Banks and Wigmore kept in contact with the Russian embassy; Wigmore wrote to invite Russian diplomats to attend Leave.EU events—including their Brexit victory party in June 2016. Though Banks reportedly consulted experts about the Russian gold and diamond mine investment offers, he told reporters he ultimately turned all of them down. Wigmore had also decided “not to proceed further” with an investment. But shortly after the Brexit campaign concluded, an investment fund associated with Jim Mellon, one of UKIP’s major donors, reportedly made an investment in Alrosa, the Russian state-owned diamond company, which was partially privatized. However, a representative of the firm said that the specifics of the investment were made without Mellon’s knowledge and that the fund had made an earlier investment in Alrosa when public shares were first offered in 2013. In late July 2016, a month after Brexit was won and just weeks after the Russian intelligence hack of the Democratic National Committee’s files and emails was leaked, Alexander Nix went to a polo match and was photographed with Ambassador Yakovenko sharing a bottle of Russian vodka. Coincidentally, this was also around the time that Nix was seeking to get access to WikiLeaks’s information for the Trump campaign.
With Brexit won, Farage and Banks set their sights on America, now deep in the midst of the 2016 campaign. Over the course of 2016, these Brits campaigned vigorously for Trump, with Farage attending a myriad of public events for the Republican candidate. It seemed normal to casual observers at the time that then-candidate Trump, declaring himself “Mr. Brexit,” would invite the lead figures of UKIP to his rallies. But what many Americans don’t understand is how connected the alt-right is. It is a coordinated global movement. And it became a massive security risk in 2016.
On August 20, 2016, Sergey Fedichkin, the Third Secretary of the Russian embassy, was sent an email by Andy Wigmore, with the subject line “Fwd Cottrell docs—Eyes Only.” There were a couple of attachments and a cryptic one-line message: “Have fun with this.” The attachments contained legal documents pertaining to George Cottrell’s arrest by U.S. federal agents. At the time, Cottrell was the chief of staff to Nigel Farage and the head of fundraising for UKIP. Farage said later that he knew nothing of Cottrell’s illegal activities. After flying to America to celebrate their recent Brexit victory before a large Trump rally at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Cottrell and Farage were at Chicago O’Hare airport, about to return to England. Before takeoff, several agents boarded the plane and arrested Cottrell on multiple counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud. He had also been linked to Moldindconbank, the Moldovan bank alleged to be a key player in the “Russian Laundromat” money-laundering scheme. Wigmore is recorded, in emails I obtained from my contact, sending Russian diplomats copies of the U.S. Justice Department’s charges. Following a plea agreement, Cottrell pleaded guilty to wire fraud.
The Russian embassy clearly knew how tightly connected key figures in the Brexit movement were to the Trump campaign, and the embassy kept cultivating their relationship to the point where they received documents from Wigmore about their UKIP associate’s FBI arrests. Why should Americans care about what Russia was doing in Britain? Because these Brexiteers shared the same data firm, in Cambridge Analytica, and the same adviser, in Steve Bannon, and they were clearly keeping the Russians informed at each step of the way. And these same Brexiteers were some of the very first people invited to Trump Tower after his surprise victory. The president-elect of the United States met with British citizens who were regularly briefing the Russian government.
As the journalists celebrated having exposed Cambridge Analytica and plunged the stock of an intransigent Facebook, I did not feel joyous. I was numb. It felt like watching the death of someone whose time has come. It was the most grueling and arduous thing I have ever been through. I only began to process what had happened months later, after the adrenaline subsided. I realized how much trauma I had endured and I allowed myself to feel the pain of the experience, a pain made all the more acute by the role I had played in this disaster. As I saw Trump rise to power and watched as he banned citizens of Muslim states from entering the United States and gave justifications for white supremacist movements, I couldn’t help feeling that I had laid the seeds for this to happen. I had played with fire, and now I watched as the world was burning. In heading to Congress, I was not simply going there to give my testimony. I was attending my own confessional.
CHAPTER 12
REVELATIONS
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I won’t tell you where I live, exactly. It’s somewhere between Shoreditch and Dalston, in the East End of London. I am the pink-haired guy who lives on the top floor, but I don’t really stand out much. The neighborhood is working class in its roots, and many buildings here were once factories in London’s industrial age. Faded paint on smoke-stained brickwork advertises long-gone products from a century ago. There is a détente between the Indian, Pakistani, and Caribbean communities that moved here in the last wave of Commonwealth immigration and the new wave of artists, gays, students, and grungy weirdos who are being pushed out of central London by the cost of living. There are art deco cinemas, roof gardens, and the restless cacophony of intoxicated clubgoers drinking cans of Red Stripe until 4 A.M. every weekend. One often sees completely veiled Muslim women shopping in the same off-license greengrocer as tattoo-clad club kids with asymmetrical hair. It is still a place where I can walk outside in relative anonymity.
My building is old, built in a time before the Internet was even imaginable and when indoor plumbing was still a novelty. The floor is wooden and solid, but every so often it creaks as you take a step. There are extra bolts on the door, installed after a group of men kept coming to the door the week after I went public. My neighbors started complaining, until they realized who I was. Now they let me know anytime they see people loitering nearby.
There are many things missing where I live. In my living room, there’s a stand in the far corner where there used to be a television. Wires still dangle from the walls there. It was a smart TV that connected to my Netflix and social media accounts, and it had a microphone and camera. In my room, there is a nightstand with a drawer that is lined with a special metallic fabric that prevents any devices in the drawer from sending or receiving electronic signals. As part of my bedtime ritual, I leave my devices in there. Across the room in my closet are my old electronics from my life before. An unplugged Amazon Alexa sits alone, buried among a pile of other electronic rubbish—tablets, phones, a smartwatch—that I have yet to dispose of properly. In another box sit the remnants of hard drives, degaussed, smashed up, or acid-bleached after the evidence on them was handed over to the authorities. The data is gone forever, and I might as well throw them out, but I feel oddly sentimental about them.
In the living room, I have an antique wooden desk from an old factory, and on it sits an air-gapped laptop that has never been connected to the Internet. I used it to work through evidence handed over to the House Intelligence Committee. In the drawer is the blank laptop I use for traveling, in case it is searched at the border. My personal computer sits in the living room, encrypted and locked down with a physical U2F key. The cameras are taped, although there is little you can do about the built-in microphone. On the floor, there is a private VPN server connected to the wall, which in turn connects onward onto other servers.
There is a security camera at the entrance of my building that relays data to a security company. I have no idea if any of it is encrypted, so who knows who is watching. When I leave my house, I bring a portable panic button, but I have not yet needed to use it. The NCA put me on a watch list connected to one of my phones. If I call, they will prioritize a response, even if I say nothing to the operator. My backpack always has a portable hardware VPN router in case I need to connect to insecure Wi-Fi, as well as several Faraday cases that I got in pink because it was cute. I often wear a hat, but people will still recognize me, even a year later. Almost daily,
I get the question “Are you…the whistleblower?”
My life now looks like that of a paranoid man, but after being assaulted in the street, receiving threats from rogue private security firms, having my hotel room broken in to late at night as I was sleeping, and experiencing two hacking attempts on my email in the past twelve months, it is only sensible to be cautious. When I had my flat checked for security risks, the TV was deemed a risk, as it could be used to watch or listen to me without my ever knowing. As we dismantled it, I smiled at the irony of a TV that watches you.
In the days leading up to the story’s publication, when Facebook began sending me legal threats and escalated my case up to its deputy general counsel and vice president, my lawyers realized that the company saw my whistleblowing as a major threat to its business. Having experience on other hacking cases, my lawyers knew what companies backed into a corner were willing to do. But Facebook was different. They did not need to hack me; they could simply track me everywhere because of the apps on my phone—where I was, who my contacts were, who I was meeting.
I disposed of my phone, and my lawyers bought new clean phones that have never touched Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. The terms and conditions of Facebook’s mobile app asked for microphone and camera access. Although the company is at pains to deny pulling user audio data for targeted advertising, there is nonetheless a technical permission sitting on our phones that allows access to audio capabilities. And I was not an average user: I was the company’s biggest reputational threat at the time. At least in theory, audio could be activated, and my lawyers were concerned that the company could listen in on my conversations with them or the police. Facebook already had access to my photos and my camera, which put them in a position to not just listen to me but also to see where I was. Even if I was alone in the bathroom taking a shower, I wasn’t really ever alone. If my phone was there, so was Facebook. There was no escape.
But getting rid of my phone was not going to be enough. My mom, dad, and sisters all had to remove Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from their phones for the same reason. But Facebook also knew who all my friends were, they knew where we liked to go out, what we wrote about in messages, and they knew where we all lived. Even hanging out with my friends became a risk, as Facebook had access to their phones. If a friend took a photo, Facebook could access it, and its facial recognition algorithms could, at least in theory, detect my face in the photos sitting on other people’s phones, even if they were strangers to me.
As I was getting rid of my old electronics, my friends joked that it was as if I was exorcising the demons inside the machines, and one friend even brought over some sage to burn just in case. A funny gesture, of course, but in a way it really was an exorcism. We now live in a world where there are invisible spirits made of code and data that have the power to watch us, listen to us, and think about us. And I wanted these specters gone from my life.
* * *
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ON MARCH 16, 2018, a day before The Guardian and The New York Times published my story, Facebook announced that it was banning me from not only Facebook but also Instagram. Facebook had refused to ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other armies of hate, but it chose to ban me. The company demanded that I hand over my phone and personal computer and said that the only way for me to be reinstated was, in effect, to give them the same information I was providing the authorities. Facebook behaved as if it were a nation-state, rather than a company. The firm did not seem to understand that I was not the subject of investigation—they were. My lawyers advised me to refuse their demands, so as not to interfere with a lawful police and regulatory investigation. Later, when I was working with the authorities, the ban made it far more difficult to hand over evidence that was sitting in my Facebook account, and the investigation into what happened during the Brexit referendum suffered as a result.
They say you appreciate something only when it’s gone, and it was only when I was erased from Facebook that I truly realized how frequently my life touched their platform. Several of my phone’s apps stopped working—a dating app, a taxi app, a messaging app—because they used Facebook authentication. Subscriptions and accounts I had on websites failed for the same reason. People often talk about a dualism: the cyber world and our “real lives.” But after having most of my digital identity confiscated, I can tell you they are not separate. When you are erased from social media, you lose touch with people. I stopped getting invited to parties—not intentionally, but because those invites always happened on Facebook or were posted on Instagram. Friends who did not have my new phone number found it nearly impossible to get hold of me, except by trying to send an email to my lawyers. When I got through the thick of the whistleblowing, it would only be in coincidental encounters at clubs or bars that I would make contact with people I had not seen in months.
And now, when guys on dating apps ask to check out my Instagram profile, it starts an awkward explanation about how I was banned—and that I’m not catfishing, I promise. It’s as if my identity has been confiscated and people no longer believe that I am who I say I am. Sometimes I get recognized as that guy, and people worry that someone might start watching them if they decide to meet me. I always tell them that they needn’t worry, because these companies are already tracking them 24/7. This ban was nothing more than a dick move by Facebook, and it felt like trolling by frightened bullies. For me, it created at most an annoying personal hassle and was not nearly as consequential to my life as the kinds of retaliation that other whistleblowers have experienced. (Not to mention the degree of damage to modern society that the platform had already aided and abetted.) But it showed me just how integral my online identity had become to so many facets of my life—and that my identity was afforded no due process rights or an impartial adjudication. Four days after my ban, during an emergency debate in Parliament, the British secretary of state for culture said that Facebook’s ability to unilaterally ban whistleblowers was “shocking,” because it raised serious questions about whether a company should be able to wield this kind of unchecked power.
Hundreds of millions of Americans have entered into Facebook’s invisible architecture thinking it was an innocuous place to share pics and follow their favorite celebrities. They were drawn into the convenience of connecting with friends and the ability to fend off boredom with games and apps. Users were told by Facebook that the enterprise was about bringing people together. But Facebook’s “community” was building separate neighborhoods just for people who look like them. As the platform watched them, read their posts, and studied how they interacted with their friends, its algorithms would then make decisions about how to classify users into digital neighborhoods of their kind—what Facebook called their “Lookalikes.” The reason for this, of course, was to allow advertisers to target these homogeneous Lookalikes with separate narratives just for people of their kind. Most users would not know their classification, as the other neighborhoods of people who did not look like them would remain unseen. The segmentation of Lookalikes, not surprisingly, pushed fellow citizens further and further apart. It created the atmosphere we are all living in now.
As the birthplace of social media, America was eased into the new digital commons of newsfeeds, followers, likes, and shares. And, as with the incremental effects of climate change on our shorelines, forests, and wildlife, it can be hard to fully picture the scale of change of something that envelops us. But there are cases where we can see the stark effects of social media, cases where it suddenly hits a country in full force. In the mid-2010s, Facebook entered into Myanmar and grew rapidly, quickly reaching 20 million users in a country of 53 million people. Facebook’s app came preinstalled on many smartphones sold in the country, and market research identified the site as one of the primary sources of news for Burmese citizens.
In August 2017, hate speech surged on Facebook targeting the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority group in Myanmar, with narra
tives of a “Muslim-free” Myanmar and calls for ethnic cleansing of the region going viral. Much of this was propaganda created and disseminated by military personnel conducting information operations. After Rohingya militants launched a coordinated attack on the police, the Burmese military capitalized on a surge in support they received online and proceeded to systematically kill, rape, and maim tens of thousands of Rohingya. Other groups joined in the slaughter, and calls to action to murder Rohingya continued to go out on Facebook. Rohingya villages were burned and more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees were forced across the border into Bangladesh. Facebook was warned repeatedly by international and local organizations about the situation in Myanmar. The company banned a Rohingya resistance group from the platform but left the military and pro-government groups on the site, which enabled them to continue spreading hate propaganda. This was despite what United Nations officials called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
In March 2018, the U.N. concluded that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Violence was enabled by Facebook’s frictionless architecture, propelling hate speech through a population at a velocity previously unimaginable. Facebook’s apathetic response was positively Orwellian. “There is no place for hate speech or content that promotes violence on Facebook, and we work hard to keep it off our platform,” read Facebook’s statement about its facilitating role in the ethnic cleansing of forty thousand human beings. It seemed for all the world that if you wanted to maintain an oppressive regime, Facebook would be an excellent company to turn to.
Mindfuck Page 27