: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower / about Cambridge Analytica

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Kimi Wei <kimi () thewei com>
> Date: March 18, 2018 at 8:09:30 AM EDT
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower / about Cambridge 
> Analytica
>
> Long but fascinating article ~ Kimi
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
>
> by Carole Cadwalladr   Sun 18 Mar 2018
>
> The Cambridge Analytica Files
>
> ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
>
> For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the 
> UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss 
> his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate
>
> The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind 
> time. To put the genie back in the bottle.
>
> By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, 
> he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A 
> data science nerd.
>
> Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was 
> impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has 
> done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a 
> consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge 
> Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership 
> referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.
>
> Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological 
> warfare mindfuck tool”.
>
> In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And 
> Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And 
> the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – 
> “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.
>
> It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my 
> source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The great British Brexit robbery”, which set out a skein of 
> threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence 
> behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, 
> indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.
>
>
> By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won 
> contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s 
> insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they 
> want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”
>
> He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in 
> the months following publication of my article in May, it was revealed that the company had “reached out” to 
> WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of 
> special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election.
>
>
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> The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and 
> Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to 
> create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, 
> worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it 
> became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.
>
> Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend 
> forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use 
> their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target 
> them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.
>
> “We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.
>
> And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.
>
> “Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.
>
> He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”
>
> Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake 
> news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official 
> Hansard extract reads:
>
> Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of 
> its associated companies?”
>
> Simon Milner: “No.”
>
> Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”
>
> Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are 
> on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”
>
> Alexander Nix
> Facebook Twitter Pinterest
> Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica CEO. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
> Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked 
> Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work 
> with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”
>
> And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and 
> researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. 
> In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, 
> between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of 
> all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data 
> illegitimately.
>
> Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. 
> He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer.
>
> It’s taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where it’s possible for him to finally come 
> forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic – 
> Robert Mueller’s in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s 
> Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after the Observer’s first article in this investigation.
>
> It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind – to undo events that he set in motion. 
> Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National 
> Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold.
>
> There are many points where this story could begin. One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal 
> Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most 
> aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible.
>
> Profile
> Cambridge Analytica: the key players
>
> Show
> Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 
> without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 
> 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada 
> for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the 
> London School of Economics.
>
> “Politics is like the mob, though,” he says. “You never really leave. I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to 
> upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree.”
>
> Politics is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he 
> discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and 
> within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition.
>
> It showed these odd patterns. People who liked 'I hate Israel' on Facebook also tended to like KitKats
> “He’s one of the brightest people you will ever meet,” a senior politician who’s known Wylie since he was 20 told me. 
> “Sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes a curse.”
>
> Meanwhile, at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, two psychologists, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, 
> were experimenting with a way of studying personality – by quantifying it.
>
> Starting in 2007, Stillwell, while a student, had devised various apps for Facebook, one of which, a personality quiz 
> called myPersonality, had gone viral. Users were scored on “big five” personality traits – Openness, 
> Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – and in exchange, 40% of them consented to give him 
> access to their Facebook profiles. Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population 
> and correlating scores against Facebook “likes” across millions of people.
>
> An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test.
> Facebook Twitter Pinterest  Examples, above and below, of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling 
> test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans?
> The research was original, groundbreaking and had obvious possibilities. “They had a lot of approaches from the 
> security services,” a member of the centre told me. “There was one called You Are What You Like and it was 
> demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked ‘I 
> hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.
>
> “There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. 
> That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.”
>
> The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research. Boeing, a major US 
> defence contractor, funded Kosinski’s PhD and Darpa, the US government’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects 
> Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski’s work.
>
> But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including Wylie. He had 
> finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the Lib Dems. It is fair 
> to say that he didn’t have a clue what he was walking into.
>
> An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important 
> should this message be to all Americans?
> A visual message test from the app thisismydigitallife. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be 
> to all Americans?
> “I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 
> 19th century,” Wylie explains. “And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem 
> voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there 
> were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data.
>
> “And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it 
> suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib 
> Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And 
> it just clicked all of a sudden.”
>
> Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems weren’t 
> interested.
>
> “I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: ‘Why are you 
> so pessimistic?’ They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI.”
>
> Another Lib Dem connection introduced Wylie to a company called SCL Group, one of whose subsidiaries, SCL Elections, 
> would go on to create Cambridge Analytica (an incorporated venture between SCL Elections and Robert Mercer, funded by 
> the latter). For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same.
>
> Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total 
> freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’”
>
> An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important 
> should this message be to all Americans?
> In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL 
> group, a private contractor that has both defence and elections operations. Its defence arm was a contractor to the 
> UK’s Ministry of Defence and the US’s Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in “psychological 
> operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set 
> of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.
>
> SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped 
> democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves.
>
> Wylie holds a British Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa – a UK work visa given to just 200 people a year. He was working 
> inside government (with the Lib Dems) as a political strategist with advanced data science skills. But no one, least 
> of all him, could have predicted what came next. When he turned up at SCL’s offices in Mayfair, he had no clue that 
> he was walking into the middle of a nexus of defence and intelligence projects, private contractors and cutting-edge 
> cyberweaponry.
>
> “The thing I think about all the time is, what if I’d taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just 
> think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist. You have no idea how much I brood on 
> this.”
>
> A few months later, in autumn 2013, Wylie met Steve Bannon. At the time, he was editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which 
> he had brought to Britain to support his friend Nigel Farage in his mission to take Britain out of the European Union.
>
> What was he like?
>
> “Smart,” says Wylie. “Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about 
> intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white 
> men feel.”
>
> Wylie meeting Bannon was the moment petrol was poured on a flickering flame. Wylie lives for ideas. He speaks 19 to 
> the dozen for hours at a time. He had a theory to prove. And at the time, this was a purely intellectual problem. 
> Politics was like fashion, he told Bannon.
>
> If you do not respect the agency of people, anything you do after that point is not conducive to democracy
> Christopher Wylie
> “[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from 
> culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is 
> like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment 
> when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”
>
> But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information 
> operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional 
> battle space”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group – the British government has paid SCL to conduct 
> counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in 
> Afghanistan.
>
> I tell him that another former employee described the firm as “MI6 for hire”, and I’d never quite understood it.
>
> “It’s like dirty MI6 because you’re not constrained. There’s no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It’s 
> normal for a ‘market research company’ to amass data on domestic populations. And if you’re working in some country 
> and there’s an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that’s just a bonus.”
>
> When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though it’s one he can back up 
> with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert 
> for the US air force on a plane. “And the cyberwarfare guy is like, ‘Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare 
> for elections.’”
> <snip>
>
>
>
> Kimi Wei
> kimi () thewei com  @kimiwei
> facebook.com/thekimiwei
> 862-203-8814



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