Mindfuck

by Christopher Wylie

  Vote Leave did not even have the electoral register yet, so I told Cummings that I was extremely skeptical that he could develop data sets anywhere close to those used by Cambridge Analytica. And I continued to tell him that Steve Bannon was close with Nigel Farage, so the chances were high that Cambridge Analytica was already working with their rival pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU. Shortly after the meeting, Leave.EU officially announced its partnership with Cambridge Analytica, apparently spoiling Cummings’s plan. After the meeting, Parkinson invited Gettleson and me to come work for Vote Leave. As I had already accepted a project working for Justin Trudeau, I declined. But Gettleson, after initially flirting with the idea of joining me in Canada, decided to stay in London and work for Vote Leave, because he was not in a place for another dramatic change in his life like moving to a new country. As a courtesy, I nonetheless sent Cummings an email outlining how he could probably attempt a pilot of a few thousand voter surveys, but I estimated that that was about all they could accomplish in the exceptionally tight time frame of the referendum—well, at least all they could do legally.

  Just before I left for Ottawa, another friend of mine in London named Shahmir Sanni asked if I could help him find an internship. He and I had first connected on nights out in London, and we kept in touch over Facebook, frequently trading thoughts and opinions on politics, fashion, art, hot boys, and culture. Sanni had just finished university and was interested in politics, but he had no connections and needed an introduction. I asked him where he wanted to join, but he said party was not a concern; he was most interested in gaining experience. When I asked contacts in both the Remain and Leave campaigns about internships, only one responded: Stephen Parkinson. Parkinson asked who I wanted to introduce, so I texted him Sanni’s Instagram profile. Parkinson, clearly enamored with Sanni’s well-curated photos, texted back just two words: “YES PLEASE!!!!!” And that’s how Sanni—who would eventually become one of two Brexit whistleblowers—signed on to the Vote Leave campaign.

  Pro-Brexit leaders knew that they weren’t going to win the vote by speaking only to traditional right-wing Brexiteers, so Vote Leave made it a priority to bring in a more diverse coalition of support. In British politics, referendum campaigns are unique in that they tend to make a concerted effort to be as cross-party as possible, because issues, not parties, are on the ballot. No one “wins power” at the end of a referendum; only the idea wins, and the government of the day has a choice whether or not to implement the result. Cummings and Parkinson understood that the key to a Brexit victory was to identify Labour and Lib Dem voters, as well as those who didn’t normally vote, and persuade them to either vote Leave or stay neutral. It was for this reason that the pro-Brexit side was extremely eager to recruit Lib Dems, Greens, Labour, LGBTQ, immigrants—as many traditionally non-Conservative voters as possible. Sanni was the perfect man to help with that mission.

  One of the most compelling progressive arguments for Brexit was pretty simple. It was that the European Union tended to favor European—i.e., white—immigrants over those from the Commonwealth nations, who were predominantly people of color. Under EU rules, migrants to Britain from countries like France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Austria did not need a visa to work and live in Britain. But migrants from, say, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, or Jamaica were required to undergo extensive screening and difficult immigration procedures. Yet for hundreds of years, Britain had built its vast empire predominantly by using the labor of people of color throughout the Commonwealth, conquering their lands, taking their resources, and leaving them to struggle at home while the great cities of Britain flourished in the wealth created from abroad. In both world wars, when British freedom was threatened by other European nations, the citizens of the Commonwealth were called to arms to fight for Britain. Few, if any, major war films have been made to honor their sacrifice, but many of the great British victories were in fact won with the spilled blood of Commonwealth soldiers from India, the Caribbean, and Africa. Then, decades later, when Europe looked more economically promising than the fledgling countries emerging out of colonial rule, Britain turned its back on these nations, closed off its borders, and implemented tough new immigration rules for Commonwealth citizens. At the same time, Britain began opening up nearly unrestricted immigration to European citizens, who were overwhelmingly white.

  It was out of this sense of deep unfairness that many people of color—people like Sanni’s friends and family, who were from Pakistan—had no affinity for the EU: They knew what it felt like to have to endure a Kafkaesque immigration system requiring them to prove every ounce of their worth. They knew what it felt like to live in a country that had exploited their ancestors to build itself up but now sent Home Office trucks roving through the neighborhoods of Indian and Pakistani communities, emblazoned with warnings like HERE ILLEGALLY? GO HOME OR FACE ARREST. TEXT HOME TO 78070. Meanwhile, a German or Italian, whose grandfather may very well have taken deadly aim on those battalions of Indians and Nigerians that Britain called into battle, could enter Britain with no questions asked, and then get busy applying for jobs.

  As the Remain campaign paraded around its “pro-immigration” messages to defend the EU, what many people of color saw was the tacit whiteness of that very message—that it really meant rights for some immigrants. For people like Sanni, Brexit was a story of marginalization and of Britain’s unaddressed legacy of colonialism—an attempt to right the wrong of denying immigrants and people of color access to the very country that had plundered them for centuries. And it was by identifying this bubbling resentment that the pro-Brexit movement managed to create a counterintuitive alliance between some sections of immigrant communities and cohorts of jingoist Brexiteers who wanted them all to “go home.”

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  PARKINSON GAVE SANNI AN unpaid internship. He started in the spring of 2016 as a volunteer. Because the outreach team was so small, his duties quickly multiplied. Much of his work was focused on minority and queer communities. He would visit impoverished neighborhoods to ask residents how they were planning to vote and why.

  On Sanni’s first day at the office, he noticed a dandy in a green blazer and pink pants: Mark Gettleson, in his full homosexual plumage. Right away, Sanni and Gettleson started joking about being the odd men out in this sea of conservative white men. Gettleson had joined Vote Leave as a consultant in the spring of 2016, impressing the staff with his wit, intelligence, and intuitive understanding of British liberals. He immediately began setting up the websites for several of the outreach groups, many of which he branded and named himself—Green Leaves, Out and Proud, and others. When Darren Grimes, the twenty-two-year-old fashion student I knew from the Lib Dems, joined the team, he and Gettleson started conceptualizing a progressive arm of Vote Leave, to be called BeLeave.

  I was in Canada by then, but we all kept in touch via Facebook. In the course of designing the branding for BeLeave, Grimes sent me his idea sheet via Messenger. Even though I was preoccupied with setting up projects for the new Liberal government in Ottawa, I wanted to give him a hand after the rough time he’d had with the Lib Dems. One of his challenges was in choosing the right colors. The official color for Vote Leave was red, so they needed something different. I said, “Why not use the Pantone colors of the year?”—which in 2016 happened to be Serenity blue and Rose Quartz pink. Darren did a mock-up, and I messaged back, “It looks so gay and millennial. Not fascist at all.”

  BeLeave attempted to appeal to the softer side of the pro-Brexit vote by focusing on issues such as parity in treatment for immigrants, ending what they termed “passport discrimination” between EU and non-EU citizens, the unfair impact protectionist EU policies had on African farmers, and environmental protections. After Parkinson asked Sanni to shift his attention from minority outreach to BeLeave, he and Grimes—a pair of interns in their early twenties—essentially ran the initiative, with occasional input from the senior staff a
t Vote Leave. With the hardcore anti-immigration votes already in the bag, the Leave side needed to secure only a small percentage of more liberal-minded voters to win. Data was the key to targeting those voters.

  Vote Leave didn’t have the data it needed, though, and the one company that could provide it, Cambridge Analytica, was not an option because it was already working with Leave.EU. If Vote Leave worked with Cambridge Analytica, it would run afoul of laws restricting coordination between the campaigns. What they did, I learned later, was hire a firm whose origins intersected with my early days at SCL, when I was just starting to put together a technical team.

  This was back in August 2013, when I was looking for people who could help. I recalled my time at the LPC and the mentorship of Jeff Silvester, who had taken an interest in me while I was still in school. Silvester, a computer software engineer by training, had developed a solid understanding of enterprise data systems long before he started advocating for a new data strategy at the LPC. A big guy with a beard—he reminded me of Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation—Silvester was unfailingly considerate and thoughtful, but he also had the dry and cynical sense of humor of someone who had spent years in politics. He lived outside of Victoria, British Columbia, and on weekends he helped mentor young people as leader of a local Boy Scout troop. My first few months working with Silvester as an intern involved helping him on casework for refugee and political asylum claims, and he showed me how you can really make a difference in people’s lives. He was one of the most honorable people I knew.

  Shortly after joining SCL, I wrote to Silvester, describing the firm’s portfolio—not just psychological warfare projects for NATO, but efforts to fight HIV in Africa. He quickly replied: “You need a Canadian office!” When the Trinidad project came up, he got his wish. SCL needed someone to help build and manage data infrastructure, and Silvester had exactly the right background. Silvester poached another Canadian political operative, Zack Massingham, a veteran of the rough world of B.C. provincial politics, to lead project management for the new company, which he called AIQ. The company was registered in Canada and was legally called AggregateIQ, but it signed an intellectual property agreement that granted SCL the rights to its work. SCL and, later, Cambridge Analytica frequently took advantage of a network of offshore companies registered under different names. Similar to the strategies employed by tax avoidance schemes, this network of companies around the world helped Cambridge Analytica bypass the scrutiny of electoral or data privacy regulators.

  AIQ’s headquarters was a brick building on Pandora Avenue, only a block from the ocean in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. SCL and CA employees loved to visit the office—it was scenic, breezy, and relaxed compared with the frenetic pace of London. As AIQ grew, the firm recruited a fantastic and diverse team of engineers to work on SCL projects.

  AIQ’s Trinidad contract with SCL included building infrastructure for Facebook data harvesting, clickstream data, ISP logs, and the reconciliation of IPs and user agents to home addresses, which would help de-anonymize Internet browsing data. As SCL grew into Cambridge Analytica, AIQ became an indispensable part of the back-end technical engineering team. Once it was decided that CA’s models would have to be loaded into a platform that could launch social and digital ad targeting, AIQ was tasked with constructing Ripon, CA’s ad-targeting platform. After Kogan harvested the Facebook data, it was passed on to AIQ for loading into the Ripon platform, which allowed a user to segment universes of voters according to hundreds of different psychometric and behavioral factors. During the 2016 U.S. primaries, AIQ staff members would travel south to Texas to build out infrastructure for Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign.

  When Brittany Kaiser and Sam Patten joined Cambridge Analytica and took over the Nigeria project, AIQ was brought on to distribute CA’s voter suppression and intimidation propaganda. After uploading videos of women being burned alive and men choking on their own blood as they had their throats cut, AIQ sought to target the content at regions and voter profiles that CA gave them. In 2015, when I found out that Silvester was working on this project, it felt truly bizarre: My onetime mentor was not at all the sort of person who would blithely disseminate videos of torture victims. Years later, I would meet up with Silvester and ask him about Nigeria. Unless you count uncomfortable laughter, he showed no remorse. Somehow he had made peace with the mayhem his company had spewed out into the world as a Cambridge Analytica contractor.

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  ON THE AFTERNOON OF June 16, 2016, a pro-Remain Labour MP named Jo Cox was walking to the library in the small town of Birstall, West Yorkshire. She was heading to her fortnightly “surgery,” a British tradition wherein MPs regularly host open meetings with constituents who need help with casework or want to raise an issue. But when Cox was just steps from the library door, a man wearing a baseball cap walked toward her, raised a sawed-off shotgun, shouted “Britain first!” and shot her point-blank. The man then dragged the forty-one-year-old Cox between two parked cars and began stabbing her, flailing his knife at shocked onlookers who tried to stop him. He continued to yell “Britain first! This is for Britain!” throughout the attack, which finally ended when he reloaded his gun and shot Cox in the head. Cox, the mother of two young children, lay dying on the pavement.

  The assassination of Jo Cox sent waves of genuine shock throughout Britain, where gun violence is far less common than in the United States. Fellow MPs gathered for a vigil on Parliament Square, where flowers left by mourners formed a makeshift memorial. It soon emerged that the killer was a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer, which only served to heighten the emotional tension between Leave and Remain supporters. In an attempt to calm the storm, and in tribute to Cox, the Leave and Remain campaigns agreed to stop all campaign activities for three days, an extraordinary decision with only a week remaining until the vote. However, AIQ secretly continued deploying digital advertisements for Vote Leave, knowing that the British media would not be able to tell whether they were continuing online ads. It seemed that, after distributing videos in Nigeria of people being tortured and killed, a bit of extra digital campaigning during a period of public mourning for a murdered MP was not beneath them.

  By this time, the political climate in Britain had become extremely toxic. Threats were being sent to both Remain- and Leave-supporting MPs (mostly to the Remain side), there was a disproportionate increase in race-based violence, and social media was blowing up every day. No one was passive or nonchalant about what was going on in British politics anymore. People were awake and people were angry. Very angry.

  A lot of the messaging from the Leave side during this time was targeted toward “metropolitan elites,” as the politicians called them, as well as people of color and European migrants. Vote Leave eschewed responsibility, but it was apparent that they had left the race-baiting to Leave.EU, which gladly (and proudly) took up the cause. A few days before Jo Cox was murdered, Leave.EU’s Farage unveiled a campaign poster showing a caravan of brown-skinned migrants beneath the words BREAKING POINT. The move drew comparisons to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s showing lines of Jewish people flooding into Europe.

  As I sat in Canada watching the drama unfold, I told myself that Vote Leave was not the same as Leave.EU, as many of my friends were working for Vote Leave. Farage’s campaign is the racist one using Cambridge Analytica, I thought. Vote Leave couldn’t possibly be pandering to that kind of rhetoric. I was wrong.

  By the final weeks of the campaign, Vote Leave had spent nearly all of its allotted £7 million. British law barred it from accepting any more funds or collaborating with other campaigns, but Cummings wanted to keep spending and decided to find another way. AIQ had been receiving the bulk of Vote Leave’s ad spending, and Cummings was extremely impressed with the power of AIQ’s digital targeting capabilities. AIQ was able to target, engage, and enrage specific voters. Many of AIQ’s targets were infrequent voters, so even though pub
lic polls had Remain ahead, this meant AIQ was engaging new niches of the electorate who were systemically excluded from traditional campaigning and by polling firms. But AIQ realized that if it was to sustain its momentum, it would need more money than Vote Leave was legally allowed to spend—and it needed it fast. So attention turned to the BeLeave project. Until that point, BeLeave had been a totally organic operation run by a couple of interns in the Vote Leave office. There were no paid ads, and all the creative content was being developed by Sanni and Grimes in their spare time. Vote Leave would provide guidance and money for certain things, but only very small amounts—£100 here and there.

  Around the same time, Parkinson began inviting Sanni to stay after hours with him in his house because he knew that Sanni was based in Birmingham, U.K., and the two began a relationship. For Sanni, who was twenty-two and not yet out about his sexuality to his family, this was all very new and confusing. He did not know how to deal with this intimate situation he now found himself in with his boss. But he was in awe of receiving so much attention and guidance from a senior political adviser who worked at the top echelons of the British government. Parkinson would take Sanni out and tell him how pleased he was with his work, and that if he kept it up there might be a future career in it for him. Sanni agreed to keep the affair secret.