New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate
voters across the globe, from the 2016 election in the United States to the Brexit campaign
in Britain to elections in over 60 countries, including Ukraine, Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil.
Cambridge Analytica was founded by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. Trump’s former
adviser Steve Bannon of Breitbart News was one of the company’s key strategists and
claims to have named the company. The company collapsed in May 2018 after The Observer newspaper
revealed the company had harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’
knowledge or consent. Cambridge Analytica used the data to sway voters during the 2016
campaign. A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica
documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company’s operations across
the globe, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser
John Bolton. The documents come from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, who
worked at the firm for three-and-a-half years before leaving in 2018. Kaiser is featured
prominently in the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, which has been shortlisted for
an Oscar. There were red flags here and there, especially
when I would call our lawyers, who were actually Giuliani’s firm at the time, in order to
ask for advice on what I could and could not do with certain data projects. And I always
got told, “Hey, you’re creating too many invoices.”
But what really landed the plane for me was, a month after Donald Trump’s election, everybody
at Cambridge Analytica who had worked both on the Trump campaign and on the Trump super
PAC, which ran the “Defeat Crooked Hillary” campaign — they gave us a two-day-long debrief,
which I write about in detail in my book Targeted, about what they did. They showed us how much
data they collected, how they modeled it, how they identified people as individuals
that could be convinced not to vote, and the types of disinformation that they sent these
people in order to change their minds. It was the most horrific two days of my life.
So what did you do after that? I spent a while trying to figure out if there
was still anything I could salvage from what I learned there. Was it still possible to
use these tools for good? And when I realized that the company had gone way too far in the
wrong direction, I started working with journalists in order to go through and figure out what
I had in my documents that could possibly assist in saving democracy in the future.
You testified before the British Parliament. You were subpoenaed by Robert Mueller. You’ve
been involved in a lot of information giving during these investigations. In an odd way,
would you describe yourself as a persuadable? Definitely. And that’s actually a story
that is very prevalent in my book. Most people don’t like to think that they are persuadable.
We all like to think that we can’t be manipulated. But, trust me, we’re not as digitally literate
as we like to think that we are. That’s why I released the Hindsight Files, because
I want everyone to realize how easy it is for us to be manipulated and that we need
to be aware in order to protect ourselves. Peter Thiel, as far as I am aware, was the
head of Trump’s technology advisory council. There were multiple meetings where Alexander
Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was either being invited or attempting to
be invited to those meetings, through the Mercers, through Kellyanne Conway, through
Steve Bannon. And you were with Rebekah Mercer, right, on
Trump inauguration night? Absolutely. The Mercers and a lot of other
people who had played a very large role in the funding and in the campaigning for Donald
Trump were reaching as far as they possibly could to technology tools in order to achieve
their goals. And are they doing it now?
Absolutely. I think if anybody thinks that this is different than 2016, they are sorely
mistaken. In 2016, everybody saw how successful Cambridge Analytica’s tactics are, so now
there’s hundreds of Cambridge Analyticas around the world, especially acting in the
U.S. elections right now.