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 “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.” “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?” In
June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through “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 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 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 The money
man: Robert Mercer, Trump supporter and owner of Cambridge Analytica.
Photograph: Rex It
also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in There
are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian
surveillance state are being laid in the 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 autocompletesuggestions 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 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 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 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 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 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.” Mark
Zuckerberg says change the world, yet he sets the rules
Carole Cadwalladr Even if we don’t think the
Facebook boss’s manifesto is ill-intentioned, we should be worried by
its implications Read more 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 Steve
Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in 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 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. Steve
Bannon, former vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, now a key adviser to
Donald Trump. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters 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 “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.” Google
is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes
and distorts how we see the world
Carole Cadwalladr The right is rewriting history on
the web. We must seize back control | Carole Cadwalladr Read more A
project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in 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 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 In
the 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 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
Donald
Trump with Peter Thiel, one of his key The
details of the 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 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 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.” Illustration:
James Melaugh 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 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 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 “He
believes that to change politics, you have to first change the culture. And On
29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one of the smaller
campaigns, Veterans for I
asked David Banks, Veterans for “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 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 A
map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world
where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes What
Brexit should have taught us about voter manipulation
Paul Flynn Read more 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 Martin
Moore of King’s College, This
is Key names
SCL Group
Steve Bannon Alexander Nix Christopher Wylie AggregateIQ Veterans for DUP Thomas Borwick ASI Data Science Donald Trump Nigel Farage Arron Banks |