It’s eye-opening to summarize what was going on over those final months of my tenure. Our research was being seeded with questions about Putin and Russia. The head psychologist who had access to Facebook data was also working for a Russian-funded project in St. Petersburg, giving presentations in Russian and describing Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to build a psychological profiling database of American voters. We had Palantir executives coming in and out of the office. We had a major Russian company with ties to the FSB probing for information about our American data assets. We had Nix giving the Russians a presentation about how good we were at spreading fake news and rumors. And then there were the internal memos outlining how Cambridge Analytica was developing new hacking capacity in concert with former Russian intelligence officers.
In the year after Steve Bannon became vice president, Cambridge Analytica started deploying tactics that eerily foreshadowed what was still to come in the 2016 American presidential election. To get access to their opponent’s emails, Cambridge Analytica made use of hackers, some of whom may have been Russian, according to internal documents. The hacked emails CA procured were then used to undermine their opponent, including a concerted effort to leak rumors about the opposing candidate’s health. And this stolen kompromat was then combined with widespread online disinformation targeting social media networks. The overlap in events could be entirely coincidental, but many of the personnel who worked on Nigeria also worked on CA’s American operations. One year after Nigeria, Brittany Kaiser was appointed director of operations of the Brexit campaign Leave.EU, and Sam Patten would later go on to work with Paul Manafort on the Trump campaign. In 2018, Patten was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller and later pled guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent. His business partner, Kilimnik, was also indicted but avoided prosecution by staying in Russia. It wasn’t until later, after Patten was revealed to be associated with suspected Russian intelligence operatives, that I wondered again about those bizarre research projects on Vladimir Putin and Crimea.
Patten also ran research in Oregon, which included an extensive amount of questioning about attitudes toward Russian foreign policy and Putin’s leadership. Why would Russia care how Oregonians felt about Vladimir Putin? Because once CA modeled people’s responses to the questions, the database could identify cohorts of Americans who held pro-Russian views. The Russian government has its own domestic propaganda channels, but one of its global strategies is to cultivate pro-Russia assets in other countries. If you’re interested in spreading your narratives digitally, it’s helpful to have a roster of people to target who are more likely to support your country’s worldview. Using the Internet to cultivate local populations with Russian propaganda was an elegant way to bypass all Western notions of “national security.” In most Western countries, citizens have free speech rights—including the right to agree with a hostile nation’s propaganda. This right serves as a magical force field for online propaganda. U.S. intelligence agencies cannot stop an American citizen from freely expressing political speech, even if the speech was cultivated by a Russian operation. Intelligence agencies can work only on preemptive actions to block weaponized narratives from an American social network.
Russia has always been contemptuous of America’s approach to free speech and democracy in general. When Russian leaders look at America’s history of mass movements and protests, they see nothing but chaos and social disorder. When they look at U.S. courts citing civil rights to permit gay marriage, they see Western decadence leading America into weakness and moral decline. To Moscow, civil rights and the First Amendment are the American political system’s most glaring vulnerabilities. And so the Russian state sought to exploit this vulnerability—to hack American democracy. It would work, they decided, because American democracy is an inherently flawed system. The Russians created their self-fulfilling prophecy of social chaos by targeting and domesticating their propaganda to American citizens of similar worldviews, who would then click, like, and share. These narratives spread through a system of constitutionally protected free speech, and the U.S. government did nothing to stop them. Neither did Facebook.
Was Cambridge Analytica involved in Russian disinformation efforts in the United States? No one can say for sure, and there’s no single “smoking gun” proving that Cambridge Analytica was the culprit, aided and abetted by Russia. But I’ve always hated the expression “smoking gun,” because it means nothing to an actual investigator. Instead, investigators compile small pieces of information—a fingerprint, a saliva sample, tire tracks, a strand of hair. In this case, Sam Patten worked for CA after working on pro-Russian campaigns in Ukraine; CA tested American attitudes toward Vladimir Putin; SCL’s work for NATO made it a Russian intel target; Brittany Kaiser used to consult for Julian Assange’s legal team; the head psychologist who was collecting Facebook data for CA was making trips to Russia to present lectures about social media profiling, one of which was titled “New Methods of Communication as an Effective Political Instrument”; CA systems were accessed by IP addresses that resolved to Russia and other CIS countries; memos referenced ex–Russian security services; and we have Alexander Nix telling Lukoil about Cambridge Analytica’s U.S. data sets and disinformation capacity.
When I had lunch with Nix to tell him I was quitting, he was clear about how he thought things would play out. “The next time you see me,” he said, “I will be at the White House. And you will be nowhere.” As it turned out, he wasn’t that far off. When I next saw Alexander Nix, nearly four years after I told him I was quitting, he was in the British Parliament, answering questions about lies he had told in a parliamentary inquiry. His reputation was being eviscerated before my eyes, but, characteristically, he didn’t seem to realize it—or maybe he just didn’t care. When he saw me sitting in the gallery, he simply winked.
CHAPTER 9
CRIMES AGAINST DEMOCRACY
-
In January 2016, I decided to accept an offer to consult for the Liberal Caucus Research Bureau (LRB), based at the Canadian Parliament. Justin Trudeau had just formed a new government after leading the Liberal Party to a huge victory in the October 2015 federal election. One of the planks of the Trudeau election platform was reinstating the census, which had been abolished by the previous Conservative government, and reinvigorating Canadian social programs with more data-informed policy making. Just after his victory, I was asked by some of my former Liberal colleagues if I was interested in working on Trudeau’s new research and insight team, with a focus on technology and innovation.
After several exceptionally frustrating years, first with the Liberal Democrats in the U.K.’s coalition government and then with Cambridge Analytica, I was desperate to find something to do where I knew I would be contributing something good to the world. It would mean that I would have to return to Canada, but I negotiated an arrangement whereby I would not have to stay in Ottawa, save for important meetings. Having been away from Canada for over five years, I did not have that many friends in the country, but I was reeling from the trauma of everything that had happened, so I thought some calmer downtime back home would help me recover.
When I first arrived in Ottawa for my preliminary meetings and induction, I was flooded with memories of my younger years at Parliament, trying to get VAN set up. This place had been the setting of my formative adventures working for the leader of the opposition, and now I was back to close a chapter of my life that had started when I was a teenager. Ottawa was the same dull city I had left years before, but, coming from London, it was now even more acutely monotonous. In true Canadian fashion, Ottawa was like an even blander version of Washington, D.C.—the Diet Coke of capital cities.
The home of the government’s political research unit, at 131 Queen Street, was no less bland than the rest of Ottawa, with a vibe somewhere between space station and purgatory. Navigating the building’s windowless halls and undecorated beige rooms, I soaked in its
bureaucratic aesthetic, occasionally passing reception desks with little blue ENGLISH/FRANÇAIS signs, reminding passersby that in Canada we also parlons français. My job description promised steady boredom—basic technical setup, polling advice, social media monitoring, some simple machine learning work and research on innovation policy. Nothing spectacular and, ironically, nothing very innovative came out of it, but I was okay with that, as I wasn’t obligated to actually stay in Ottawa. I could quickly flee the LRB office in Ottawa and work on projects around Canada, which would keep me sane.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, had announced a referendum on the country’s future—whether it would continue to be a member of the European Union or strike out on its own. Ever since the U.K. joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1972, Euroskeptics had been agitating for withdrawal. Initially, the left wing led the movement, with many Labour politicians and trade unionists agreeing that a bloc-style pact would harm their socialist dreams. But most of their countrymen welcomed the arrangement. When a referendum in 1975 asked the British public if they wanted to stay within the European Economic Community, the vote was 67 percent in favor.
By the time the EEC became the European Union, the left and the right were largely in agreement on the benefits of membership. But in the early 1990s, the right-wing U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) emerged out of a growing resistance to European priorities. In 1997, Nigel Farage, a former commodities trader and founding UKIP member, ousted the leader of the party. Farage became leader in 2006, and under his leadership, UKIP began stoking virulent anti-immigration sentiment among working-class whites and tapping into nostalgia for Britain’s imperial past in wealthy white communities. The world had been transformed by the September 11 attacks, the rise of Islamophobia, and the conflicts of the Bush and Blair years. As the fate of black and brown refugees developed into a European crisis, Cameron moved to appease nationalist sentiment to retain right-wing voters. The Conservative Party drew up a plan for a referendum, to be held before the end of 2017. The date was set for June 23, 2016.
* * *
—
REFERENDUMS IN BRITAIN ARE largely publicly financed, where each side of the ballot question receives equal amounts of public funding after the U.K.’s Electoral Commission designates one campaign group on each side to become the official campaign. British electoral law also sets strict spending limits, applied equally to both sides, to ensure that one side is not unfairly advantaged by more money than the other. In effect, these are Britain’s electoral equivalent of Olympic anti-doping rules that ensure a fair race. Having more resources means being able to reach a disproportionate number of voters with one’s messaging, so the resources are regulated to maintain a fair election. Other groups are still allowed to campaign, but they do not receive public funding and they may not coordinate their campaigns without declaring the spending against the official limit.
Politicians and campaigners had until April 13, 2016, to win designation as the official campaign for Leave or Remain. Vote Leave and Leave.EU were among the main Leave campaigns. Britain Stronger in Europe was the official campaign for Remain from the start, with specialist initiatives such as “Scientists for EU” and “Conservatives In” also campaigning to remain in the union. Vote Leave consisted largely of Conservatives, with a handful of Euroskeptic progressives. The other pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, was focused almost entirely on immigration, with many of its campaigners peddling racist tropes and far-right talking points in order to rile up the public. Each group had its own targets and ideological strategies, and, according to British law, they could not work together in any fashion. Eventually, Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe were granted official campaign status by the Electoral Commission. But the two main Leave groups set themselves up to push different buttons among potential supporters—a tactic that was spectacularly effective in generating votes.
College-educated city dwellers, accustomed to living among immigrants and working in businesses that benefit from their skilled labor, rejected right-wing fearmongering and generally supported Remain. Lower-income Britons and those who lived in rural areas or old industrial heartlands were much more likely to support Leave. National sovereignty has always been a core part of British identity, and the Leave campaign argued that EU membership was undermining that sovereignty. Remain supporters countered by pointing to economic, trade, and national security benefits in the status quo.
Vote Leave was led in public by the campaign’s lead spokesperson, Boris Johnson, a pompous man who was once mayor of London and was always a Conservative favorite, with some of the highest approval ratings among Conservative voters, and Michael Gove, who could be characterized as Johnson’s opposite. Lacking Johnson’s pomposity, Gove was more measured and was a favorite among the free-market-type libertarians in the U.K. Their slogan, “Vote Leave, Take Back Control,” was laughed at by Remain camps, but it was not really about the EU itself. It was meant to appeal to voters who otherwise felt their lives were not in their control—their lack of job prospects or an education meant that their lives, more than anyone else’s, were more susceptible to the winds of a bad economy and a British society that systemically ignores them. Vote Leave had been co-founded in 2015 by Dominic Cummings, one of Westminster’s most infamous political strategists, and Matthew Elliott, founder of several right-wing lobbying groups in the U.K. Some in the Vote Leave office disagreed on politics, but they were united under Cummings’s leadership behind the scenes.
While Vote Leave operated from the seventh floor of Westminster Tower, on the banks of the River Thames, directly across from Parliament, Leave.EU was based more than a hundred miles away, in Lysander House, Bristol, overlooking a busy roundabout. The group shared an office building with Eldon Insurance, a firm run by millionaire Arron Banks, who also happened to be the co-founder and main funder of Leave.EU. The campaign launched during the summer of 2015 and teamed up with Cambridge Analytica in October of the year. The Euroskeptic Nigel Farage, a prominent right-wing politician, became the figurehead for Leave.EU. After Steve Bannon introduced Banks and Farage to the American billionaire Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica signed on to the Brexit campaign to service Leave.EU with its algorithms and digital targeting. It was announced that Brittany Kaiser would become Leave.EU’s new director of operations, with Kaiser and Banks launching Leave.EU together at a press conference.
Shortly before returning to Canada, I had drinks with a few of the people I’d gotten to know during my time in British politics. One of those was a special adviser to then–Home Secretary Theresa May, a gay Conservative named Stephen Parkinson. He was a Tory, but something I had learned over the years in politics is that it’s usually easier to be friends with people outside of your own party, because they aren’t in direct competition for your job and are less likely to try to screw you over personally. Parkinson told me he had just taken a leave of absence from the Home Office to work for Vote Leave—a newly created campaign group for Brexit. I wasn’t surprised that Parkinson was working on it, and I told him I knew a few other people who might be interested in joining his campaign.
One was a young student at the University of Brighton named Darren Grimes. I had originally met Grimes through the Liberal Democrats, but he had become disenchanted when the party began to implode in the internal leadership race that followed its decimation in the 2015 elections. When Grimes decided to leave the Lib Dems, he asked me for an introduction to the Tories, so I introduced him to Parkinson. You’ve probably never heard of Grimes, but he would later become an accidental central player in Vote Leave’s victory in the Brexit referendum.
Parkinson and I met several times before I left London, because he wanted to get my thoughts on data analytics. He did not say this at the time, but he knew about Cambridge Analytica and clocked how valuable such targeting tools would be for the Brexit campaign. He said that he wanted to introduce me to someone. �
��His name is Dom Cummings.” I flinched at the name.
Dom Cummings—not a porn name, though it would be a good one—had made a reputation at the Department for Education in the coalition government as a Machiavellian operator and a very difficult character. Cameron, the prime minister at the time, would later suggest that Cummings was a “career psychopath.” In keeping with his notoriety, Cummings went on to become the mastermind behind the largest breach of campaign finance law in British history, using some of the technologies developed at Cambridge Analytica to tilt the Brexit vote toward Leave. But I didn’t learn any of this until it was too late: at the time, he was just an abrasive, ambitious Conservative staffer who enjoyed irritating the shit out of everyone in the British political system.
Parkinson, Cummings, and I all sat down in a barren room in the future headquarters of Vote Leave to talk about voter targeting. The entire floor was being renovated and was covered in plastic sheeting, but, sitting along Albert Embankment, it had spectacular views of the Palace of Westminster, directly across the Thames. My first impression of Cummings was that he looked disheveled, as if he’d just climbed onto a lifeboat after the Titanic sank. Cummings has a very large head, and his hair tends to go all over the place, with wispy strands haphazardly crossing his balding pate. He looked a bit dazed, or maybe a bit blazed, like he was either stuck trying to solve a puzzle or had just dragged an epic joint—I could never quite tell.
To his credit, Cummings is one of the few smart people I have encountered working in the Augean stable of mediocrity that is British politics. What I liked about meeting Cummings was that we didn’t talk about what people in politics usually obsess about. Cummings understood that more people are busy watching the Kardashians or Pornhub than following the political scandal du jour on BBC Newsnight. Instead, Cummings wanted to talk about identity, about psychology, about history, and, indeed, about AI. And then he mentioned Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund set up by Robert Mercer. Cummings had obviously read up on Cambridge Analytica, and he asked a lot of questions about how the firm worked. He was interested in creating what he called “the Palantir of politics”—a term I shuddered at after hearing it used so often by Nix. I just rolled my eyes, thinking, Here we go again.
Mindfuck Page 19