The crucial piece of support came a few weeks after we were introduced to Lord Strasburger, a Lib Dem who sat in the House of Lords and is the founder of Big Brother Watch, a privacy activist group. He, in turn, connected me to an exceptionally wealthy individual who came to London to meet me. I asked him why he wanted to help, and he told me that it was because he knew the history of Europe. He said he knew what happens when everyone is cataloged. Privacy is essential to protect us from the rising threat of fascism, and so he said he would help me. A few days later he pledged funds to help me and gave me the backing I needed.
This was just part of the assistance that allowed me to get through the whistleblowing ordeal in one piece. As I prepared to speak out against political and corporate Goliaths, I was a David now backed by committed lawyers and journalists, a legal defense fund, and a huge amount of moral support. So often, whistleblowers are framed as lone activists standing up to giants for what’s right. But in my case, I was never alone, and I got incredibly lucky on several occasions. Without this help, I never would have been able to come forward.
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IN OCTOBER 2017, Allen and I met with the Channel 4 News producers, Job Rabkin, and his editor, Ben de Pear. I described Nix and told them about the kinds of illegal activities he regularly engaged in. They were intrigued by the notion of catching him on tape, but as we discussed the details of how such a sting might work, they wondered whether it would be too complicated to succeed. Permission would have to come from the top legal team at the channel, and they could easily deem the undertaking too risky, both legally and reputationally, if it backfired.
We began working with their lawyers on an extensive legal preparatory document. Britain has laws protecting these types of sting operations, but journalists must show that what they’re proposing is in the public interest, that they’re not going to entrap anyone, and that the sting is going to reveal probable crimes. Preparing this document in advance would protect Channel 4 in the event Nix sued.
The sting would require a microscopic attention to detail. I called Mark Gettleson, who without hesitation agreed to help. Nix would have to believe that the people he was meeting with were clients, that the project he was being asked to undertake was real, and that the conversation he was having was completely private. The person playing the “client” would have to be extensively briefed on how Nix operated. He would have to know exactly what to ask for and would also have to be well versed in the political situation of whichever country we chose to have the “project” based in.
We decided to set the scenario in Sri Lanka, for a couple of reasons. One: SCL had done work in India and had an office there, so a neighboring country would feel familiar enough to Nix. And two: The labyrinthine nature of Sri Lankan politics and history made it easier to create a fake political scenario loosely based in reality. Whatever project we created would have to involve enough real players that when a Cambridge Analytica assistant did a bit of Googling before the meeting, it would still seem legit and eventually pass their due diligence procedures.
After Channel 4 hired a Sri Lankan investigator to play the client, “Ranjan,” Gettleson and I coached the Channel 4 team on Nix’s habits and peculiarities, walked them through how Cambridge Analytica vetted prospective clients, and showed them emails from Nix to help them ascertain how he and the company operated. There would be four meetings altogether—three preliminary ones with other Cambridge Analytica executives and then a final one to close the deal with Nix. Ranjan would have to let Nix come up with illegal ideas on his own so there could be no possible suggestion of entrapment.
Ranjan was to play an agent representing an ambitious young Sri Lankan who’d traveled to the West, made a lot of money, and now wanted to return home to run for political office. But because of a family rivalry, a particular minister in the government had frozen his family’s assets. He would use the name of an actual minister and throw in enough factual detail about Sri Lankan politics that Nix and the other executives would buy into the whole scenario. Channel 4 had to do a huge amount of detailed advance research, because any misstep could potentially blow the whole sting up. The carrot for Cambridge Analytica was 5 percent of the value of the man’s assets, if they succeeded in getting the (imaginary) funds released. We knew Alexander wouldn’t be able to resist.
At the first two meetings, Ranjan met with chief data officer Alexander Tayler and managing director Mark Turnbull in private rooms at a hotel near Westminster. The executives pitched Cambridge Analytica’s data analysis work and suggested intelligence-gathering services, but nothing concrete came out of the meetings. They seemed cagey, hedging in how they talked about what Cambridge Analytica really did. Channel 4 was frustrated, but we had an idea for how to fix it.
We realized that whenever guys like this go into a private hotel room, they assume that it’s bugged, so Channel 4 had to figure out how to have these meetings in a public place. The Channel 4 executives pushed back, saying the logistics would be impossible. If we tried to record a meeting in a restaurant or bar, the noise might drown out the audio. Also, where would we put the cameras, to ensure we’d get video recordings of the executives? We couldn’t just lead them to a specific table—that would be too suspicious.
The Channel 4 team, to their credit, made an audacious decision. They rented out a large part of a restaurant, filled it with people hired to have lunch and talk quietly, and aimed dozens of hidden cameras at all the available tables. Nix and the other executives could choose whichever table they liked, which would help make them feel less guarded. However, pretty much everything around them was a camera—even some of the table settings, handbags, and “guests” sitting around them would be recording the conversation.
Two meetings took place at this restaurant. At the first, Turnbull laid the groundwork for some of the more questionable services Cambridge Analytica offered. He told Ranjan that Cambridge Analytica could do some digging about the Sri Lankan minister, saying they would “find all the skeletons in his closet, quietly, discreetly, and give you a report.” But he pulled back toward the end, saying that “we wouldn’t send a pretty girl to seduce a politician, and then film them in their bedroom and then release the film. There are companies that do this, but to me, that crosses a line.” Of course, just by describing what Cambridge Analytica supposedly wouldn’t do, he succeeded in putting the idea on Ranjan’s plate.
Finally, weeks after the sting began, Nix made his entrance. For this fourth meeting, Channel 4 took extra care to make sure that everything was arranged flawlessly. All the tables were bugged, and cameras were set up around the room. There were hidden cameras in the handbags of a couple of women having lunch at the next table. Everything was ready, and we held our breath that Alexander wouldn’t cancel or postpone.
He didn’t. He dug his own grave. Ranjan did a perfect job of asking the right questions and showing interest at the most opportune moments. And Alexander, bless him, just walked right in and opened his big mouth.
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TWO MONTHS WOULD PASS before Channel 4 was ready to show us the tape from the restaurant. One morning in early November, I had an appointment with Allen, and I decided to walk because it was a sunny and crisp autumn morning. As I waited for her in the reception lobby, I noticed that I had received several new messages from a strange number. I opened them and reflexively yelled, “What the fuck!” The receptionist stood up and asked if I was okay, and I said no. The messages were photos of me walking that morning. Someone had followed me to my lawyer’s office, and they wanted me to know.
We suspected that Cambridge Analytica may have found out that I had moved back to London and had hired a firm to find out what I was doing. From that point on, Allen said we needed to change my routines—where I went and how I met with lawyers. A few days later, Leave.EU posted on Twitter a video clip from the movie Airplane! depicting a “hyste
rical” woman being repeatedly beaten, with Cadwalladr’s face superimposed. In the background played the Russian national anthem. She told me she had found out that they might be using a private intelligence firm to investigate her and warned me that if they had been following her around, they might have seen me too and connected the dots. If Cambridge Analytica found out what I was doing, Allen cautioned me, the company could go to court and apply for an injunction preventing me from handing over any more documents to The Guardian or The New York Times. With every turn, I was feeling more concerned about what was going to happen. A few days later, on November 17, the same day Cadwalladr published a story in The Guardian about the threats she had received, I had a seizure on a London street, blacked out, and was taken to a hospital. The doctors said that the cause was unclear.
Soon after I was released from the hospital, I asked Allen if there was anything we could do to secure the information that I had against any effort to keep it away from the public. Was there a surefire way to protect against injunctions in Britain? She said no but then paused, pointing out that the one exception is inside the Houses of Parliament, where the ancient laws of parliamentary immunity shield MPs from injunctions or libel claims in the courts. Discussions of legal principles dating back to the 1600s seemed academic at first, but what Allen told me gave me an idea to take Alistair Carmichael up on his offer to help. Meeting with Carmichael at his office in Parliament, I told him that I was probably under surveillance and that I needed him to lock away some hard drives to safeguard evidence in the event I was not able to publish it. Carmichael agreed and told me that, should it come to it, he would do whatever was necessary to get this information out, even if it meant using his parliamentary immunity. I handed him several hard drives, and for the rest of the time before the stories broke, we kept key evidence in his safe.
I also helped him secure some remarkable recordings. Dr. Emma Briant is a British professor and information warfare expert who came across several Cambridge Analytica executives during the course of her research into CA’s work for NATO. Even as someone who hangs around in military propaganda circles, she had been shocked by her conversations with the firm and had begun recording them. Cadwalladr had introduced us because Briant needed help getting the same kinds of protections I was able to secure working through Carmichael at Parliament. I sat in Alistair’s office as Briant played a recording of Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. “Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,” said Oakes. “So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.” Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing. In a separate clip of a discussion between Briant and Wigmore, the Leave.EU communications director also seemed to be interested in reviewing the strategic nature of the Nazis’ communication campaigns. In the tape, Wigmore is recorded explaining, “The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance—if you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did. In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery….And looking at that now, in hindsight, having been on the sharp end of this [2016 EU referendum] campaign, you think, crikey, this is not new, and it’s just—it’s using the tools that you have at the time.” As we played the recordings, Carmichael just sat there in silence.
Finally, in February 2018, Allen and I were invited to a screening room in the ITN building, which coincidentally was across the street from Tamsin’s office on Gray’s Inn Road. I watched as Nix shifted in his seat in our pretend dining room, trying to cater to his guests’ whims and desires. I watched as each sentence was spoken, each mistake made. It was insane. Here I was watching Nix in full form, admitting to some of the grotesque things Cambridge Analytica had done and was willing to do. Nix discussed how he had met Trump “many times” during the 2016 campaign. Turnbull went further, revealing how Cambridge Analytica had set up the “crooked Hillary” narrative. “We just put information into the bloodstream [of] the Internet and then watch it grow,” he said. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.” As I watched, I could barely contain myself. My experience was finally being validated by Nix’s own words.
The footage was perfect. Nix and Turnbull were caught dead to rights, casually offering to find kompromat and to blackmail a Sri Lankan minister. Nix, draping one leg over the other and sipping a drink, said:
Deep digging is interesting. But you know, equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true, and make sure that’s video-recorded. You know, these sorts of tactics are very effective. Instantly having video evidence of corruption. Putting it on the Internet, these sorts of things….
We’ll have a wealthy developer come in—somebody posing as a wealthy developer….They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras. We’ll blank out the face of our guy and then post it on the Internet.
Yes, Nix actually proposed conducting a sting operation, right in the middle of ours. I sat there watching with Allen and the Channel 4 team, taking in the sheer irony of it all. And then Nix went on and offered to:
send some girls around to the candidate’s house. We have lots of history of things….We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying….They are very beautiful. I find that works very well….I’m just giving you examples of what can be done and what has been done….I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.
After months of work and endless wrangling, we finally had all the elements in place. This Channel 4 footage would serve as the story’s coup de grâce, and in that moment I finally felt confident that we were actually going to stop Cambridge Analytica.
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AT LONG LAST, it was agreed that the print stories and the corresponding broadcast investigation would come out during the last two weeks of March 2018. A couple of weeks before publication, I met with Damian Collins, the chair of Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS), at his office in Portcullis House, a modern glass building on the Parliamentary Estate. Collins had opened up an official inquiry into social media disinformation, and several MPs and committee chairs I’d talked with had recommended that I meet with him. Collins was extremely polite and posh and spoke with the preppy charm that English Tories of a certain breed seem to have. I was impressed with him from the start. He was far more aware of what Cambridge Analytica was than any other MP I had met, and he had in fact already called Nix to testify several months prior. Nix had denied before the committee—on record—that Cambridge Analytica used any Facebook data. I told Collins that was false and that Nix may have misled the committee—which was quite serious, as it was potentially contempt of Parliament. I plugged one of the drives from Carmichael’s safe in to my laptop and turned the screen to Collins. On the screen was a fully executed contract for Facebook data with both Nix’s and Kogan’s signatures signed in bright blue ink. We spent several hours going through internal documents from CA that established that the company used Facebook data and had relationships with Russian companies, and showing some of the extremely gruesome propaganda they had disseminated showing people being murdered. After Collins and the committee staff identified the documents they needed, I made a copy and handed a drive over to him. We agreed that, two weeks after the scheduled publication date, his inquiry would call me to testify in public. On that day, he would start a document dump via the committee of the documents I had giv
en him.
At the same time all this was happening, I had been updating the Information Commissioner’s Office—the government agency that investigates data crimes—on the evidence we were gathering about Cambridge Analytica’s illicit activities. After seeing the Channel 4 footage, I told Commissioner Elizabeth Denham that CA was still at it, proposing to commit crimes on behalf of prospective clients. The ICO asked us to hold off on breaking the stories, because they wanted to conduct a raid before everything went public. They didn’t want CA to have a chance to delete evidence. I gave them all the evidence I had, including copies of CA executives’ files, project documents, and internal emails, which they then passed along to the National Crime Agency, the British equivalent of the FBI. I had to curate the evidence, since it was all quite complicated, in order for the ICO to execute proper warrants for the raid. Tamsin and I were also preparing witness statements and a full written opinion to be provided to the Electoral Commission, about the crimes committed by the Leave campaign. We were hardly sleeping—working on legal documents, advising law enforcement, managing the journalists. It was an exhausting time. But, finally, everything was coming together.
About a week before publication, The Guardian sent out right-to-reply letters to the people and companies named in their reporting. The letters are a customary British journalism practice intended to give people a chance to respond to allegations before articles are published. On March 14, I received a letter from Facebook’s lawyers demanding that I hand over all my devices for their inspection, citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the California Penal Code in an attempt to intimidate me with criminal liability. On March 17, the day before publication, Facebook threatened to sue The Guardian if it moved forward with the articles, insisting that there had been no data leak. When the company realized that publication was inevitable, in an attempt to get ahead of the story and shift focus, it announced that it was banning me, Kogan, and Cambridge Analytica from using the platform. The Guardian and The New York Times were furious that Facebook was using the extra notice it had been given, in good faith, to attempt to undermine the story with its announcement.
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