The great British Brexit robbery: how
our democracy was hijacked
A shadowy global operation involving
big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave
campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the
polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?
by Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday 7 May 2017 09.00 BST
“The connectivity
that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile
intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent
a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.”
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016
“It’s not MI6’s job to warn of internal threats. It was a
very strange speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a
shot across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa May’s government?
Does she know something she’s not telling us?”
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017
In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie
was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d
previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert
Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and
achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in
both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in
2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet
Brexited. The world had not yet turned.
“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company
that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call
Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare
firm.”
Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological
warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the
same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they
mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in
the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”
Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare
firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for
MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old
Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You
were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like
election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”
On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief
executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. “She said, ‘You
really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she
suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her
father.”
Who’s her father?
“Eric Schmidt.”
Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google?
“Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company
called Palantir.”
I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge
Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still
a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is
practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with
governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon
Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.
In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an
introduction to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I
have ever researched.
A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of
why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling
of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm:
Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley –
Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the
global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.
It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political
debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening
in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump
administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge
Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these
relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle
into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being
remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.
There are three strands to this story. How the foundations
of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British
democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination
enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab
for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed,
harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.
My entry point into this story began, as so many things do,
with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a
wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust
happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.
Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it
was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North
Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first
person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem
and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.
He called the company a central point in the right’s
“propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump
election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second
article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative
news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon,
the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence
suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and
replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing
propaganda.
Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early
artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge
funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is
also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s
communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his
company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.
The second article triggered two investigations, which are
both continuing: one by the Information Commissioner’s Office into the possible
illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is “focused
on whether one or more donations – including services – accepted by Leave.EU
was ‘impermissable’”.
What I then discovered is that Mercer’s role in the
referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The
key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass
ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based
in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.
It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave
campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign
budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for
Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750.
“Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless
campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the
Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.
How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a
pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the
centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London
has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the
Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on
discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never
heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet.
More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other
campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page
website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”
Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that
concluded UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms
of digital campaigning. Offshore companies, money poured into databases,
unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had
always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose.
Laws, the report said, that needed “urgently reviewing by parliament”.
AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated
network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had
found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company
listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A
day later, that online reference vanished.
There had to be a connection between the two companies.
Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was
too big a coincidence. But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica,
Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term
“contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We
published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.
Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed
by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his
time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It
happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the
Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”
He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was
AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.
Who’s Chris Wylie?
“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting
[individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west
Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends.
He’s the one who brought them in.”
There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica
and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert
Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built
our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then
Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then
Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”
I did find Chris Wylie. He refused to comment.
Key to understanding how data would transform the company is
knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from “Director of Defence
Operations, SCL Group”, that helped me realise this. It’s from “Commander Steve
Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd)” complaining about my use in my Mercer
article of the word “disinformation”.
I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d
written to “deception” and “propaganda”, which I said I understood to be
“roughly synonymous with ‘disinformation’.” It’s only later that it strikes me
how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about
military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.
What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics”
firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial
complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment
in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary
under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi
Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s
pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.
Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for
British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from
the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.
SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a
couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British
defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An
ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler,
has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.
This is not just a story about social psychology and data
analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using
military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of
sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it
is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It
should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not
transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether
we are actually living in a democracy or not.”
Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee,
were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its
psychological warfare techniques. “It brought psychology, propaganda and
technology together in this powerful new way,” David tells me.
And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from
Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place.
Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data
(legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work
about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and
much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica
contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new
Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which
also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also
those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.
Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that
enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism
that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.
The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer
datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and
uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all
this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their
email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s
information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled
Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”
Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and
with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high
in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country.
The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.
Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key
states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective,
according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to
persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It
has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign,
but this document provides the first actual evidence.
But does it actually work? One of the criticisms that has
been levelled at my and others’ articles is that Cambridge Analytica’s “special
sauce” has been oversold. Is what it is doing any different from any other
political consultancy?
“It’s not a political consultancy,” says David. “You have to
understand this is not a normal company in any way. I don’t think Mercer even
cares if it ever makes any money. It’s the product of a billionaire spending
huge amounts of money to build his own experimental science lab, to test what
works, to find tiny slivers of influence that can tip an election. Robert
Mercer did not invest in this firm until it ran a bunch of pilots – controlled
trials. This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. He is not
going to splash $15m on bullshit.”
Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New
York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US
military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The
capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well
established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a
global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t
even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about
exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate
people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of
international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.
“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up
these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of
government. That’s a very worrying situation.”
A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad
in 2013 brings all the elements in this story together. Just as Robert Mercer
began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL
was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago. The brief
involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the
time. And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote
Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.
David said: “The standard SCL/CA method is that you get a
government contract from the ruling party. And this pays for the political
work. So, it’s often some bullshit health project that’s just a cover for
getting the minister re-elected. But in this case, our government contacts were
with Trinidad’s national security council.”
The security work was to be the prize for the political
work. Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture
citizens’ browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying
natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national
police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to
commit crime.
“The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was
pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the
Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying,” said David.
These documents throw light on a significant and
under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped
Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the
Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon
now sits in the White House. It is also reported to be in discussions for
“military and homeland security work”.
In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what
data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes.
Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian
surveillance state?
A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart
of the administration. Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with
many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch. One memo
references Cambridge Analytica trying to place an article with a journalist in
Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “RM re-channeled and connected with Jamie
McCauley from Robert Thomson News Corp office,” it says.
It makes me think again about the story involving Sophie
Schmidt, Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Is it a telling detail, or is it a
clue to something else going on? Cambridge Analytica and Palantir both declined
to comment for this article on whether they had any relationship. But witnesses
and emails confirm that meetings between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir took
place in 2013. The possibility of a working relationship was at least
discussed.
Further documents seen by the Observer confirm that at least
one senior Palantir employee consulted with Cambridge Analytica in relation to
the Trinidad project and later political work in the US. But at the time, I’m
told, Palantir decided it was too much of a reputational risk for a more formal
arrangement. There was no upside to it. Palantir is a company that is trusted
to handle vast datasets on UK and US citizens for GCHQ and the NSA, as well as
many other countries.
Now though, they are both owned by ideologically aligned
billionaires: Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. The Trump campaign has said that
Thiel helped it with data. A campaign that was led by Steve Bannon, who was
then at Cambridge Analytica.
A leading QC who spends a lot of time in the investigatory
powers tribunal said that the problem with this technology was that it all
depended on whose hands it was in.
“On the one hand, it’s being done by companies and
governments who say ‘you can trust us, we are good and democratic and bake
cakes at the weekend’. But then the same expertise can also be sold on to
whichever repressive regime.”
In Britain, we still trust our government. We respect our
authorities to uphold our laws. We trust the rule of law. We believe we live in
a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of
this story so profoundly unsettling.
The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the
mystery that was AggregateIQ. Trinidad was SCL’s first project using big data
for micro-targeting before the firm was acquired by Mercer. It was the model
that Mercer was buying into. And it brought together all the players: the
Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, AggregateIQ, Chris Wylie, and two other
individuals who would play a role in this story: Mark Gettleson, a focus group
expert who had previously worked for the Lib Dems. And Thomas Borwick, the son
of Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington.
When my article linking Mercer and Leave.EU was published in
February, no one was more upset about it than former Tory adviser Dominic
Cummings, the campaign strategist for Vote Leave. He launched an irate Twitter
tirade. The piece was “full of errors & itself spreads disinformation” “CA
had ~0% role in Brexit referendum”.
A week later the Observer revealed AggregateIQ’s possible
link to Cambridge Analytica. Cummings’s Twitter feed went quiet. He didn’t
return my messages or my emails.
Questions had already been swirling about whether there had
been any coordination between the Leave campaigns. In the week before the
referendum, Vote Leave donated money to two other Leave groups – £625,000 to
BeLeave, run by fashion student Darren Grimes, and £100,000 to Veterans for
Britain, who both then spent this money with AggregateIQ.
The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A
source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it
had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British
jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the
Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.
On his blog, Dominic Cummings has written thousands of words
about the referendum campaign. What is missing is any details about his data
scientists. He “hired physicists” is all he’ll say. In the books on Brexit,
other members of the team talk about “Dom’s astrophysicists”, who he kept “a
tightly guarded secret”. They built models, using data “scraped” off Facebook.
Finally, after weeks of messages, he sent me an email. We
were agreed on one thing, it turned out. He wrote: “The law/regulatory agencies
are such a joke the reality is that anybody who wanted to cheat the law could
do it easily without people realising.” But, he says, “by encouraging people to
focus on non-stories like Mercer’s nonexistent role in the referendum you are
obscuring these important issues”.
And to finally answer the question about how Vote Leave
found this obscure Canadian company on the other side of the planet, he wrote:
“Someone found AIQ [AggregateIQ] on the internet and interviewed them on the
phone then told me – let’s go with these guys. They were clearly more competent
than any others we’d spoken to in London.”
The most unfortunate aspect of this – for Dominic Cummings –
is that this isn’t credible. It’s the work of moments to put a date filter on
Google search and discover that in late 2015 or early 2016, there are no Google
hits for “Aggregate IQ”. There is no press coverage. No random mentions. It
doesn’t even throw up its website. I have caught Dominic Cummings in what
appears to be an alternative fact.
But what is an actual fact is that Gettleson and Borwick,
both previously consultants for SCL and Cambridge Analytica, were both core
members of the Vote Leave team. They’re both in the official Vote Leave
documents lodged with the Electoral Commission, though they coyly describe
their previous work for SCL/Cambridge Analytica as “micro-targeting in Antigua
and Trinidad” and “direct communications for several PACs, Senate and Governor
campaigns”.
And Borwick wasn’t just any member of the team. He was Vote
Leave’s chief technology officer.
This story may involve a complex web of connections, but it
all comes back to Cambridge Analytica. It all comes back to Mercer. Because the
connections must have been evident. “AggregateIQ may not have belonged to the
Mercers but they exist within his world,” David told me. “Almost all of their
contracts came from Cambridge Analytica or Mercer. They wouldn’t exist without
them. During the whole time the referendum was going on, they were working
every day on the [Ted] Cruz campaign with Mercer and Cambridge Analytica.
AggregateIQ built and ran Cambridge Analytica’s database platforms.”
Cummings won’t say who did his modelling. But invoices
lodged with the Electoral Commission show payments to a company called Advanced
Skills Institute. It takes me weeks to spot the significance of this because
the company is usually referred to as ASI Data Science, a company that has a
revolving cast of data scientists who have gone on to work with Cambridge
Analytica and vice versa. There are videos of ASI data scientists presenting
Cambridge Analytica personality models and pages for events the two companies
have jointly hosted. ASI told the Observer it had no formal relationship with
Cambridge Analytica.
Here’s the crucial fact: during the US primary elections,
Aggregate IQ signed away its intellectual property (IP). It didn’t own its IP:
Robert Mercer did. For AggregateIQ to work with another campaign in Britain,
the firm would have to have had the express permission of Mercer. Asked if it
would make any comment on financial or business links between “Cambridge
Analytica, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, AggregateIQ, Leave.EU and Vote Leave”,
a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica said: “Cambridge Analytica did no paid
or unpaid work for Leave.EU.”
This story isn’t about cunning Dominic Cummings finding a
few loopholes in the Electoral Commission’s rules. Finding a way to spend an
extra million quid here. Or (as the Observer has also discovered
)underdeclaring the costs of his physicists on the spending returns by £43,000.
This story is not even about what appears to be covert coordination between
Vote Leave and Leave.EU in their use of AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica.
It’s about how a motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue,
Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in
a century.
Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to
Trump, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of
Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that
stretches back years. Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since
at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in
2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political
war”, he told the New York Times.
Britain had always been key to Bannon’s plans, another
ex-Cambridge Analytica employee told me on condition of anonymity. It was a
crucial part of his strategy for changing the entire world order.
“He believes that to change politics, you have to first
change the culture. And Britain was key to that. He thought that where Britain
led, America would follow. The idea of Brexit was hugely symbolically important
to him.”
On 29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one
of the smaller campaigns, Veterans for Britain. Cummings’s strategy was to
target people in the last days of the campaign and Vote Leave gave the smaller
group £100,000 in the last week. A small number of people they identified as
“persuadable” were bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in
the last few days.
I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of
communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ.
“I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up
and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. They were this Canadian company
which was opening an office in London to work in British politics and they were
doing stuff that none of the UK companies could offer. Their targeting was
based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was
proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural
insights. They approached us.”
It seems clear to me that David Banks didn’t know there
might have been anything untoward about this. He’s a patriotic man who believes
in British sovereignty and British values and British laws. I don’t think knew
about any overlap with these other campaigns. I can only think that he was
played.
And that we, the British people, were played. In his blog,
Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to “about 600,000 people – just
over 1% of registered voters”. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of
the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters. The
referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to
take a clear shot at. Or I should say US billionaires and other interested
parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and
America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is
wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too.
For the last month, I’ve been writing about the links
between the British right, the Trump administration and the European right. And
these links lead to Russia from multiple directions. Between Nigel Farage and
Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica.
A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the
world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have
revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with
executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees
to working for Russian entities.
Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside
British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another
election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the
authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned
that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess
whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign
finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission.
Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being
done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum.
Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described
the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the
truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call
it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up
its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with
Trump’s America.
Martin Moore of King’s College, London, pointed out that
elections were a newly fashionable tool for would-be authoritarian states.
“Look at Erdoğan in Turkey. What Theresa May is doing is quite anti-democratic
in a way. It’s about enhancing her power very deliberately. It’s not about a
battle of policy between two parties.”
This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks
like a “managed” democracy. Paid for a US billionaire. Using military-style
technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum
result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or
Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a
brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.
Key names
SCL Group
British company with 25 years experience in military
“psychological operations” and “election management”.
Cambridge Analytica
Data analytics company formed in 2014. Robert Mercer owns
90%. SCL owns 10%. Carried out major digital targeting campaigns for Donald
Trump campaign, Ted Cruz’s nomination campaign and multiple other US Republican
campaigns – mostly funded by Mercer. Gave Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU “help” during
referendum.
Robert Mercer
US billionaire hedge fund owner who was Trump’s biggest
donor. Owns Cambridge Analytica and the IP [intellectual property]
ofAggregateIQ. Friend of Farage. Close associate of Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon
Trump’s chief strategist. Vice-president of Cambridge
Analytica during referendum period. Friend of Farage.
Alexander Nix
Director of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group.
Christopher Wylie
Canadian who first brought data expertise and microtargeting
to Cambridge Analytica; recruited AggregateIQ.
AggregateIQ
Data analytics company based in Victoria, British Columbia,
Canada. Worked for Mercer-funded Pacs that supported the Trump campaign. Robert
Mercer owns AggregateIQ’s IP. Paid £3.9m by Vote Leave to “micro-target” voters
on social media during referendum campaign. Outside British jurisdiction.
Veterans for Britain
Given £100,000 by Vote Leave. Spent it with AggregateIQ.
BeLeave
Youth Leave campaign set up by 23-year-old student. Given
£625,000 by Vote Leave & £50,000 by another donor. Spent it with
AggregateIQ.
DUP
Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Spent £32,750
with AggregrateIQ.
Thomas Borwick
Vote Leave’s chief technology officer. Previously worked
with SCL/Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ.
ASI Data Science
Data science specialists. Links with Cambridge Analytica,
including staff moving between the two and holding joint events. Paid £114,000
by Vote Leave. Vote Leave declared £71,000 to Electoral Commission.
Donald Trump
US president. Campaign funded by Mercer and run by Bannon.
Data services supplied by Cambridge Analytica and AggregrateIQ.
Nigel Farage
Former Ukip leader. Leader of Leave.EU. Friend of Trump,
Mercer and Bannon.
Arron Banks
Bristol businessman. Co-founder of Leave.EU. Owns data
company and insurance firm. Single biggest donor to Leave – £7.5m.
Some names, ages and other identifying details of sources in
this article have been changed
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