Alternative War: Unabridged

by J. J. Patrick

  As far as I could see it, the existence of an effective data-wash was clear: whether it was legally or illegally sourced, it could enter the United Kingdom, or Europe even, and leave it just as freely.

  When I started looking behind Leave.EU, the mirroring of SCL’s registration became even clearer. Better For The Country Limited registered with the ICO in August 2015 at the same address as Leave.EU, but this company included transfers to countries and territories throughout the world. The company connections were becoming more obscure but, finally, provided the more direct connections which I had been missing. While Leave.EU had not yet posted accounts, Better For The Country Limited last filed showing over one million pounds in shareholder funds. The company was registered with Companies House in May 2015, listing its nature as “other information services.” The directorships when I looked, in April and May 2017, showed the prominent Leave.EU figure Andrew Wigmore, Maria Ming, Alison Marshall, Elizabeth Bilney, the well-known UKIP donor Arron Banks, Ranja Abbot, and Dawn Williams. Bilney I found interesting, also being listed as a director at Banks’ flagship alternative media outlet Westmonster, and a new venture ‘Big Data Dolphins’ alongside Alison Marshall.

  Big Data Dolphins was an unknown quantity having only been registered with Companies House in December 2016, giving its nature as “business and domestic software development” and “data processing, hosting and related activities.” The ICO registration, I saw, was a mirror of SCL’s but was different in that it was shown as having data transfers restricted to the EEA. The shareholders also link to Rock Services, Banks’ insurance company, though the majority share (91%) shows as being owned by Deep DD Limited which returns no trace on any company searches I’ve managed to do.

  Also registered at Lysander House, a development in Bristol and the home of most of Banks’ businesses, Bilney was listed as an active director of Chartwell Political Limited, a company set up in June 2014 to carry out market research and public opinion polling. The company then showed as owing nearly three hundred and forty thousand pounds. The second director, Bridget Rowe, was listed on the company website underneath a picture of the back of Banks talking to journalists and alongside her was the name James Pryor. Rowe worked in print news, including alongside Rupert Murdoch, and previously worked as the director of communications for UKIP. Pryor had worked on elections all over the world, for the Conservatives at Downing Street, and as a campaign director for UKIP. They claimed to be uniquely able to: “Identify the range of threats that can emerge to destabilise political and election campaigns,” and went on to say: “It is well known that ‘best intelligence’ wins wars, especially Information Wars. The battle for hearts and minds hinges, crucially, on securing, shaping, re-shaping and controlling the Message.”

  Bilney was, of course, also a director of Westmonster, the ‘Breitbart’ styled news agency launched by Arron Banks – which was incorporated in January 2017 and lists a major shareholder as Better For The Country Limited. The second major shareholder and director is Michael Heaver, previously communications officer for MEP Nigel Farage and former chair of UKIP's youth arm, Young Independence123. The youth group, much like the Sweden Democrats original movement for younger members, is no stranger to controversy. In 2013, the then chairman Olly Neville was fired by the party for supporting same-sex marriage. Another incident occurred on a few days later when the Northwest chairman and prospective Parliamentary candidate for Chester, Richard Lowe, was allegedly compelled to resign because of a lack of confidence over his support for same-sex marriage and other views that, according to reports: “Clashed with UKIP policy.” Additionally, during the first UKIP leadership election in 2016, youth members were accused of body shaming and attacking one of the candidates, Lisa Duffy, on a closed Facebook group. The group was shut down after the Huffington Post reported on racism and homophobic attacks being found on the page.

  By 2014, Heaver was actively writing for Breitbart, the right-wing alternative news outlet then headed by Bannon and funded by Mercer. Bannon had already launched the site in the UK at that time, specifically to further his “cultural war” and influence the 2015 general election. While Banks and Farage were openly with each other while in the US supporting the Trump campaign, Heaver provided a definite, prior connection between Farage, his official public office, and Bannon.

  The background information in all of this is of such a complex nature, I now find it easy to see how difficult it has been for the world’s media agencies to reduce the available evidence to the short, sharp punches needed for headline-led reporting. For example, both Mercer and Trump were both linked to Russia’s twelfth richest businessman, Dmitry Rybolovlev because Mercer’s yacht was seen docked near the oligarch in March 2017124 after Trump’s plane was seen next to the oligarch’s prior to the US election – though Trump and Dmitry were also connected by a ninety-five million property deal in Florida, a stone’s throw from Mar-a-lago.

  Rybolovlev himself has a controversial history125, associating with criminals in the 1990s before becoming embroiled in the murder trial of a business partner. During his divorce – the most expensive settlement in history – he was also implicated in the April 2016 Panama Papers, with reports on the judgement saying his use of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands was deemed a “textbook example of the lengths rich people (in most cases men) go to protect their considerable wealth in case of a marital breakup.” He was also implicated in the Football Leaks scandal which revealed he and football agent Jorge Mendes set up a secret system to illegally buy players’ shares. Using a Cyprus-based offshore investment fund, named Browsefish Limited, Rybolovlev illegally manipulated the price of his own players through third-party ownerships. If you add the Cyprus assessment from the Kremlin Watch report into this mix, the inability of the news outlets to condense stories like this is easily explained.

  Arron Banks was also named in the Panama Papers as a shareholder of PRI Holdings Limited which Panamanian-based Mossack Fonseca set up as an offshore company in 2013126. The British Virgin Islands, known by the abbreviation BVI, is an offshore British territory and international tax haven which dismissed an anti-corruption summit held in London, in April 2016, by then prime minister, David Cameron. Another shareholder of PRI was Elizabeth Bilney.

  Banks himself is also more directly linked to Russia. In his own account of the Brexit campaign127, Banks describes meeting “a shady character called Oleg” while at UKIP's annual conference in September 2015. “He was introduced to us as the First Secretary of the embassy – in other words, the KGB's man in London,” wrote the UKIP donor, who went on to say he was invited to a private meeting with the Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko. “Our host wanted the inside track on the Brexit campaign and grilled us on the potential implications,” Banks recorded in his memoir. Though the meeting was two years before I began investigating, I’ve picked through the Russian Embassy staff lists and found only one Oleg in a position prominent enough to warrant a public listing. Captain Oleg Kornienko is shown on the embassy’s website as the Defence and Naval attaché.

  Banks’ own directorships at Companies House are relatively straight forward. He’s an active director at Avista Awards (a food award scheme), Parsons Jewellers, Old Down event catering, Rock Services (his insurance company), and Precision Risk Services – an insurance investigator. However, a variant of the Precision Risk company name also featured in Bank’s Panama Papers listings under the PRI Holdings umbrella and was linked back to Gibraltar-based STM Fidecs Management Ltd, which acted as secretary to Banks’s PRI Holdings Limited. The Observer reported at the time that STM Fidecs Ltd was the first to register Leave.EU as a wholly owned subsidiary before its ownership passed to Banks.

  By this point, as I sat reading through pages and pages of documents and material, the international link between the alt-right and far-right parties was already established. The interference of Russia in western democracy and the substantial and genuine security threat it posed had been, for all
intents and purposes, fully confirmed. Even the collaborative use and extent of disinformation and propaganda had also been set out in an undeniable way. As I sat reviewing the ICO’s statement on their investigation while going back over the Electoral Commission documents, it was clear that our own independent bodies were deeply concerned about interference in democracy during the general election and were alive to the specific risks we faced. Equally, they didn’t have the right teeth to sink into the issue in any way likely to make a difference when up against this web of companies, both national and international, linked directly to Arron Banks – to Brexit – which included agencies specifically geared towards the deployment of tailored political messaging and the collection, use, and sale of intricate personal data.

  I could see it all so clearly. Our personal data was being harvested both here and abroad, bought and sold as a commodity, potentially illegally, while also being used for political purposes. This additionally relied on alternative media outlets to drive specific messages, including from parties directly serving in public offices. It was apparent that those who controlled the alternative media outlets also controlled the data – and its use – and all of them were indisputably connected to each other on both sides of the Atlantic. Cambridge Analytica had openly sourced data from survey operations too, using it to build psychometric profiles of electorates. This data had either, in part or in full, been sold on or transferred and subsequently used in the direct viral marketing of political messages. Leave.EU has used this data, working with Cambridge Analytica, and it appeared this fell within the ICO definition of illegal sugging. Robert Mercer, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks, Steve Bannon, Michael Heaver and Elizabeth Bilney were now inseparably linked to one another and, whether by data acquisition, personal association or through other linear exposure, all of these parties were also linked to Russia – a country directly implicated, at a state-sponsored level, in interfering with elections across the western world.

  Watching these puzzle pieces fall into each other was awful, if I’m honest, and it was hard to know where to start. Nonetheless, I took a deep breath and wrote to SCL, asking if they or Cambridge Analytica had ever been investigated by the ICO for data breaches, or if they are currently under investigation. I wanted their official comment on the Electoral Commission investigation into their relationship with Leave.EU, whether they were aware of the sugging definition, and if they were continuing the practice of using surveys to develop databases. I also wanted to know whether they had bought data from, or sold data to, Leave.EU, Better For The Country Ltd, or Big Data Dolphins.

  As the growing scale of the international data wash was starting to be exposed, the question started to shift. I wasn’t just sat asking what the hell happened anymore, I was asking who else was involved. But I didn’t get that answer straight away. Something unexpected happened instead.

  It was about eleven o’clock on the morning of the 3rd of May 2017 when I wrote to the SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections, asking the specific questions arising from my investigations. They replied at half-three in the afternoon the day after128, Thursday the 4th of May, not from SCL, but from Cambridge Analytica’s press email address, answering the questions. This wasn’t a standard press office reply, however. The subject line read “Complaint” and the email was copied to the ethics team at the National Union of Journalists (of which I am a freelance member), Byline, and Impress (the new press regulator I work to the rules of). The company wrote: “You have published a number of inaccuracies and misrepresentations about Cambridge Analytica in your Byline blogs entitled “Data Laundering: The New Chemical Warfare” (28 April) and “The Big Data Wash” (3 May).” They went on to list a number of points they wanted addressing, requesting me to “let us know how Byline intends to correct these mistakes” – though there were no mistakes – and also provided answers to the original questions I had asked. It was bizarre and I am not the only person who felt that it was the beginning of a rather litigious effort to have all mention of them they didn’t like struck from the record – which seems to be the reason why they set the legal team on the Guardian. I suppose I had two benefits on my side, namely that I know bankruptcy isn’t that bad – as long as you can ration food – and I’d already taken on the Met and won where it counted. That’s without even starting on the inevitable fact I was only writing the truth.

  The specific clarifications requested by Cambridge Analytica actually ended up raising more questions than they resolved, but for the sake of clarity and chronology, the original questions and responses from a company spokesperson were:

  1. Have SCL Elections / Cambridge Analytica ever been investigated by the ICO for data breaches / are you currently under investigation by the ICO?

  “No and no. CA/SCL has never been investigated by the ICO for data breaches. We are compliant with data laws. Like a range of organisations, we are in touch, with the ICO, to help them with their ongoing assessment into the use of data analytics.”

  2. What is your official comment on the Electoral Commission investigation in the LEAVE.EU campaign, which appears to centre around donations of services by yourselves.

  “We did not do any work (paid or unpaid) for Leave.EU.”

  3. Are you aware that the practice of data collection by way of surveys for other uses, including the sales of database to others, and viral marketing, falls within the ICO definition of 'sugging'? Are you continuing this practice?

  “Whenever we conduct research, we have the explicit consent of each respondent for the use of their data.”

  4. Do you buy from or sell data to Leave.EU, Better For The Country Ltd, or Big Data Dolphins? Have you bought or sold data from these companies in the past?

  “No we have not.”

  Cambridge Analytica went on to list the points it found objectionable and started by saying it did not use psychometrics on the Trump campaign. This wasn’t true. There’s a rather brilliant video129 which was filmed at the Concordia Summit in the United States of America in September 2016. The presentation was given by Cambridge Analytica's CEO, Alexander Nix, and, in the video, he states Cambridge Analytica had profiled all adult Americans and, before leaving the stage, announced one of the remaining presidential candidates was using this new technology. At that time there were two candidates left in US election, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The latter did not use their services. Also, in a broadly reported press release from Cambridge Analytica, Nix is quoted as saying: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump's extraordinary win.” Additionally, in their own marketing materials, the company says: “We collect up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans…and predict the behaviour of like-minded people,” to which Nix added “if I was to tell you that an individual had voted for a particular party over the last 40 years the same way, you would conclude that is a fairly good indicator…Now imagine if we could overlay thousands of data points that are predictable about behaviour. Of course it works.” When later reports started to critique the company's technique, Nix was quoted in March 2017, by the New York Times, as saying130: “We bake a cake, it’s got 10 ingredients in it. Psychographics is one of them.”

  So, I had clarified that they had used the method in the Trump campaign, with their own words. It seemed odd, to be honest, they would even challenge it but they had also been busy deleting web records linking them to Leave.EU by this point.

  Unsurprisingly, the company spokesperson went on to dispute any connection to Leave.EU, saying they did not work (paid or unpaid) for Leave.EU and did not work on the EU Referendum. Again, this seemed bizarre, given that most of the evidence of the collaboration came from them and the Electoral Commission was specifically investigating donation-in-kind of services made to Leave.EU. Of course, those documents I’d seen, backed up by other reports, showed quite clearly that a working link between Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU d
id exist.

  Cambridge Analytica also said their psychometric offering was not based on a method developed by a Cambridge academic – they were talking about Kosinski – and added that the Ocean personality model had been around for about 30 years. They also denied any dealings with academic researcher Michael Kosinski of Cambridge University. It was known and accepted the Ocean model had been in existence for around thirty years and the sections of the original articles they were referring to weren’t controversial at all. One said: “Scientific research, including that by Michael Kosinski at Cambridge University, has shown that a big data profile can be used to develop targeted marketing or messaging, designed to drive a behavioural response in an individual. The technique is known as either psychographics or psychometrics and has become famous following its use by Cambridge Analytica in the Trump and Brexit campaigns,” while the other said: “A basic profile, as Michael Kosinski found in his research, can predict your behaviours just based on social media likes. An advanced profile, based on what websites you visit, what news you read, your job, your politics, your purchases, your medical records, would mean such a company knows you better than you know yourself.” In the end, I made one small amendment, to the effect that the data collection by survey bore similarities to Kosinski’s work, rather than was based upon it. Still, it all seemed overkill. Cambridge Analytica also stated it does not use Facebook likes, added it has no connection whatsoever with “fake news” or “alternative facts”, despite having had Bannon on the board, and said it did not use “bots” on the presidential campaign. I put these weird points on the record in a follow-up article for reasons of fairness, even though the original articles attributed none of these to the company. I think the last point they raised was the one which they knew was a sticking point. They said they had never transferred any data to Leave.EU. By then I had actually submitted the evidence I’d gathered during my investigations to the ICO, the appropriate authority, so they could investigate. That, technically, made me a witness but they knew this as they’d clearly seen the articles.