With the title “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked,” that first article came out May 7, 2017. It caused a sensation, becoming the most read piece on The Guardian’s website that year. Cadwalladr’s reporting was solid, but she had only just started to skim the surface of a much murkier story. On May 17, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to oversee the investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign. It was beginning to become apparent that there was an appetite among Democrats and even some Republicans to get to the bottom of why Trump had so drastically fired FBI director James Comey after telling him to drop the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn—who, it turned out, had a consulting agreement with Cambridge Analytica. The full story went far beyond Brexit—it was about Bannon, Trump, Russia, and Silicon Valley. It was about who controls your identity, and the corporations that traffic in your data.
But I had a problem. If I was to help get this information out and persuade others at Cambridge Analytica to come forward, I couldn’t do it in Canada. I confided in some of Justin Trudeau’s team. They immediately understood the gravity of the situation and encouraged me to come forward and go to the U.K. to work with The Guardian. So I did.
* * *
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I HAD NO PLAN and didn’t even have a flat sorted yet, so I flew to Alistair Carmichael’s constituency in the Shetland Islands, the most northerly of the British Isles, once part of ancient Norse kingdoms before its annexation by Scotland. At the airport, when I stepped from a tiny propeller plane with my life packed into a single bag, Carmichael was waiting, ready to take me to a guesthouse—but not without a scenic detour. As the local member of Parliament and an extremely proud Scotsman, he was keen to first give me a tour of the island, rain and harsh wind be damned. We were surrounded by sheer cliffs, Shetland ponies, and sheep roaming nearby when he asked what I planned to do.
“I don’t have a plan yet,” I answered. “I’m seeing Carole next week…Do you think this is a good idea, Alistair?”
“No—it’s crazy!” he shot back, almost shouting. Then he fell silent. “But it’s important, Chris. All I can say is that I will do what I can to help.” There are few politicians I would walk through miles of cold, wet grass in the freezing north of Scotland for. But Alistair had always been someone I could rely on. He’d become a confidant, a mentor, and a friend.
A couple of weeks later, Cadwalladr and I finally met in person, near Oxford Circus in London, at the Riding House Café—a large modern space with crimson sofas by the windows and a bar with bright turquoise stools. Cadwalladr was waiting for me inside, looking like a biker chick with her tousled blond hair, sunglasses, leopard print top, and well-worn leather bomber jacket. From across the street, I could see her in the large window of the restaurant. Unsure that this woman was actually the same Guardian journalist I had been speaking with for months on the phone, I searched for more photos of Cadwalladr on my phone, and held up the photos to compare with the woman sitting inside. When she saw me, she jumped up and exclaimed, “Oh my God! It’s really you! You’re taller than I imagined!” She got up and gave me a hug. She told me that The Guardian wanted its next story to be about how Cambridge Analytica had collected the Facebook data and asked if I would be willing to go on the record.
It would not be an easy decision. If I went public, I risked the wrath of the president of the United States, his alt-right whisperer Steve Bannon, Downing Street, militant Brexiteers, and the sociopathic Alexander Nix. And if I told the whole truth behind Cambridge Analytica, I risked angering Russians, hackers, WikiLeaks, and a host of others who’d shown no compunction about breaking laws in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and beyond. I had seen people face serious threats to their safety; several of my former colleagues had warned me to be extremely careful after I left. Before joining SCL, my predecessor, Dan Mureşan, had ended up dead in his hotel room in Kenya. This was a decision that I could not take lightly.
I told Cadwalladr I would think about it and continued to give her information. But then any trust I had in The Guardian was wrecked when the paper failed to stand by its own reporting. Cadwalladr had opened her May 7 article with the story of how Sophie Schmidt—daughter of Google CEO Eric Schmidt—had introduced Nix to Palantir, setting off the chain of events that led to SCL’s foray into data warfare. I knew the story, though I wasn’t the source for it; someone else had told Carole about it. The article was true. In fact, I had emails about Sophie Schmidt’s involvement in SCL. The story wasn’t remotely libelous, but Schmidt threw a battalion of lawyers at The Guardian, with the threat of a time-consuming and expansive legal battle. Instead of fighting an obviously spurious lawsuit, the paper agreed to remove Schmidt’s name several weeks after publication.
Then Cambridge Analytica threatened to sue over the same article. And even though The Guardian had documents, emails, and files that confirmed everything I had told them, they backed down again. Editors agreed to flag certain paragraphs as “disputed,” to appease Cambridge Analytica and mitigate the paper’s liability. They took Cadwalladr’s well-sourced story and watered it down.
At this point, my heart sank. I thought, All right, I’ve just moved back to London, I haven’t got a job, and I’m being asked to put my neck on the line for a newspaper that won’t even defend its own journalism. An additional complication was the super NDA that prohibited me from revealing details about my work at Cambridge Analytica. The whole point of Cambridge Analytica making me sign it was that it seriously increased my legal liability, and I had no doubt that my old employers would attempt to sue me into oblivion were I to breach the agreement. My lawyers said I had a strong defense—that by giving The Guardian this information, I was exposing unlawful behavior. But a good defense does not prevent a lawsuit from being filed in the first place, and fighting Cambridge Analytica in court would mean hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees—money I didn’t have.
All the same, I remained determined that the full story come out. My best course of action, I soon discovered, ran through Donald Trump’s hometown. Carole passed me on to Gavin Millar QC, a well-known barrister in London at Matrix Chambers who had worked on the Edward Snowden case for The Guardian, and he suggested that I give the story to an American newspaper. The First Amendment provided U.S. newspapers with much stronger defenses against accusations of libel, he said. The New York Times was far less likely to back down than The Guardian had been, and it would never delete parts of articles after the fact. This was a brilliant suggestion. It also ensured that the story would get as much play in the United States as in Britain.
I told The Guardian that I planned to share the story with The New York Times. They were not pleased, arguing that if we waited any longer, interest in the story would dry up, or someone else would publish before us. But the choice was mine, not theirs, and I stood my ground. I would give reporters at both papers the same information, with the condition that they publish on the same day—and only after I gave the go-ahead. There was too much at stake, and The Guardian’s actions in the Schmidt case had made me wary of the risk of Britain’s extremely plaintiff-friendly libel laws. I reiterated to the paper’s editors that I would not be cooperating or handing over documents until there was an agreement with The New York Times. Cadwalladr was actually completely supportive of letting the Times in, and The Guardian, not having much choice in the matter, acquiesced. The editors cringed at the idea of sharing with their rivals, but, to their credit, they swallowed their pride and set up a meeting with Times editors in Manhattan to start the discussions about how this was all going to play out. The papers reached a tentative agreement in September 2017, and shortly thereafter I met the reporter The New York Times had assigned to the story.
* * *
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ON THE DAY I was scheduled to meet the American journalist, I walked into the buzzing lobby bar of the Hoxton Hotel, in Shoreditch, and
spotted Cadwalladr, who waved me over to her table. She was sitting across from Matt Rosenberg of the Times. Completely bald, slightly beefy, and apparently divorced, he was quite fetching.
“So you’re the guy?” Rosenberg said as he rose from his seat to shake my hand. “I’m assuming,” he said, “we need phones away?”
We all pulled out our Faraday cases, which prevent phones from receiving or transmitting electronic signals. All my meetings with journalists started with this ritual. We then zipped the cases into a soundproof bag I had brought in case there was preinstalled listening malware that could turn itself on without remote activation. With my former Cambridge Analytica associates now working in the Trump administration, and given Cambridge Analytica’s history with hackers and WikiLeaks, we had to be extremely careful.
After more than two hours of conversation about my experience with Cambridge Analytica, Rosenberg said that he had enough to go back to his editors. He ordered some wine for the table and then shared war stories from his time in Afghanistan. He seemed like a straight-up decent guy, and I felt hopeful that maybe this was going to work out. Before the meeting broke up, he gave me his card: “Matthew Rosenberg. National Security Correspondent. New York Times.” He had scribbled a number on the back. “That’s for my burner phone. Call me on Signal. It’ll be good for a few weeks.”
With The New York Times now involved, I began connecting journalists with other former Cambridge Analytica employees, and the journalists flagged a recurring theme: Everyone thought that if they could talk directly to Nix, he wouldn’t be able to help himself—he’d start bragging about Cambridge Analytica’s operations to further wank his already overinflated ego. Although this was undoubtedly true, it seemed like a bad idea to tip him off about planned exposés.
“Maybe I should try to interview him,” Cadwalladr said to me one afternoon. Then she came up with a better idea: catching him in the act. If we put Nix in a situation where he was trying to win potential clients, he was sure to blab about his shady tactics in hopes of impressing them. I’d seen him do this at least a dozen times. And if we managed to get him on tape doing it, that would prove to the world that my accusations were true. So now, in addition to The Guardian and The New York Times, we decided to approach Channel 4 News. As a public television service, Channel 4 had a statutory mandate to represent more diverse, innovative, and independent programming than the BBC, which tended to be extremely risk averse in breaking new stories.
One afternoon in late September, Cadwalladr and I met Channel 4’s investigations editor, Job Rabkin, and his team at the back of an empty pub in Clerkenwell a few blocks from their studios. Cadwalladr introduced us, and Rabkin began describing his team’s experience with undercover work. When I started telling him about Cambridge Analytica’s projects in Africa, Rabkin’s eyes widened. He interjected, “This sounds so twisted and colonial.” Rabkin was the first journalist to use that word with me—“colonial.” Most of the people I told about Cambridge Analytica were fascinated with Trump, Brexit, or Facebook, but whenever I got onto the topic of Africa, I usually was met with shrugs. Shit happens. It’s Africa, after all. But Rabkin got it. What Cambridge Analytica was doing in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria—it was a new era of colonialism, in which powerful Europeans exploited Africans for their resources. And although minerals and oil were still very much part of the equation, there was a new resource being extracted: data.
Rabkin pledged the full support of the Channel 4 investigations unit, adding that his team was willing to take the risk of going undercover to get inside Cambridge Analytica. I began working with them on the operation, which I felt sure would truly blow the lid off of Nix’s corrupt tactics. But this would be an incredibly complicated and delicate undertaking, with disastrous results if Nix somehow discovered what we were up to.
With so many moving parts, whistleblowing was turning into a full-time job. I was also setting myself up for a storm of legal trouble if anything was done improperly, so I texted the lawyers who had helped me over the summer. Their answer was the last thing I wanted to hear. This was too much for pro bono support; I needed to either find cash or new lawyers. I was devastated. I was out of work, in the thick of an extremely complicated mess, and risking serious legal jeopardy—all without a lawyer. But as with so many things in life, sometimes you get lucky and bad news leads you somewhere amazing. And this was one of those moments, because it led me to Tamsin Allen.
Gavin Millar heard about what had happened and referred me to Allen, a top U.K. media lawyer at the firm Bindmans LLP who was an expert in defamation and privacy, in the fall of 2017. Her list of clients included ex-MI5 spies and celebrities who’d had their phones hacked in the infamous News Corp case. She seemed like a perfect fit for my dilemma, and when I met her, we immediately clicked. Growing up, Allen was once expelled from school for skinny-dipping, and just as the 1980s punk scene was taking off, she moved to London, where she lived with squatters in Hackney. “I have so many stories that are completely untellable,” she recollected one late evening as we were prepping evidence. Allen was a rebel herself, and she was unfazed by a pink-haired guy with a nose ring recounting bizarre stories of spying, hackers, and data manipulation. In my journey to become a whistleblower, Allen became my number one ally.
Allen recognized that my interests weren’t entirely aligned with those of Channel 4, The Guardian, and The New York Times. The reporters were focused on the scoop of the year, maybe the decade, while I needed to tell this vitally important story and simultaneously steer clear of legal jeopardy. She counseled that I stay razor-focused on the public interest aspect of the Cambridge Analytica story, particularly because of the super NDA, as British law allows a defense to breach of confidence if it was required to reveal illegality or was manifestly in the public interest. We had a lot of discussions about what “the public interest” was and how we could hew to that line, avoiding revealing anything too gossipy or that would risk legitimate national security interests of the British or American governments, but Allen warned that even if we kept to an airtight legal standard, Cambridge Analytica would still probably sue me. She told me that Facebook also might file suit, and their resources were nearly limitless. And she said it was possible that Facebook or CA might apply for an injunction to prevent publication. Such injunctions are almost unheard of in the United States but are not uncommon in the U.K. Fighting the injunction would be time-consuming, and even if we ultimately won, the British journalists might get cold feet and pull out—Allen told me she had seen it happen many times.
But those were simply the legal scenarios. The story involved many characters who had a history of operating outside of the law, and Allen was becoming concerned for my personal safety. At one of our early meetings, she asked whether I had family in London and what safety precautions I’d taken. “Who are you going to ring in an emergency?” she asked me. We had to create a plan. But as time went on and we became increasingly devoted to each other, I decided that Allen would be the one I would call should things go sideways.
With my legal situation sorted, I started having conversations with Sanni about what had transpired between BeLeave and Vote Leave. He was very forthcoming. Without quite grasping the deeper implications of what he was describing—collusion and cheating—he outlined an arrangement in which Vote Leave wired hundreds of thousands of pounds through BeLeave to an AIQ account. After I helped him see the underlying offenses, Sanni finally understood that he had been used. He had no idea that AIQ was part of Cambridge Analytica, and he was visibly disgusted when I told him about the videos that AIQ had handled for CA during the Nigerian election.
A few days later, he showed me a shared drive containing strategy documents for BeLeave, Vote Leave, and AIQ. Under British law, this was evidence of unlawful coordination. In the activity log, someone had been using the administrator’s account to delete the names of leading Vote Leave officials from the drive. The deletions were ma
de the same week the Electoral Commission launched its investigation of the campaign, Sanni told me. Vote Leave has since claimed this was a data clean-up, but it looked to me as if Vote Leave was trying to delete evidence of the over-spending and had potentially committed yet another crime: destruction of evidence. It began to look like an attempted cover-up, and when he showed me who else was on this drive, it became even more serious. Two of the accounts on the shared drive were those of two senior advisers who were now sitting inside the office of the prime minister, advising on the Brexit negotiation process. I emphasized to Sanni that he might be in possession of evidence of a crime—several crimes, in fact—and that he needed to be extremely careful lest he end up in serious trouble. He was already aware of my cooperation with The Guardian and The New York Times. As he grasped the enormity of what he discovered, Sanni agreed to meet with Cadwalladr, to tell her what he knew. And I also connected him to Tamsin Allen for independent legal advice.
In the beginning, Allen worked on a pro bono basis. But as the complexity of the situation grew, she could no longer give me the hours I needed without some sort of payment. She was also concerned about what would happen if Cambridge Analytica took me to court after they found out that I was going public. Allen refused to drop me over money, but we had to get creative. We decided to approach some of her well-connected contacts, as Allen knew it would be important to create a body of support. The first was Hugh Grant—yes, the Hugh Grant, the star of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Over dinner, Allen explained my predicament. Sanni joined us to go through what had happened on Vote Leave. Grant was warm and caring and seemed just like many of the characters he’s played. Grant had also had personal experience with stolen data—the Rupert Murdoch–owned News of the World had hacked his phone messages. He was taken aback by the scale of Cambridge Analytica’s activities and said he would help think of who could assist us.
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