Voters were noticing BeLeave’s work too. Some of the content that Sanni and Grimes had created went viral and even outperformed Vote Leave’s paid ads. BeLeave’s graphics focused on progressive issues such as the “tampon tax,” arguing that if Britons were out of the EU, they would not need twenty-seven other member states to agree to get rid of what was so obviously a misogynistic tax. It seemed that there was a clear market for BeLeave’s progressive, woke, and social-justice-oriented brand of Euroskepticism. Weeks before the June 23 referendum, Cleo Watson, who was head of outreach in Vote Leave, set up a meeting for Grimes and Sanni with a potential donor. The pair met the donor in the Vote Leave headquarters and made a proposal outlining how effective their posts were—their organic outreach was in some cases surpassing the impact of Vote Leave’s paid ads.
Grimes had sent me this presentation, asking my advice on how to optimize targeting online for Facebook and what his budget should be. I messaged him back, providing guidance on what metrics they should use and how they should pitch. It was a good presentation, but the donor ultimately decided against putting in any money. After the donor pulled out, one of Vote Leave’s senior directors approached the two young interns and told them that they had found a new way to get them money for BeLeave—but they would have to sign some paperwork first. After meeting with Vote Leave’s lawyers, Sanni and Grimes were instructed to set up as a separate campaign, open a bank account, and write a formal constitution. The Vote Leave lawyers drafted the new campaign’s articles of association and handed the interns paperwork to sign. What Sanni and Grimes did not realize was that it was not lawful for BeLeave to spend any more money because it was working so closely with Vote Leave. By saying that the BeLeave campaign was separate and could spend its own budget Vote Leave was putting these young interns at risk for any illegal campaign spending undertaken by this “separate” campaign. But the two interns were not told any of this, and they continued as before, working at the Vote Leave headquarters, attending Vote Leave events, and helping with leafleting.
The next week, Grimes and Sanni were told that the money Vote Leave promised them was finally coming through—and it was going to be more than they had asked for. In fact, it was going to be hundreds of thousands of pounds more. Vote Leave began organizing the transfer of £700,000 to BeLeave, in what would be the single largest expenditure of Vote Leave’s entire campaign. But Grimes and Sanni had to first agree to one condition. The problem for Vote Leave was that if the two were to receive the money as an “independent” campaign, they would be legally entitled to spend it however they liked. So Vote Leave told the two interns they would never actually see any of the money in their new bank account. Rather, Vote Leave would transfer the money to AIQ directly, and Grimes and Sanni would simply have to sign off on a set of AIQ invoices. Disappointed, Sanni asked if he could at least have his travel and food costs covered by some of these funds (he was treasurer and secretary), but he was told by his Vote Leave supervisor that that would not be possible. Grimes and Sanni had no idea that what they’d just agreed to was completely illegal. They had trusted the lawyers and advisers of Vote Leave, who consistently told them everything was in order.
What made that deception even worse was that Vote Leave’s lawyers put these interns’ names on the BeLeave documents, making Grimes personally liable for the legal fallout that eventually came. This was not an uncommon strategy in some of the dirtier schools of British campaigning, particularly among the Tories, who have been caught several times using the scheme: Senior campaign advisers not wanting to take on the personal risk of breaking election laws would find someone inexperienced, often an eager young volunteer, and nominate them as the campaign’s “agent,” which would make that person legally liable for the campaign. That way, if and when wrongdoing was uncovered, a fall guy was in place and the true perpetrators could walk off scot-free, continuing to enjoy their proximity to power while leaving behind the betrayed volunteers and broken lives.
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FINALLY, THE DAY OF the referendum arrived. On June 23, torrential rains continued to batter the south of England, and Londoners hurrying to vote ended up facing horrendous delays, with train stations closing and the tube shutting down in the evening due to flooding. Most of the Vote Leave team, including Grimes and Sanni, spent the day going to key Leave seats to get out the vote. Dover was the gateway to Europe for the U.K. by sea and by train, and the final stop for Britons before they entered the English Channel. The volunteers spent many hours in Dover knocking on doors in heavy, torrential rain. The front page of the right-wing tabloid The Sun had a single bold and familiar headline: BELEAVE IN BRITAIN.
I had no idea AIQ was involved in the Leave campaign until the night of the vote, when Parkinson texted me a photo of himself with Massingham inside the Vote Leave headquarters—grinning in front of fogged-up windows with the outline of Parliament lingering behind them. Weirdly, even though I had seen and spoken to Silvester several times since returning to Canada, he never once mentioned AIQ’s connection to the Leave campaigns. After the spending returns were released, it was revealed that AIQ had received 40 percent of Vote Leave’s budget—and hundreds of thousands of pounds more from the other pro-Brexit campaigns, including BeLeave.
Now I understood that this was how Cummings had gotten around the fact that Cambridge Analytica was already working with Leave.EU—he just used one of CA’s subsidiaries, based in a different country, with a name that no one knew. AIQ had Cambridge Analytica’s infrastructure, handled all of its data, and could perform all the same functions, but without the label. (Vote Leave denies that it had access to Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data.) Nobody had wanted to tell me because everyone knew that I had left Cambridge Analytica on such bad terms, as had many others. Silvester and Massingham chose to stay quiet because this was their biggest gig in politics. Silvester was perfectly comfortable talking about the shady work they had done in Africa or the Caribbean, but not about Brexit.
As someone who had worked on targeted campaigns, I knew that most of the content that the media was talking about was not what individuals and groups were actually seeing during the referendum. Almost instantly, I realized something deeply sinister was happening in Britain. Even so, 72 percent of voters cast ballots. For hours, the vote was too close to call, but in the end, Leave emerged victorious with 51.89 percent of the vote. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Vote Leave had appointed Thomas Borwick to become the chief technology officer of the campaign. Before joining Vote Leave, Borwick had worked with Alexander Nix and SCL running a number of data-harvesting projects in island nations across the Caribbean. (However, there is nothing to suggest that Borwick participated in any of SCL’s unlawful work in the region.) After the referendum, Borwick revealed that Vote Leave and AIQ had together disseminated more than a hundred different ads with 1,433 different messages to their target voters in the weeks leading up to the referendum. Cummings later revealed that these ads were viewed more than 169 million times, but only targeted at a narrow segment of a few million voters, which resulted in their newsfeeds being dominated by Vote Leave messaging.
The people of the United Kingdom were the targets of a scaled information operation deployed by AIQ, and the problem with Remain was that they completely failed to understand what they were up against. As Cambridge Analytica identified, provoking anger and indignation reduced the need for full rational explanations and would put voters into a more indiscriminately punitive mindset. CA found that not only did this anger immunize target voters to the notion that the economy would suffer, but some people would support the economy suffering if it meant that out-groups like metropolitan liberals or immigrants would suffer in the process—that, in effect, their vote would be used as a form of punishment.
This approach proved effective against Remain’s “Project Fear” messaging, which tried to focus voters on the potentially catastrophic economic risks of exiting
the European Union. In short, it is far harder to make angry people fearful. The “affect bias” arising out of anger mediates people’s estimation of negative outcomes, which is why angry people are more inclined to engage in risky behavior—the same is true whether they are voting or starting a bar fight. If you have ever been in a bar fight, you know that literally the worst way imaginable to make your opponent think twice about a rash move is to yell threats at him. It only eggs him on.
Remain’s focus on the economy also neglected to stop and ask people what they thought the economy was in the first place. Cambridge Analytica identified that many people in non-urban regions or in lower socioeconomic strata often externalized the notion of “the economy” to something that only the wealthy and metropolitan participated in. “The economy” was not their job in a local store; it was something that bankers did. This is also what made certain groups comfortable with economic risks and even trade wars, since, in their minds, that chaos would be unleashed upon the people who worked in “the economy.” And the more forceful the economic argument they heard, the more confident they would become that what they were “actually” hearing was the fears of a cowering elite worried about losing its wealth. This made them feel powerful, and it would become a power they wanted to wield.
After Leave won, a wave of shock and consternation swept Britain and the world. David Cameron gave a somber statement in front of 10 Downing Street, saying he would step down as prime minister by October. Both the euro and the British pound plummeted in value, and global stock markets nosedived. A petition began circulating, asking for a second referendum, and within seventy-two hours of the election, more than three and a half million people had signed it. In the United States, the response was mostly surprise and confusion. As pundits tried to parse what Brexit would mean for Americans, President Obama adopted the Keep Calm and Carry On approach, assuring everyone that “one thing that will not change is the special relationship that exists between our two nations.”
Donald Trump, then the presumptive Republican nominee, happened to be in Scotland at the time, visiting his Trump Turnberry golf resort. He called the Leave victory “a great thing,” saying that the voters had taken back their country.
“People want to take their country back, they want to have independence,” Trump said. “People are angry, all over the world…They’re angry over borders, they’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over, nobody even knows who they are. They’re angry about many, many things.”
The world did not know it yet, but Brexit was a crime scene. Britain was the first victim of an operation Bannon had set in motion years before. The so-called “patriots” of the Brexit movement, with their loud calls to rescue British law and sovereignty from the grips of the faceless European Union, decided to win a vote by mocking those very laws. And to do so, they deployed a web of companies associated with Cambridge Analytica in foreign jurisdictions, away from the scrutiny of the agencies charged with protecting the integrity of our democracies. Foreshadowing what was to come in America, a clear pattern emerged during the Brexit debacle, where previously unknown foreign entities began exerting influence on domestic elections by deploying large data sets of unexplained origins. And with social media companies not performing any checks on the advertising campaigns spreading throughout their platforms, there was no one standing guard to stop hostile entities seeking to sow chaos and disrupt our democracies.
CHAPTER 10
THE APPRENTICE
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“I’m not going to lie, this is certainly one of the weirder cases I’ve dealt with,” my lawyer said as we sat in her office in London reading through a June 2015 pre-action letter from Cambridge Analytica (falsely) claiming that I was attempting to set up a rival firm in aid of the nascent Trump presidential campaign. Donald Trump had first come into my life a few months before, in the spring of 2015, when Mark Block called me with a proposition refreshingly far removed from the work I’d done with Cambridge Analytica. As Block explained it, the Trump Organization needed help with market research, either for Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice or his casinos. Block had also called Jucikas and Gettleson, who were still in London. The three of us talked, and we agreed to a meeting with the Trump executives.
In calls with the Trump Organization, we heard about declining ratings for The Apprentice and how fewer people were staying at Trump hotels and gambling in the casinos. With the advent of online gambling and the total dependence on Donald Trump’s public image as a sexy, savvy billionaire, it seemed his team was beginning to realize that an outdated casino system and an aging, orange-stained C-list celebrity didn’t conjure “sexy and fun” for potential new customers. The Trump brand was on a downturn, and the company needed to figure out how to give it a boost.
The project was frustratingly amorphous, the executives weren’t even sure what we did or how we could help, and I started to suspect that the Trump executives were just looking for free advice. When they proposed a meeting for about a month later, I declined, content to let Jucikas and Gettleson report back from Trump Tower. The meeting took place at a Trump Tower restaurant, and the conversation picked up in the same vague place the calls had left off. Could we use data to enhance the image of Trump and his products—to revive the Trump brand? And if so, who would be the targets for such a project?
When Gettleson called to tell me about what went down, he was laughing. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Trump is planning to run for president.” The meeting had included Corey Lewandowski, who identified himself as Trump’s campaign manager and assured Gettleson and Jucikas that Trump was indeed serious about running for president. He invited us to take part in the campaign—an offer I wanted no part of, for several reasons. One: It was a political campaign, and I had quit Cambridge Analytica and left London specifically to get away from politics. Two: Trump seemed like an utterly ridiculous individual and a likely failure as a candidate. And three: He was running as a Republican, and I was finished doing dirty work for right-wing politicians. It was one thing to explore how to improve ratings for a reality TV show; it was quite another to help a Republican run for president. Gettleson agreed—Jucikas, soon to be a consultant on GOP campaigns, not so much—and the Trump subplot, we assumed, had come to an end.
But a couple of weeks later, on June 5, 2015, we learned that Cambridge Analytica was suing Gettleson, Jucikas, and me. They claimed that we had violated the non-solicitation clause in our NDAs with the firm. We had, according to the lawsuit, solicited one of Cambridge Analytica’s clients: Donald Trump. The letters informing us of the lawsuit gave us two weeks to respond, so even though the case was clearly bogus, I decided to hire a lawyer to make it go away as quickly as possible. At our first meeting, the attorneys were baffled. Imagine how strange this conversation was, long before Cambridge Analytica or Steve Bannon became household names: “So there’s this psychological warfare firm,” I told them. “And it got acquired by this Republican billionaire in the United States. And after I quit, I got invited to talk with Donald Trump—the guy from The Apprentice? Apparently, he’s going to run for president, and he’s secretly a client of theirs. And so now they’re suing me…”
By now, Cambridge Analytica had spread like a disease through the Republican Party, advising prominent candidates in House and Senate races and undertaking projects to study cultural phenomena, such as militarism among U.S. youth, on behalf of right-wing interests. On the face of it, Cambridge Analytica was wildly successful. But behind the scenes, the firm was screwing the Republican Party generally—and the Mercers specifically. For me, the real revelation in the lawsuit was that Cambridge Analytica was connected with Trump as an off-book client at the same time the firm was working for the Mercers’ preferred presidential candidate, Ted Cruz. Not only did Bannon have a different agenda than the Mercers, he also had no interest in supporting Cruz, whom Bannon despised.
Aft
er I explained to the attorneys that I wasn’t even working for Trump, they essentially said, “Fine, don’t worry. Firms send these letters all the time as a stern warning, but usually nothing comes of them. It’s probably their director’s insecurity. We can take care of this.”
But it wasn’t going to be cheap. Indeed, Cambridge Analytica made it clear that they intended to keep badgering me, costing me money and peace of mind, until I gave in. I offered to sign a document saying I would never again work for a Republican, but Cambridge Analytica didn’t want that. They wanted me to never work with data again, which of course was an impossible request. Back and forth we went, for months on end. The whole thing got more and more bizarre. In the course of the legal dispute, I discovered that after Gettleson and I left the firm, CA had invented two fake staff personas—“Chris Young” and “Mark Nettles”—that they continued to use on their site and with clients. Finally I agreed to sign a deed of confidence, which was essentially a super-non-disclosure agreement stating that I would never discuss what I had seen and done at Cambridge Analytica. Unbeknownst to me, the first trap in my future as a whistleblower had been set.
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WHEN I MOVED BACK to Canada to work for Trudeau’s research team, my days involved mostly conference calls and meetings, and for the most part I welcomed the stability and warmth of an environment that wasn’t hostile, particularly one in which the boss wasn’t hell-bent on psychologically abusing his staff.
In March 2016, a senior Canadian government official called me asking for a briefing that was slightly outside my mandate. He wanted a read on the Republican primaries in the United States, which were in full swing. Specifically, he wanted to know why Donald Trump was surging in the polls. On March 1, Trump had taken the Republican primaries in seven out of eleven of the Super Tuesday states, and thousands of screaming supporters were packing his rallies across the country. The more outrageously Trump behaved, it seemed, the higher his poll numbers rose: At the March 3 presidential debate, he tangled with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida about, of all things, the size of his penis, with Trump boasting, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” Two weeks later, Trump won four out of six states and territories in a single day—and Rubio dropped out of the race. Trudeau’s people weren’t worried—yet—but they were curious, because the reality TV star turned candidate struck them as ridiculous and weird. Why was he doing so well? What were the Americans thinking? Like many of their fellow Canadians, they took pleasure in smugly shaking their heads at their backward neighbors.
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