Several weeks after the story went public, Shahmir Sanni was terminated from his job at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a think tank, after pressure from Conservative Party advisers. The alliance later admitted to his lawyers that they unlawfully fired Sanni in retaliation for what they called his “philosophical belief in the sanctity of British democracy.” Although the question of Parkinson’s job at 10 Downing Street was raised several times in Parliament, Parkinson kept his job and faced no consequences for using the press office of the prime minister to out his former intern as being gay. And Mark Gettleson, who provided evidence to authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, was pushed out of his new job at a mobile app company over reputational concerns about his whistleblowing.
In March 2018, just before the staff at Cambridge Analytica learned about the impending demise of their firm, Alexander Nix allegedly emptied £6 million from company accounts, preventing severance pay from being issued to its former staff. He later denied this at Parliament, saying that the withdrawn money was “in exchange for unbooked services” and that he intended on paying some of it back. Nix was shunned by many of his former business partners and peers in the private clubs of Pall Mall, but, as a man of exceptional wealth, he could continue living off his inheritance in his mansion in London’s Holland Park. Nothing much happened to him beyond some cringeworthy public hearings in Parliament in which he blamed the “global liberal media” for his company’s demise.
After I came forward with the Cambridge Analytica story, Brittany Kaiser rebranded herself as a whistleblower and hired a PR manager to start booking interviews. She attended a parliamentary hearing in which she admitted to being involved in the Nigeria project, said that Cambridge Analytica likely retained Facebook data, and outlined her relationship with Julian Assange. (Later, it would emerge that she visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.) Immediately after Kaiser’s testimony concluded, Nix texted her, “Well done Britt, it looked quite tough and you did ok. ;-).” The next day, she flew to New York and held a press conference to plug her new data project, which launched something called the Internet of Value Omniledger, apparently intended to unleash our “data freedom.”
Like Kaiser, several other former executives from Cambridge Analytica went on to found their own data companies. CA’s former head of product Matt Oczkowski founded a firm called Data Propria (Latin for “Personal Data”) and brought CA’s chief data scientist David Wilkinson with him. The firm has stated that it will focus on targeting “motivational behavioral triggers” and had already started work for the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Mark Turnbull, the former managing director of Cambridge Analytica, joined up with one of the firm’s former associates, Ahmad Al-Khatib, to set up Auspex International, which they described as an “ethically based” and “boutique geopolitical consultancy.”
My biggest regret was Jeff Silvester. I can’t even begin to put into words how maddening and disheartening it was for me to sit with the knowledge about what he and AIQ had done. He was my mentor when I was a teenager and the man who helped me enter politics in the first place. He had supported me, encouraged me, and nurtured my talents so I could grow. And I just still cannot understand how he could have let himself continue working for something so wrong, so colonial, so illegal, and so evil. I tried to talk to him, and I told him to be open with The Guardian, but I failed. He could have come clean. He could have cooperated with the investigations. He knew what AIQ had done was wrong. He knew that the effects of his work had profound consequences for the future of an entire nation and the rights of millions of people. Having to choose between a deep friendship and reporting a crime is torture, because no matter what you choose, you’ll feel profound regret. But I had no choice but to betray him. On the day The Guardian sent out the right-to-reply letters to all of the accused parties, I agonized over what was happening the entire day, waiting to hear anything. When he received his letter, Silvester finally learned of the choice I had made, and he began to realize what was about to happen to him. His final text message to me was simply “Wow.”
Walking into my first parliamentary hearing, to the sound of rapidly clicking cameras and shouted questions, I felt unexpectedly at ease. Allen sat behind me, occasionally passing me notes of legal advice. We had prepared for hours, going through the evidence, and I had the special protection of parliamentary privilege—meaning that nothing I said could be used in civil or criminal proceedings. The hearing caused a wave of legislative attention around the world, and the DCMS committee chair, Damian Collins, began organizing international joint hearings among fifteen national parliaments. There were debates on the floor of the House of Commons and cross-party support for regulating social media. For a couple of months, it seemed as if Britain was leading the way in challenging the power of Silicon Valley.
But then, in October 2018, seven months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Facebook, the company announced that it was making a major hire: a new apologist in chief to world governments. Facebook’s new global spin doctor was going to be Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom—the same man I used to work for in my days at LDHQ. Ironically, it was Clegg who had once vowed that he would go to prison before registering in a pilot national identity database. But he was also the guy whose tenure as deputy prime minister became in effect a five-year apology tour after he broke a host of key promises in the coalition government. And the more I thought about it, the more the pairing seemed to be a match made in heaven. Both Zuckerberg and Clegg had built their careers on compromising their principles, both suffered catastrophic blows of public confidence after they ignored their promises to users or voters, and both stopped being cool in 2010. When Channel 4 asked me for comment on camera after Clegg’s appointment was announced, all I could think to say was “This is bullshit.” They aired the comment, albeit with a bleep.
On May 24, 2019, Prime Minister Theresa May announced her intention to resign, triggering an internal leadership race within the Conservative Party. In the United Kingdom, if a prime minister resigns mid-term, the convention is that Her Majesty the Queen appoints the new leader of the governing party as the new prime minister without a general election. This means that the internal party back-roomers, donors, and paid members of the party can bypass an election and choose among themselves who shall lead Britain. On July 23, the members of the Conservative Party decided that the new prime minister would be Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and lead advocate for leaving the European Union without any negotiated exit deal (often referred to as a “hard Brexit”). When forming his new government, Johnson appointed Dom Cummings, his former colleague from Vote Leave, to become one of his new senior advisers in 10 Downing Street. It did not seem to matter that Cummings was the director of a campaign that cheated during the very referendum Johnson was now using as the “democratic” basis for leaving the European Union at almost any cost. Only a few months prior to his appointment, Cummings was found to be in contempt of Parliament after ignoring an order to appear before Parliament to answer questions about cheating and the dissemination of fake news in the EU referendum. Although Cummings is one of only a handful of people ever to be formally admonished by a unanimous vote of the House of Commons, the limits of parliamentary authority were tested, at it appears there were very few consequences for Cummings. And slated to join Cummings in the new Johnson government as a new special adviser to Her Majesty’s Treasury was Matthew Elliott, the former chief executive of Vote Leave and co-founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the lobbying group that fired Sanni in retaliation for his whistleblowing. It looked like a Vote Leave takeover of the British government. During his first Prime Minister’s Questions session in the House of Commons, Johnson was asked by opposition members about what was discussed in December 2016, when he met with Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, when he was Britain’s foreign secretary. His response was
simply “I have no idea.”
Inside Cambridge Analytica, I saw what greed, power, racism, and colonialism looks like up close. I saw how billionaires behave when they want to shape the world in their image. I saw the most bizarre, dark niches of our society. As a whistleblower, I saw what big companies will do to protect their profits. I saw the lengths to which people will go to cover up crimes that others committed for the sake of a convenient narrative. I saw flag-waving “patriots” turn a blind eye to the defacement of the rule of law on the most important constitutional question of a generation. But I also saw all the people who cared and who fought back against a failing system. I saw journalists at The Guardian, The New York Times, and Channel 4 all working to bear witness to the crimes committed by Cambridge Analytica and the incompetence of Facebook. I saw my brilliant lawyers outmaneuver every threat that was thrown my way. I saw the kindness of people who came to support me and asked for nothing in return. I saw the tiny Information Commissioner’s Office, based in the parish town of Wilmslow, England, use what powers it could to take on an American technology giant––eventually issuing Facebook the maximum fine allowable in law for data breaches.
And I saw members of Congress who were concerned and eager to learn about the brave new world we now find ourselves in. As I left the House Intelligence Committee hearing, emerging from the SCIF with my lawyers and Sanni, I shook hands with the members of the committee and was walked to the security entrance by Congressman Adam Schiff and his aides. They were gracious, and they thanked me for flying to America to help them understand not only Cambridge Analytica but the emerging risks to American elections posed by social media platforms. It would be the last of my testimonies in the United States, but everything felt far from resolved.
On July 24, 2019, the Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5 billion civil penalty against Facebook, and the same day the Securities and Exchange Commission issued notice of an additional $100 million fine. The regulators found that not only did Facebook fail to protect users’ privacy, the company misled the public and journalists by issuing false statements that it had seen no evidence of wrongdoing when it in fact had. The fine was one of the largest imposed by the U.S. government for any violation. In fact, this was the largest ever fine issued to an American company for violating consumers’ privacy rights, and was twenty times greater than the largest privacy or data security penalty ever imposed worldwide. However, it was nonetheless seen by investors as good news. The news actually increased Facebook’s share value by 3.6 percent, with the market tacitly recognizing that even the law cannot stop the growth of these technology giants.
I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I am far more cynical now than before I started this journey. But it hasn’t made me more resigned. If anything, it has made me even more radical. I used to believe that the systems we have broadly work. I used to think that there was someone waiting with a plan who could solve a problem like Cambridge Analytica. I was wrong. Our system is broken, our laws don’t work, our regulators are weak, our governments don’t understand what’s happening, and our technology is usurping our democracy.
So I had to learn to find my voice in order to speak up about what I saw was happening. I am hopeful, because I have seen what happens when we find our voices. When The Guardian took on this story, many journalists saw it as a series of conspiracy theories. The tech bros of Silicon Valley laughed at the notion that they should be subjected to any scrutiny. Politicos in D.C. and Westminster called the story niche. It took the persistence of a team of women at The Guardian’s Arts & Culture section and its Sunday paper, The Observer, where the blockbuster story appeared. It took the attention of the women who led the investigations at the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Electoral Commission. And it took two immigrant queer whistleblowers backed by a steadfast woman lawyer. This story took the leadership of dedicated women, immigrants, and queers to ignite a public awakening about the discreet colonizing power of Silicon Valley and the digital technologies they have created to surround us. We all persisted in raising our voices until the world could finally see what we saw.
Growing up queer, you learn early in life that your existence is outside the norm. We incubate ourselves inside a closet, remaining unknown, and hide our truth until it becomes unbearable. Living in a closet is painful. It is an act of emotional violence we inflict upon ourselves so as not to discomfort those around us. Queers understand systems of power intimately, and coming out is our transformative act of truth telling. In coming out, we realize the power of speaking our truth to those who may not want to hear it. We reject their comfort and make them listen. Why do so many gays blow whistles at Pride? To get your attention. To announce that we will no longer hide ourselves. To defy hegemonies of the powerful. And, like so many queers who came before me, I had to accept my own truth and come to terms with my inevitable failure to ever become society’s notion of a perfect man.
I am a queer whistleblower, and this was my second coming out. Subjecting me to covenants of nondisclosure, I was forced into a new closet, to live in hiding with my uncomfortable knowledge and objectionable truths. I lived my life for two years with a personalized don’t ask, don’t tell policy imposed upon me by powerful companies. If I hoped to avoid any consequences, I was forbidden to reveal myself to others, and I became their little secret. But like other out queers, I am a truth teller, and I chose to be indiscreet with those uncomfortable truths, to stop hiding, to stop being their secret, to face the consequences before me, and to shout out to the world what I know.
The closet is not a literal space; it is a social structure that we as queer people internalize and conform to. The closet is a container whose boundaries are imposed by others who want to control how you behave and present yourself. The closet is invisible, and it is placed upon you by default, never by choice, for others to create a more palatable version of who you are—for their benefit, not yours. Growing up in a closet means incrementally learning how to pass in society—which movements, tones, expressions, perspectives, or uttered desires transgress the norms of those social boundaries imposed upon you. Queer kids learn, little by little, how to restrain their behavior until it becomes almost second nature, until they pass. So incremental are these changes that sometimes you do not even notice how much you have changed your behavior until, one day, you decide to leave that closet. And part of coming out is coming to terms with how much of you has been constructed for you inside that closet, and it can be painful to realize how much of who you once were was imposed upon you without your awareness or consent. The closet is a place of acquiescing to society in exchange for passing, but it is also a place where rage builds as those boundaries and definitions slowly suffocate you until you cannot bear to remain inside that prison.
Coming out is our rejection of the definitions that have been imposed upon us by someone else. The ability to define our identities is extremely powerful, and whether the threats to that power take the form of a social closet or an algorithmic one, we must resist anyone or anything that seeks the power to define or classify who we are for their benefit. Silicon Valley risks creating a new hegemony of identity through its construction of these personalized spaces for each person. And these spaces are nothing but a new closet to define our identities, expressions, and behaviors. In harvesting and processing your data self, algorithms make decisions on how to define you, how to classify you, what you should notice, and who should notice you. But there is a fine line between an algorithm defining you in order to represent who you really are and an algorithm defining you to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of who it thinks you should become.
People are already morphing themselves to fit a machine’s idea of who they should be. Some of us are curating ourselves on social media to increase our follower engagement, to the point that who we really are and how we present online become confused and conflated. And when those followers see enough of these curated identities, so
me of them begin to hate who they are or how they look, and they starve their bodies to conform to a new standard that now surrounds them. Others click on links recommended to them by algorithms, engaging with that content, and get drawn further and further down the rabbit hole of personalization until their worldview changes without their realizing it. What we buy online is now curated based on a profile of us, defined by something else. Our worthiness as job, insurance, credit, or mortgage applicants is now based on a profile of us, defined by something else. The shows we watch and the music we discover are now preselected based on a profile of us, defined by something else. As we move toward the inevitable merger of our physical and digital worlds, more and more of our lives will start to become defined not by us but by something else. And so, if we are ever to resist our future lives being defined by something else, we may all need to come out of our closets before someone or something locks us inside.
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ON MAY 23, 2019, I woke up at 6 A.M., unusually early for me. My room was bright and warming up, the sunrise peeking through my curtains. I hate getting up early, so I stared at the ceiling for a bit before glancing out the window to see life emerging on the street. A guy I had been seeing stayed the night, so I had to slip out of bed carefully in order not to make a sound. It was polling day in Britain, in what was potentially the last-ever European Parliament election. My polling card said polls would open at 7 A.M., so I wanted to sneak out to run to the local community center where voting in my local ward was taking place.
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