When did those red flags go up for you?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;There were red flags here and there, especially when I would call our lawyers, who were actually Giuliani’s firm at the time, in order to ask for advice on what I could and could not do with certain data projects. And I always got told, “Hey, you’re creating too many invoices.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But what really landed the plane for me was, a month after Donald Trump’s election, everybody at Cambridge Analytica who had worked both on the Trump campaign and on the Trump super&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">PAC</span>, which ran the “Defeat Crooked Hillary” campaign —&nbsp;they gave us a two-day-long debrief, which I write about in detail in my book&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Targeted</em>, about what they did. They showed us how much data they collected, how they modeled it, how they identified people as individuals that could be convinced not to vote, and the types of disinformation that they sent these people in order to change their minds. It was the most horrific two days of my life.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;So what did you do after that?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;I spent a while trying to figure out if there was still anything I could salvage from what I learned there. Was it still possible to use these tools for good? And when I realized that the company had gone way too far in the wrong direction, I started working with journalists in order to go through and figure out what I had in my documents that could possibly assist in saving democracy in the future.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;You testified before the British Parliament. You were subpoenaed by Robert Mueller. You’ve been involved in a lot of information giving during these investigations. In an odd way, would you describe yourself as a persuadable?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">BRITTANY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KAISER</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Definitely. And that’s actually a story that is very prevalent in my book. Most people don’t like to think that they are persuadable. We all like to think that we can’t be manipulated. But, trust me, we’re not as digitally literate as we like to think that we are. That’s why I released the Hindsight Files, because I want everyone to realize how easy it is for us to be manipulated and that we need to be aware in order to protect ourselves.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;Karim Amer, for people who are still sitting here and going, “Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, what does this have to do with each other, Zuckerberg testifying before Congress?” explain then what was the magic sauce. What happened here between these two companies? What did Cambridge Analytica do? And I’ll also ask Brittany this question. And what did Facebook understand was done? And what did they do about it?</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">KARIM</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMER</span>:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Well, I think, you know</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, the situation that we find ourselves in is one in which all of our behavior, which is essentially what data is, recordable human behavior, is constantly being tracked and gathered. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And that’s part of the deal or the devil’s bargain we’ve made in this new economy, where we give our data up, and in return we get services. Now, most of us go ahead and we sign these terms and conditions that we don’t really read or don’t really understand what they’re about. What we’ve realized is that we’re giving up a certain level of autonomy that we may not have understood the implications of.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Now,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> what is that autonomy? What that is, it is insight into everything you do all the time. It’s something that’s tracking you, from the most public of spaces, when you’re posting, to the most intimate of spaces, when you’re watching porn or when you’re messaging somebody or when you’re staring at photos of a loved one or someone else. All of that behavior is constantly being tracked.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> it is used to create essentially a voodoo doll of you that can predict your behavior with quite a lot of accuracy</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The proof of that is that that is the business model of Facebook and Google. It is about predicting your behavior and selling access to that prediction. Think of it as being in a casino that is constantly running, trying to make bets on what you’re going to do next. Now, that casino access is being sold in real time to all kinds of brands around the world.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What Cambridge identified was that they could take voter data, and they could take personality data, and they could map them together and create the most accurate profiles</b>. That’s why they bragged about having 5,000 data points about every U.S. voter, which was one of their unique offerings. And with that insight, they realized that if you knew which districts you had to target and how to target the key people in those districts with the perfect messaging, you had the greatest chance of success.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">And where that leaves us to is, we used to live in a world where a political leader had to write one big, one great story to inspire a great people to go on to a great cause. Now we live in a world where a politician can customize a story to every single individual voter and do it in a way which is operating in darkness without transparency.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What do we mean by darkness? We mean that 'til this day we still do not know what ads were placed on Facebook in 2016, who was targeted, who paid for those ads, how it was conducted, were these ads paid for by a foreign country or not, what happened, what didn't happen.</b> And I think we deserve to know. Why? Because we’ve seen that this has become a place of weaponized information, that can be used to not only promote amazing ideas, but to convince people not to vote, which is active voter suppression.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And what’s troubling is that this is an information crime. Whether it’s legal or illegal doesn’t matter, in my opinion, because many things in our country’s history were legal once before, including slavery, and yet we’ve realized that it was not OK for them to be legal. So, at the current moment, Facebook is a crime scene. Facebook has the answers. Facebook knows what happened to our democracy. And yet it is still unwilling to participate in giving us the evidence we need.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;I want to turn to another one of your clips, Jehane and Karim, one of the clips of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</em>. This is one of the main subjects of the documentary, professor David Carroll.</font></p><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">DAVID</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CARROLL</span>:</strong>&nbsp;I was teaching digital media and developing apps, so I knew that the data from our online activity wasn’t just evaporating. And as I dug deeper, I realized these digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. We are now the commodity. But we were so in love with the gift of this free connectivity that no one bothered to read the terms and conditions.</font></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;David Carroll is featured in this documentary,&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</i>. In 2018, we&nbsp;<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/23/meet_the_american_professor_suing_cambridge" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; border: 0px;">spoke</a>&nbsp;to David Carroll at&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Democracy Now!</i>, associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design. He’s filed a full disclosure claim against Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. I asked him what he was demanding. And a clip of this also appears in&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Hack</i>.</font></p><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">DAVID</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">CARROLL</span>:</strong>&nbsp;A full disclosure. So, where did they get our data? How did they process it? Who did they share it with? And do we have a right to opt out? So, the basic rights that I think a lot of people would like to have, and the basic questions that a lot of people are asking.</font></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span>&nbsp;<span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>&nbsp;And we’re going to find out just what happened with these demands, these questions he had, when he took them to Britain to take on Cambridge Analytica, and how he, as well as Brittany Kaiser and others, took Cambridge Analytica down. This is&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Democracy Now!</em>&nbsp;Stay with us.</font></p></div><hr class="hidden-xs" style="background: rgb(236, 238, 239); box-sizing: content-box; height: 1px; margin: 35px 0px 30px; border: none; clear: both;" /><div class="next_story_body" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 25px 0px 15px;"><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Next story from this daily show</font></h4><h5 style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 0.5px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><font style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><a data-ga-action="Story: Next Story" href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/7/cambridge_analytica_data_manipulation_john_bolton" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px;">Propaganda Machine: The Military Roots of Cambridge Analytica’s Psychological Manipulation of Voters</a></font></h5><h5 style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 0.5px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">----</h5></div></div></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/10/2020_election_digital_manipulation_cambridge_analytica"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/10/2020_election_digital_manipulation_cambridge_analytica</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>longtime Facebook executive has admitted the company’s platform helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and it may happen again this year.</b> In an internal memo, Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes.” Bosworth, who was a backer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, went on to write that the company should not change its policies in an effort to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. In his memo, Bosworth referenced the role of the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica but downplayed its significance. However, a new Oscar-shortlisted documentary called “The Great Hack” argues Cambridge Analytica has played a significant role not just in the U.S. election but in elections across the globe. The company harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent and used the data to sway voters during the 2016 campaign. We speak with the directors of “The Great Hack,” Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser and propaganda researcher Emma Briant.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Transcript</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: A longtime Facebook executive has admitted the company’s platform helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and predicted it may happen again this year. In an internal memo, Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes,” he said. Bosworth, who was a backer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, went on to write that the company should not change its policies in an effort to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. Bosworth credited Trump for running, quote, “the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In his memo, Bosworth referenced the role of the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica but downplayed its significance. However, a new Netflix documentary called The Great Hack argues Cambridge Analytica has played a critical role in the U.S. election, as well as elections across the globe.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cambridge Analytica was founded by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon was the company’s vice president and claims to have named the company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Cambridge Analytica harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent and used the data to sway voters during the 2016 campaign.</b> The story of Cambridge Analytica is featured in the new documentary The Great Hack, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">DAVID CARROLL: All of your interactions, your credit card swipes, web searches, locations, likes, they’re all collected, in real time, into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry.</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">CAROLE CADWALLADR: The real game changer was Cambridge Analytica. They worked for the Trump campaign and for the Brexit campaign. They started using information warfare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DAVID CARROLL: <b>Cambridge Analytica claimed to have 5,000 data points on every American voter.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Well, earlier this week, I spoke to the directors of The Great Hack, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as propaganda researcher Emma Briant and a former employee at Cambridge Analytica, Brittany Kaiser, who has begun posting online a trove of documents detailing the company’s operations, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. Kaiser has also written about her experience at the company in the book Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again. Kaiser is one of two former Cambridge Analytica employees featured in The Great Hack. The other is Christopher Wylie.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CHRISTOPHER WYLIE: It’s incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica a purely sort of data science company or an algorithm company. You know, it is a full-service propaganda machine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: I asked <b>Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser</b> to talk about how she became involved with Cambridge Analytica.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: I think it’s very important to note this, because there are people all around the world that are working for tech companies, that I’m sure joined that company in order to do something good. They want the world to be more connected. They want to use technology in order to communicate with everybody, to get people more engaged in important issues. And they don’t realize that while you’re moving fast and breaking things, some things get so broken that you cannot actually contemplate or predict what those repercussions are going to look like.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Chris Wylie</b> and I both really idealistically joined Cambridge Analytica because we were excited about the potential of using data for exciting and good impact projects. Chris joined in 2013 on the data side in order to start developing different types o<b>f psychographic models.</b> So he worked with<b> Dr. Aleksandr Kogan</b> and the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in order to start doing experiments with Facebook data, to be able to gather that data, which we now know was taken under the wrong auspices of academic research, and was then used in order to identify people’s psychographic groupings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that, psychographic groupings, and especially for people who are not on Facebook, who don’t understand its enormous power and the intimate knowledge it has of people. Think of someone you’re talking to who’s never experienced Facebook. Explain what is there.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, the amount of data that is collected about you on Facebook and on any of your devices is much more than you’re really made aware of. You probably haven’t ever read the terms and conditions of any of these apps on your phone. But if you actually took the time to do it and you could understand it, because most of them are written for you not to understand — it’s written in legalese — you would realize that you are giving away a lot more than you would have ever agreed to if there was transparency. This is your every move, everywhere you’re going, who you’re talking to, who your contacts are, what information you’re actually giving in other apps on your phone, your location data, all of your lifestyle, where you’re going, what you’re doing, what you’re reading, how long you spend looking at different images and websites.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This amount of behavioral data gives such a good picture of you that your behavior can be predicted, </b>as Karim was talking about earlier,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> to a very high degree of accuracy. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And this allows companies like Cambridge Analytica to understand how you see the world and what will motivate you to go and take an action — or, unfortunately, what will demotivate you. So, that amount of data, available on Facebook ever since you joined, allows a very easy platform for you to be targeted and manipulated.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And when I say “psychographic targeting,” I’m sure you probably are a little bit more familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, so the Myers-Briggs that asks you a set of questions in order to understand your personality and how you see the world. The system that Cambridge Analytica used is actually a lot more scientific. It’s called the <b>OCEAN five-factor model</b>. And OCEAN stands for O for openness, C for conscientiousness, whether you prefer plans and order or you’re a little bit more fly by the seat of your pants. Extraversion, whether you gather your energy from being out surrounded by people, or you’re introverted and you prefer to gather your energy from being alone. If you are agreeable, you care about your family, your community, society, your country, more than you care about yourself. And if you are disagreeable, then you are a little bit more egotistical. You need messages that are about benefits to you. And then the worst is neurotic. You know, it’s<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> not bad to be neurotic. It means that you are a little bit more emotional. It means, unfortunately, as well, that you are motivated by fear-based messaging, so people can use tactics in order to scare you to doing what they want to do.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">And this is what was targeted when they were gathering that data out of Facebook to figure out which group you belonged into. They found about 32 different groups of people, different personality types. And there were groups of psychologists that were looking into how they could understand that data and convert that into messaging that was just for you.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I need to remind everybody that the <b>Trump campaign put together over a million different advertisements</b> that were put out, a million different advertisements with tens of thousands of different campaigns. Some of these messages were for just you, were for 50 people, a hundred people. Obviously, certain groups are thousands, tens of thousands or millions. But some of them were targeted very much directly at the individual, to know exactly what you’re going to click on and exactly what you care about</span>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So they were doing this before Cambridge Analytica. But describe — I want to actually go to a Bannon clip, Steve Bannon, who takes credit for naming Cambridge Analytica, right? Because you had SCL before, Defence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And then it becomes Cambridge Analytica, for Cambridge University, right? Where Kogan got this information that he culled from Facebook.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN:<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> This is the <b>White House chief strategist Steve Bannon </b>in an interview at a Financial Times conference in March 2018. Bannon said that reports that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to build profiles on American voters and influence the 2016 presidential election were politically motivated. Months later, evidence emerged linking Bannon to Cambridge Analytica, the scandal, which resulted in a $5 billion fine for Facebook. Bannon is the founder and former board member of the political consulting firm — he was vice president of Cambridge Analytica.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN BANNON: All Cambridge Analytica is the data scientists and the applied applications here in the United States. It has nothing to do with the international stuff. The Guardian actually tells you that, and The Observer tell you that, when you get down to the 10th paragraph, OK? When you get down to the 10th paragraph. And what Nix does overseas is what Nix does overseas. Right? It was a data — it was a data company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And by the way, Cruz’s campaign and the Trump campaign say, “Hey, they were a pretty good data company.” But this whole thing on psychographics was optionality in the deal. If it ever worked, it worked. But it hasn’t worked, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. So, it was never even applied.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Steve Bannon in 2018, key to President Trump’s victory and to his years so far in office, before he was forced to — before he was forced out. What was your relationship with Steve Bannon? You worked at Cambridge Analytica for over three years. You had the keys to the castle, is that right, in Washington?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes, for a while I actually split the keys to what is Steve’s house, with Alexander Nix, because we used his house as our office. His house is also used as a Breitbart office in the basement. It’s called the <b>“Breitbart Embassy” on Capitol Hill</b>. And that’s where I would go for meetings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Who funded that?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER:<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> I believe it was owned by the Mercer family, that building. And we would come into the basement and use that boardroom for our meetings. And we would use that for planning who we were going to go pitch to, what campaigns we were going to work for, what advocacy groups, what conservative 501(c)(3)s and (c)(4)s he wanted us to go see.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And I didn’t spend a lot of time with Steve, but the time I did was incredibly insightful. Almost every time I saw him, he’d be showing me some new Hillary Clinton hit video that he had come out with, or announcing that he was about to throw a book launch party for Ann Coulter for ¡Adios, America!,</span> which was something that he invited both me and Alexander to, and we promptly decided to leave the house before she arrived.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But Steve was very influential in the development of Cambridge Analytica and who we were going to go see, who we were going to support with our technology. And he made a lot of the introductions, </b>which in the beginning seemed a little less nefarious than they did later on, when he got very confident and started introducing us to<b> white right-wing political parties across Europe </b>and in other countries and tried to get meetings with the main political parties, or leftist or green parties instead, to make sure that those far-right-wing parties that do not have the world’s best interests at heart could not get access to these technologies. heart could not get access to these technologies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: You said in The Great Hack, in the film, that you have evidence of illegality of the Trump and Brexit campaigns, that they were conducted illegally. I was wondering if you can go into that. I mean, it was controversial even, and Carole Calwalladr, the great reporter at The Observer and The Guardian, was blasted and was personally targeted, very well demonstrated in The Great Hack, for saying that Cambridge Analytica was involved in Brexit. They kept saying they had nothing to do with it, until she shows a video of you, who worked for Cambridge Analytica, at one of the founding events of leave it, or Brexit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yeah, Leave.EU, that panel that I was on, which has now become quite an infamous video, was their launch event to launch the campaign. And <b>Cambridge Analytica was in deep negotiations, through introduction of Steve Bannon, with both of the Brexit campaigns. </b>I was told, actually, originally we pitched remain, and the remain side said that t<b>hey did not need to spend money on expensive political consultants, because they were going to win anyway. And that’s actually what I also truly believed, and so did they.</b></font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So, Steve made the introductions to make sure that we would still get a commercial contract out of this political campaign, and both to Vote Leave and Leave.EU.</span> Cambridge Analytica took Leave.EU, and <b>AIQ, which was Cambridge Analytica’s essentially digital partner, </b>before Cambridge Analytica could run our own digital campaigns, they were running the Vote Leave side, both funded by the Mercers, both with the same access to this giant database on American voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Mercers funded Brexit?</span></font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: There was Cambridge Analytica work, as well as AIQ work, in both of the leave campaigns. So, a lot of that money, in order to collect that data and in order to build the infrastructure of both of those companies, came from Mercer-funded campaigns, yes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And again, explain what AIQ is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: AIQ was a company that actually ran all of Cambridge Analytica’s digital campaigns, until January 2016, when Molly Schweickert, our head of digital, was hired in order to build ad tech internally within the company. AIQ was based in Canada and was a partner that had access to Cambridge Analytica data the entire time that they were running the Vote Leave campaign, which was the designated and main campaign in Brexit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, when did you see the connection between Brexit and the Trump campaign?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Actually, a lot of it started to come when I saw some of Carole’s reporting, because there were a lot of conspiracy theories over what was going on, and I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that we definitely did work in the Brexit campaign, “we” as in when I was at Cambridge Analytica, because I was one of the people working on the campaign. And we obviously played a large role in not just the Trump campaign itself, but Trump super PACs and a lot of other conservative advocacy groups, 501(c)(3)s, (4)s, that were the infrastructure that allowed for the building of the movement that pushed Donald Trump into the White House.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it looks like Cambridge Analytica was heading to a billion-dollar corporation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: <b>That’s what Alexander used to tell us all the time. That was the carrot that he waved in front of our eyes in order to have us keep going. “We’re building a billion-dollar company. Aren’t you excited?”</b> And I think that that’s what so many people get caught up in, people that are currently working at Facebook, people that are working at Google, people that are working at companies where they are motivated to build exciting technology, that obviously can also be very dangerous, but they think they’re going to financially benefit and be able to take care of themselves and their families because of it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So what was illegal?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">BRITTANY KAISER: The massive problems that came from the data collection, specifically, are where my original accusations come from, because data was collected under the auspices of being for academic research and was used for political and commercial purposes.</span> There are also different data sets that are not supposed to be matched and used without explicit transparency and consent in the United Kingdom, because they actually have good national data protection laws and international data protection laws through the <b>European Union to protect voters. Unfortunately, in the United States, we only have seen the state of California coming out and doing it.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, on the other side, we have<b> voter suppression laws</b> that prevent our vote from being suppressed. We have laws against discrimination in advertising, racism, sexism, incitement of violence. All of those things are illegal, yet somehow a platform like Facebook has decided that if politicians want to use any of those tactics, that they will not be held to the same community standards as you or me, or the basic laws and social contracts that we have in this country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser. When we come back, we speak to the directors of The Great Hack, the documentary that’s just been shortlisted for an Academy Award.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[break]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: “Let Me Steal Your Secrets,” soundtrack from the documentary The Great Hack. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our look at Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and their roles in the 2016 U.S. election and other elections. Earlier this week, I spoke to the directors of The Great Hack, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as propaganda researcher Emma Briant and a former Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Brittany Kaiser. I asked Karim Amer to talk about what Cambridge Analytica effort to suppress the vote in Trinidad and Tobago did.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: It was important for us to show in the film the expansiveness of Cambridge’s work. This went beyond the borders of the United States and even beyond the borders of the EU and the U.K. Because what we find is that Cambridge used the — in pursuing this global influence industry that they were very much a part of, they used different countries as Petri dishes to learn and get the know-how about different tactics. And from improving those tactics, they could then sell them for a higher cost — higher margin in Western democracies, where the election budgets are, you know — we have to remember, I think it’s important to predicate that the election business has become a multibillion-dollar global business, right? So, we have to remember that while we are upset with companies like Cambridge, we allowed for the commoditization of our democratic process, right? So, people are exploiting this now because it’s become a business. And we, as purveyors of this, can’t really be as upset as we want to be, when we’ve justified that. So I want to preface it with that.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, that being said, what’s happened as a result is a company like Cambridge can practice tactics in a place like <b>Trinidad</b>, that’s very unregulated in terms of what they can and can’t do, learn from that know-how and then, you know, use it — parlay it into activities in the United States. What they did in Trinidad, and why it was important for us to show it in the film, is they led something called the “Do So” campaign, where they admit to making it cool and popular among youth to get out and not vote. And they knew —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, you had the Indian population and the black population.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: And the black population. And there is a lot of historic tension between those two, and a lot of generational differences, as well, between those two. And the “Do So” campaign targeted — was was done in a way to, you know, by looking at the data and looking at the predictive analysis of which group would vote or not vote, get enough people to dissuade them from voting, so that they could flip the election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Targeted at?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: Targeted at the youth. And so, this is really — when you watch —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: <b>“Do So” actually meant “don’t vote.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: “Do So,” don’t vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: Don’t vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: Yes, exactly. And when —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: With their fists crossed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: With their fists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: A<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">nd that it became cool not to vote.</span></font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>KARIM AMER: </b>Exactly. And you look at the level of calculation behind this, and it’s quite frightening. Now, as Emma was saying, a lot of these tactics were born out of our own fears in the United States and the U.K. post-9/11, when we allowed for this massive weaponization of influence campaigns to begin. You know, if you remember President Bush talking about, you know, the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, all of these kinds of industries were born out of this.</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">And now I believe what we’re seeing is the hens have come home to roost, right? All of these tactics that we developed in the name of, quote-unquote, “fighting the war on terror,” in the name of doing these things, have now been commercialized and used to come back to the biggest election market in the world, the United States. And how do we blame people for doing that, when we’ve allowed for our democracy to be for sale?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that’s what <b>Brittany’s files today, that she’s releasing</b> and has released over the last couple days, really give us insight to. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Hindsight Files that Brittany has released show us how there is an auction happening for influence campaigns in every democracy around the world. There is no vote that is unprotected in the current way that we — in the current space that we’re living.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>And the thing that’s allowing this to happen is these information platforms like Facebook.</b> And that is what’s so upsetting, because we can actually do something about that.<b> We are the only country in the world that can hold Facebook accountable, yet we still have not done so</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> And we still keep going to their leadership hoping they do the right thing, but they have not. And why is that? Because no industry has ever shown in American history that it can regulate itself. There is a reason why antitrust laws exist in this country. There’s a tradition of holding companies accountable, and we need to re-embrace that tradition, especially as we enter into 2020, where the stakes could not be higher.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Brittany Kaiser, can you talk about the <b>“Crooked Hillary” campaign</b> and how it developed?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, this started as a super PAC that was built for Ted Cruz, Keep the Promise I, which was run by Kellyanne Conway and funded by the Mercers. That was then converted to becoming a super PAC for Donald Trump. They tried to register with the Federal Election Commission the name, Defeat Crooked Hillary, and the FEC, luckily, did not allow them to do that. So it was called Make America Number 1.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This super PAC was headed by David Bossie,</b> someone that you might remember from Citizens United, who basically brought dark money into our politics and allowed endless amounts of money to be funneled into these types of vehicles so that we don’t know where all of the money is coming from for these types of manipulative communications. And he was in charge of this campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, on that two-day-long debrief that I talked about — and if you want to know more, you can read about it in my book — they told us —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Wait, and explain where you were and who was in the room.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: So, I was in New York in our boardroom for Cambridge Analytica’s office on Fifth Avenue. And all of our offices from around the world had called in to videocast. And everybody from the super PAC and the Trump campaign took us through all of their tactics and strategies and implementation and what they had done.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, when we got to this Defeat Crooked Hillary super PAC, they explained to us what they had done, which was to run experiments on psychographic groups to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. <b>Unfortunately, what they found out was the only very successful tactic was sending fear-based, scaremongering messaging to people that were identified as being neurotic. And it was so successful in their first experiments that they spent the rest of the money from the super PAC over the rest of the campaign only on negative messaging and fearmongering.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And crooked, the O-O in “crooked” was handcuffs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Yes. That was designed by Cambridge Analytica’s team.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Karim?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KARIM AMER: And one thing that I think it’s important to remember here, because there’s been a lot of debate among some people about: Did this actually work? To what degree did it work? How do we know whether it worked or not? What Brittany is describing is a debrief meeting where Cambridge, as a company, is saying, “This is what we learned from our political experience. This is what actually worked.” OK? And they’re sharing it because they’re saying, “Now this is how we want to codify this and commoditize this to go into commercial business.” Right?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>So this is the company admitting to their own know-how. There is no debate about whether it works or not. This is not them advertising it to the world. This is them saying, “This is what we’ve learned. Based off that, this is how we’re going to run our business.</b> This is how we’re going to invest in the expansion of this to sell this outside of politics.” The game was, take the political experience, parlay it into the commercial sector. That was the strategy. So, there is no debate whether it worked or not. It was highly effective.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the thing that’s terrifying is that while Cambridge has been disbanded, the same actors are out there. And there’s nothing has been — nothing has changed to allow us to start putting in place legislation to say there is something called information crimes. In this era of information warfare, in this era of information economies, what is an information crime? What does it look like? Who determines it? And yet, without that, <b>we are still living in this unfiltered, unregulated space, where places like Facebook are continuing to choose profit over the protection of the republic. And I think that’s what’s so outrageous.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: And I think it’s pretty telling that only two people —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Jehane.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: Only two people have come forward from Cambridge Analytica. Why is that? Both of the people that have come forward, Brittany and Chris, and also with Carole’s writing, have been targeted personally. And it’s been a very, very difficult story to tell. Even with us, when we released the film in January, every single time we have entered into the country, we have been stopped for four to six hours of questioning at the border. That —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Stopped by?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: Stopped by — on the border of the U.S., in JFK Airport, where you’re taken into the back, asked for all of your social media handles, questioned for four to six hours, every single time we enter the country. So —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Since when?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: Since we released the film, so since Sundance, since January, every time we’ve come back into the U.S.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And on what grounds are they saying they’re stopping you?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: No explanation. No —</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: And what is your theory?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JEHANE NOUJAIM: My theory is that it’s got something to do with this film. Maybe we’re doing something right. We were at first — we’ve been stopped in Egypt, but we’ve never been stopped in the U.S. in this way. We’re American citizens. Right?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: You talk about people coming forward and not coming forward. I wanted to turn to <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">former Cambridge Analytica COO, the chief operating officer, </span><b>Julian Wheatland, speaking on the podcast Recode Decode.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">JULIAN WHEATLAND: The company made some significant mistakes when it came to its use of data. They were ethical mistakes. And I think that part of the reason that that happened was that we spent a lot of time concentrating on not making regulatory mistakes. And so, for the most part, we didn’t, as far as I can tell, make any regulatory mistakes, but we got almost distracted by ticking those boxes of fulfilling the regulatory requirements. And it felt like, well, once that was done, then we’d done what we needed to do. And we forgot to pause and think about ethically what was — what was going on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could decode that, Brittany? Cambridge Analytica COO Julian Wheatland, who, interestingly, in The Great Hack, while he was — really condemned Chris Wylie, did not appreciate Chris Wylie stepping forward and putting Cambridge Analytica in the crosshairs in the British Parliament, he was more equivocal about you. He — talk about Wheatland and his role and what he’s saying about actually abiding by the regulations, which they actually clearly didn’t.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: Once upon a time, I used to have a lot of respect for Julian Wheatland. I even thought we were friends. I thought we were building a billion-dollar company together that was going to allow me to do great things in the world. But, unfortunately, that’s a story that I told myself and a story he wanted me to believe that isn’t true at all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While he likes to say that they spent a lot of time abiding by regulations, I would beg to differ. Cambridge Analytica did not even have a data protection officer until 2018, right before they shut down. I begged for one for many years. I begged for more time with our lawyers and was told I was creating too many invoices. And for a long time, because I had multiple law degrees, I was asked to write contracts. And so were other </span>—</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t you write the Trump campaign contract?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BRITTANY KAISER: The original one, yes, I did. And there were many other people that were trained in human rights law in the company that were asked to draft contracts, even though contract law was not anybody’s specialty within the company. But they were trying to cut corners and save money, just like a lot of technology companies decide to do. They do not invest in making the ethical or legal decisions that will protect the people that are affected by these technologies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Next story from this daily show</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Weaponization of Data: Cambridge Analytica, Information Warfare & the 2016 Election of Trump</font></div>