Canadians have a hard time understanding populism because, unlike America or Britain, it has never had any Rupert Murdoch–owned media. There is no Fox News or The Sun in Canada. Because of its more risk-conscious banking system, the country did not experience a housing crisis or financial crash. And unlike the rest of the OECD, Canada is the outlier where patriotism and support for immigration actually correlate positively with each other. So I would find myself repeating the same conversation over and over to baffled Canadians who simply could not understand how Brexit or Trump were even possible.
Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister in the late 1960s and 1970s, once said that living so close to the United States was like “sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast…one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Even if Trump didn’t win—and few people at that point thought he would—his position on trade was already creating ripples. Trump hated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and was riling up the American electorate in states crucial to trade relations with Canada. The fear was not so much that Trump would win, but that the longer he lasted, the more his anti-NAFTA bombast might affect gubernatorial and legislative races in these states, which in turn would shift the national dialogue on trade.
The Cambridge Analytica saga was not yet lodged in the public consciousness, but it was no secret among my Canadian colleagues that my work for the firm had ultimately been passed on to certain U.S. political campaigns. As Trump continued to gain ground, their curiosity grew. I described Cambridge Analytica’s tactics of voter manipulation—how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. I explained how, after obtaining people’s data from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica could in some cases predict their behavior better than their own spouses could, and how the firm was using that information to, in effect, radicalize people inside the Republican Party.
So while it was obvious that Trump touched a nerve with a certain percentage of American voters, Cambridge Analytica was working behind the curtain to raise his campaign to another level. A bunch of the people they were targeting were those who typically didn’t vote Republican or didn’t vote at all. They were trying to expand the electorate through this while at the same time they were committed to voter suppression. In particular, they focused on disengaging African Americans and other minority communities. One of the ways they did this was to peddle left-wing social justice rhetoric to depict Hillary Clinton as a propagator of white supremacy—while themselves working for a white supremacist. The aim was to move people from all demographics of a more left-wing ideology to vote for a third-party candidate, like Jill Stein.
I had started paying attention to candidate Trump when Cambridge Analytica sued me, because that was when I learned that the firm was working for him. At first, his campaign was a mess. But then he began repeating phrases like “Build the wall” and “Drain the swamp,” and he started rising in the polls. I called Gettleson and said, “Well, this sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?”—because these were the exact phrases CA had tested and included in reports sent to Bannon well before Trump announced. Meaning that, throughout the spring of 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was supposedly working for Ted Cruz, the fruits of its research seemed to be (wink wink!) making their way to Donald Trump.
As the primaries continued, it became apparent that Trump’s chances of winning were increasing, and the attitude of people in Ottawa began to shift from “He’s crazy, ha ha,” to “He’s crazy…and he might become president of the elephant next to us.”
* * *
—
AS BREXIT LOOMED AND TRUMP gained ground, I realized it was time to speak up. I decided to connect with a couple of friends who worked in Silicon Valley. One of them—I’ll call her “Sheela”—knew someone at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm co-founded by the tech wunderkind Marc Andreessen. In the early nineties, Andreessen, along with Eric Bina, had created the Mosaic Web browser, forever changing the way people used the Internet. Mosaic became Netscape, which became one of the earliest Internet super-successes with its IPO in 1995. Since then, Andreessen had made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in companies like Skype, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga…and Facebook. He also sat on Facebook’s board.
I flew to San Francisco in the spring of 2016 to start briefing relevant parties on what I’d seen at Cambridge Analytica. Sheela set up a meeting at the Andreessen Horowitz offices, on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. From the outside, the building looked like a slightly upscale suburban dentist’s office, but inside, a rather bland lobby gave way to walls hung with fantastically expensive art. I met with Andreessen employees in a conference room and told them about Cambridge Analytica, the millions of Facebook profiles it had misappropriated, and the malicious way it was using the profiles to interfere with the election.
“Guys, you work for a major shareholder and board member,” I said. “Facebook needs to be aware that this is going on.” They told me they would look into it. Whether that actually happened, I have no idea.
With a Facebook board member now apparently on the case, I went to a party in San Francisco’s Mission District, where a Facebook VP was expected to be among the guests. As it turned out, the party was filled with Facebook employees. The look was standard-issue Silicon Valley—form-fitted gray T-shirts—and it was hard to get through a conversation without hearing a progress report on a keto fasting diet, drinking Soylent meal replacements, and why food was becoming “overrated.” Introduced as the guy from Cambridge Analytica, I quickly became the center of attention, as they’d all heard so many rumors about the company. At the time, they all seemed to be aware of Cambridge Analytica, and I later found out that as far back as September 2015, Facebook employees discussed Cambridge Analytica internally and had asked for an investigation into the possible “scraping” of data by the company. The employees reiterated their request for an investigation in December 2015, and would later be quoted in a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint filed against Facebook describing the firm as a “sketchy (to say the least) data modeling company that has penetrated our market deeply.” But as I answered their questions, it was obvious that threats to democracy didn’t interest them nearly as much as the mechanics of what Cambridge Analytica had pulled off. Even the Facebook vice president seemed mostly unfazed. If I had a problem with Cambridge Analytica, he said, then I should create a rival firm—respond to the Uber of propaganda by developing the Lyft. This suggestion struck me as perverse—not to mention irresponsible—coming from an executive at a company well positioned to take meaningful action. But that was how Silicon Valley operated, I soon realized. The reaction to any problem, even one as serious as a threat to the integrity of our elections, is not “How can we fix it?” Rather, it’s “How can we monetize it?” They were incapable of seeing beyond the business opportunity. I had wasted my time. The U.S. regulatory investigation that I later took part in eventually determined that at least thirty Facebook employees knew about Cambridge Analytica—but prior to the story being made public by my whistleblowing, the company did not put into place any procedures to report this to regulators.
Later, I was invited by Andreessen Horowitz staff to a private Facebook chat group called “Futureworld,” where executives from major Silicon Valley companies were discussing problems facing the tech sector, including issues I had raised. Andreessen also started talking to other executives in Silicon Valley about how their platforms were potentially being misused. He welcomed several other Silicon Valley notables to his house for a dinner group they began to refer to as “the Junta”—a reference to authoritarian groups that rule a country after taking power.
“It’ll sure be ironic if the reason our correspondence lands on the government’s radar,” one group member emailed Andreessen, was because “their algorithms were trigger
ed by our sarcastic use of the word ‘junta.’ ”
* * *
—
IN EARLY SUMMER OF 2016, the Russia narrative started bubbling up. In mid-June, Guccifer 2.0 leaked documents that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee. A week later, just three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published thousands of stolen emails, opening rifts between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned almost immediately. And, of course, Nix eventually began asking around about Clinton’s emails at the behest of Rebekah Mercer, eventually offering Cambridge Analytica’s services to WikiLeaks to help disseminate the hacked material. I found out about this from a former colleague who was still with the firm and thought everything was getting out of hand.
As the Democrats tried to get their convention back on track, Donald Trump lobbed another metaphorical grenade at the party. At a news conference on July 27, he casually invited Russia to continue its interference in the campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he blustered, “I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing”—a reference to emails that Clinton had deemed personal and deleted, rather than turning them over to investigators looking into her use of a private email server.
Over the summer and into the fall, Trump and Putin exchanged admiring comments, and I started thinking back on the weird Russia connections I’d noticed at Cambridge Analytica. Kogan’s ties to St. Petersburg. The meeting with Lukoil executives. Sam Patten’s boasts about working with the Russian government. Cambridge Analytica’s internal memos alluding to Russian intelligence. The Putin questions inexplicably inserted into our research. And even Brittany Kaiser’s apparent connection to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. At the time, I had thought these were strange events, each one incidental to the others. But now they began to seem like something more.
Trump became the GOP nominee at the Republican National Convention on July 19. If my hunch was correct, Cambridge Analytica was not only using the data tool I had worked on to manipulate American voters into supporting him, it may have been knowingly or unknowingly working with Russians to sway the election. Now that I was outside Cambridge Analytica looking in, it was as if I had X-ray vision. I knew the depths this company was willing to plumb, and the moral void at its core. I felt sick to my stomach. And I knew I had to tell someone—to raise the alarm.
I approached someone in the Trudeau government—I’ll call him “Alan”—and told him about my concerns. I started describing all the connections between Russia, WikiLeaks, and Cambridge Analytica. I told him I had come to believe that Cambridge Analytica was a part of the Russia story and suggested that we share the details with someone in the U.S. government.
We didn’t want to cross a line, and we wanted to stay respectful of the U.S. election. We were concerned that even though we only wanted to warn the United States about potential security threats, particularly from Russia, coming forward could be misinterpreted as a case of foreign actors attempting to interfere in the election—which we definitely were not. We settled on an alternative plan—a trip to Berkeley for a conference focused on data and democracy, where we could aim for a discreet chat with a couple of White House officials who we knew would be there.
The other person I had talked to extensively about all this was Ken Strasma, Obama’s former targeting director. I had met with Strasma in New York and told him about Cambridge Analytica’s data targeting. Since his firm had just provided microtargeting services for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, naturally he was interested.
After Clinton clinched the nomination, in late July, Strasma called me and said, “Now that we’ve lost, I’m going to see if I can talk with Hillary’s data team.” He asked whether I’d be interested in meeting with them to outline my suspicions about what was happening with the Trump campaign. Yes, of course, I told him. Unfortunately, we were never able to connect with the Clinton team.
* * *
—
IN AUGUST, I TRAVELED to Berkeley for a conference with some advisers from Justin Trudeau’s office. We would be there for only a few days, so I asked another friend from Silicon Valley, whom I will call “Kehlani,” to help us arrange meetings. The most important one would be with the White House staffers.
I knew the meeting with the White House officials would be short, which meant we would have one shot to get our point across. And since it was likely that my audience would not be familiar with Cambridge Analytica, there was a good chance they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about and would miss its significance. So I asked Kehlani to find a discreet setting where we could set up base and plan our meeting.
“How discreet do you want it?” she replied. “I can get you a place that doesn’t have cellphone reception.”
“A little unnecessary, but okay,” I said with a laugh. She gave us an address.
The following afternoon, we drove to where the GPS pointed us, which turned out to be the middle of a shipyard. Kehlani was waiting. She led us past a warehouse, down the dock. Things were getting weird, and they got even weirder when we had to step around giant harbor seals. Past them, we came upon a 135-foot Norwegian ferry, rusting in parts—it definitely wouldn’t have passed inspection. The once-white ship had become gray, with barnacles stuck along its entire base. Someone threw down a ladder so we could climb up to the ship as it bobbed and swayed in the water.
Kehlani had found the most secure environment imaginable: a hacker ship. Anchored near San Francisco, the vessel was home to a handful of coders engaged in startups and other indeterminate tech activities. We didn’t ask. In light of everything that was going on, it all felt perfectly apropos. We based ourselves on this ship throughout the trip.
Arriving at the conference the next day, we made arrangements for our unofficial meeting. Alan, in particular, was eager for us to emphasize that we were having this conversation in a personal capacity, not as representatives of Trudeau. The meeting would introduce employees of the Canadian government who were not representing that government to White House staffers who were not representing the White House. The topic was the U.S. election and what was happening in the Republican Party with respect to Cambridge Analytica, including its massive surveillance database and its potential relationships with foreign intelligence agencies.
Someone from the White House group asked if we could talk outside, as they’d been cooped up all day at the conference. Which is how we ended up in a rather bizarre tableau: a group of high-level government advisers, crowded around a picnic table near the UC Berkeley campus, talking about Cambridge Analytica and Russian involvement in the U.S. presidential election—all while weed-smoking, backpack-wearing students strolled past.
I got right to the point, warning the Americans about Cambridge Analytica’s likely involvement in Russian interference. “We know that there are individuals working on Trump’s campaign who have ties to foreign intelligence services,” I said. “They have built up a massive social media database which is being deployed on American voters.”
I detailed Cambridge Analytica’s Russia connections and described the presentation Nix had made to Lukoil. I told them about the company’s work to undermine people’s confidence in the electoral process.
Their reply was…ho-hum. One of the Americans said they couldn’t do much, for fear of being accused of using the weight of the federal government to influence a vote. (I distinctly remember the phrase “move the dial.”) The Obama group seemed extremely concerned about not tainting what they believed was a near-certain Clinton win. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time, the rumor was that, after his inevitable loss, Trump intended to launch Trump TV as a rival to Fox News. He was also expected to claim that the election had been rigged—that the deep state had influenced it, or Clinton had cheated, or both. Worried that Trump would use any irregularity to delegitimize the election, the Obama administration want
ed to make sure it gave him nothing concrete to complain about.
When the White House guys told me about Trump TV, it made sense. I figured they knew what they were doing—and, after all, this was happening in their country, not mine. We all shook hands and went our separate ways. And this response was not unique. In early 2016, senior Facebook executives had identified that Russian hackers had probed the platform for individuals connected to the presidential campaigns, but chose not to warn the public or the authorities, as it would cause reputational issues for the company. (Facebook first publicly outlined the extent of the Russian information operations on its platform in September 2017, more than a year after it first identified the issue, and seven months after beginning to investigate what was called a “five-alarm fire” of disinformation spreading on its site.) Ultimately, between the Democrats’ indifference to the threat and Silicon Valley’s inability to understand how to solve a problem without creating another “Uber of X,” my efforts to warn the Americans went nowhere. When you try to sound an alarm and people keep telling you “Don’t worry about it” or “Don’t rock the boat,” you start to wonder if maybe you’re overreacting. I wasn’t in the Clinton campaign or in the White House. I was just a guy in Canada, shouting into the wind.
Mindfuck Page 22