A shadowy operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign heavily influenced the result of the EU referendum. Is our electoral process still fit for purpose?
The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims. The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty. Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016
It’s not MI6s job to warn of internal threats. It was a very strange speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a shot across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa Mays government? Does she know something she’s not telling us? Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017
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In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where shed previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.
That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.
Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning hearts and minds. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.
Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.
On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCLs chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. She said, “You really need to get into data.” She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.
Who’s her father?
Eric Schmidt.
Eric Schmidt the chairman of Google?
Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company called Palantir.
I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.
In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an introduction to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched.
A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley mega firm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley Google and Facebook and a small handful of others are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.
It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administrations links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade – in a radical and alarming way – by Trump.
There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.
My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with did the holocaust happen. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.
Googles algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire alt-right news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.
He called the company a central point in the rights propaganda machine, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and right-wing propaganda.
Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to help the Leave campaign.
The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: one by the Information Commissioners Office into the possible illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is focused on whether one or more donations including services accepted by Leave.EU was impermissible.
What I then discovered is that Mercers role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass our electoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.
It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend 3.9m, more than half its official 7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further 757,750. Coordination between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission looked into this and gave it a clean bill of health.
How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at Kings College London has been asking too. I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.
Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that concluded UKs electoral laws were weak and helpless in the face of new forms of digital campaigning. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose. Laws, the report said, that needed urgently reviewing by parliament.
AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: SCL Canada. A day later, that online reference vanished.
There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. But everyone AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term contractor to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.
Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found wed turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.
He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. Find Chris Wylie, he said.
Who’s Chris Wylie?
He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.
There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercers distributed empire. The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.
I did find Chris Wylie. He refused to comment.
Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from Director of Defence Operations, SCL Group, that helped me realise this. It’s from Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd) complaining about my use in my Mercer article of the word disinformation.
I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d written to deception and propaganda, which I said I understood to be roughly synonymous with disinformation. Its only later that it strikes me how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.
What’s been lost in the US coverage of this data analytics firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.
Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and NATO.
SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. Its effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.
This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where its coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.
Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. It brought psychology, propaganda and technology together in this powerful new way, David tells me.