from The Grayzone
Christopher Wylie Carole Cadwalladr Cambridge Analytica Russia Brexit
The huckster and the hack: UK govt report undermines stars of Cambridge
Analytica-Russiagate scandal
ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN·NOVEMBER 2, 2020
INFORMATION WARS
RUSSIA
UK
Self-styled whistleblower Christopher Wylie and The Guardian reporter Carole
Cadwalladr earned film deals and flashy awards by blaming Brexit and Trump
on a sweeping conspiracy between data firm Cambridge Analytica and Russia. A
British government investigation shatters their claims to fame.
Two years after the stunning June 2016 passage of the Brexit referendum,
affirming the British publics desire to withdraw from the European Union,
and the equally unexpected November 2016 election of Donald Trump to the
White House, a scandal erupted that seemed to explain these rogue right-wing
victories as the handiwork of an especially devilish data-mining scheme.
In 2018, a hipster techie named Christopher Wylie emerged as a supposed
whistleblower from the UK data firm SCL-Cambridge Analytica. Wylie claimed
inside knowledge of how his former employer illicitly harvested the personal
data of British and American voters through Facebook to conduct
micro-targeting operations in favor of Brexit and Trump. Further, and most
memorably, he asserted that known Russian agents were involved in the
right-wing plot.
Here is what I know, Wylie tweeted, when I was at Cambridge Analytica,
the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St
Petersburg, tested US voter opinion on Putins leadership, and hired hackers
from Russia all while [former Trump Chief of Staff Steve] Bannon was in
charge.
As soon as Wylie went public, his accusations against Cambridge Analytica
became a central pillar of the Russiagate narrative, bridging Trump-Putin
across the Atlantic to Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism.
Wylie, a self-proclaimed progressive Eurosceptic, has since published a
book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, and
inspired an Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary about the supposed scandal
called The Great Hack. In 2018, Wylies supposed revelations earned him a
spot on Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People. A film based on the
rebel techies interview with The Guardian is on the way.
Wylie has boastfully described himself as the gay Canadian vegan who
somehow ended up creating Steve Bannons psychological warfare mindfuck
tool, who enjoys a wild ride from fashion to fascism to fashion. (After
starting out as a fashion school student, he said he was hired by H&M in
2018.)
The hipster whistleblower was cultivated over the course of 2017 and 2018 by
The Guardians Russia-obsessed correspondent Carole Cadwalladr. Operating as
Wylies de facto publicist and churning out a stream of reports based on his
spectacular claims, Cadwalladr has won admiring media profiles, an array of
journalism awards, and a finalist nomination in the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for
National Reporting.
In July 2018, Cadwalladr issued a bold prophesy that stirred liberal
audiences across the Atlantic: From [former FBI director Robert] Muellers
most recent indictments [of Trump officials], it is clear that the data
trail must be coming soon: the chain of evidence that is required to
understand how the Russian governments influence operation targeted
American voters.
She pointed to a forthcoming report by the British Information
Commissioners Office (ICO) and its commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, on the
role of SCL-Cambridge Analytica in Brexit and 2016 US elections: And here
is the clue and where it is believed Denham comes in what data it was
based on.
Her self-styled whistleblower source, Wylie, has also praised Denham: I
want to point out this Russia/Facebook/[Cambridge Analytica] investigation
is being led by women like Elizabeth Denham, the UK Information
Commissioner, and Carole Cadwalladr at the Guardian. When the tech bros
looked away, these women paid attention and put in the hours to
investigate.
But the data trail promised by Cadwalladr never arrived. Instead, Denham and
the British ICO produced a report that contradicted virtually ever major
prediction and assertion that Wylie and Cadwalladr made about SCL-Cambridge
Analytica and its role in UK politics. Published this October, the ICO
report reinforces a British parliamentary investigation into Brexit that
found no evidence of Russian meddling.
With the release of the ICO report, the Cambridge Analytica-Russiagate
bombshell that erupted two years ago has been exposed as another dud. Now,
there are serious questions about the credibility of the figures who
inspired the debunked narrative.
Another Russiagate plot point reaches a revealing denouement
The United Kingdoms Information Commissioners Office (ICO) spent over two
years investigating Cambridge Analytica (CA) and associated entities,
including its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL);
the Canada-based Aggregate IQ (AIQ); and the research facility Global
Science Research (GSR).
Strategic advisory firms like Cambridge Analytica work with political
campaigns, governments, and corporate clients, offering them a variety of
services from public relations to black operations. The ICO report, for
example, found that Cambridge Analytica purchased large amounts of
commercially available data on US citizens. The data was then used to build
profiles on American voters so that they could be targeted with election
advertising tailored to them.
After examining Cambridge Analyticas role in the 2016 presidential election
in the United States, the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, and allegations
of ties to Russian government influence operations, the ICO found a chaotic,
largely ineffectual operation with no connection to the Kremlin. The closure
of the investigation marked yet another anti-climactic denouement of a key
Russiagate plot point.
Elizabeth Denham methodically discredited the baseless allegations of
collusion between the data firm, the Russian government, and the Trump
campaign. Further, her report poured cold water on the influence of
Cambridge Analytica in Brexit, demonstrating the companys negligible impact
on the vote.
The ICO even concluded that Cambridge Analyticas widely touted
psychographic micro-targeting of voters was mostly hype. Its tactics were
neither new nor particularly effective.
The scale of the investigation I conducted was unprecedented for a data
protection authority, declared the ICO commissioner in her 18-page report.
It highlighted the whole ecosystem of personal data in political
campaigns.
During my investigation a large amount of material and equipment was
reviewed including; 42 laptops and computers, 700 TB of data, 31 servers,
over 300,000 documents, and a wide range of material in paper form and from
cloud storage devices, Denham said.
The Guardian reported 40 full-time investigators working on the case, 20
specialist contractors, and they have an interview list that numbers 264
people.
The ICO has conducted a reverse engineering exercise to try to identify and
confirm as far as possible, how SCL/CA processed the personal data they
held
my findings were also informed and corroborated based on accounts
obtained from witness interviews and the contents of statements taken during
the investigation, Denham said.
The methodically detailed investigations findings were a damning commentary
on the Western media that opportunistically painted SCL-Cambridge Analytica
as a batcave command center for Putin and the Bannonite far-right.
Reaching for the Russia ruse
In March 2018, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pointed to
Cambridge Analyticas alleged work with Russia in order to deflect from her
loss to Trump in 2016. Youve got Cambridge Analytica
and youve got the
Russians. And the real question is how did the Russians know how to target
their messages so precisely? she posed to the UKs Channel 4 News in an
interview for the networks documentary on the data scandal.
If they were getting advice from lets say Cambridge Analytica or someone
else, about, ok, here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin
that
indeed would be very disturbing, Clinton declared.
Cadwalladr seized on the statement as confirmation of her own reporting.
That same month, Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressional point man on
allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, had invited Wylie to testify as a
part of ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016
election. In the Senate, Richard Blumenthal called to have Cambridge
Analytica investigated over its ties to Russia and services for
Russians.
The uproar that ensued from Wylies testimony resulted in Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg being dragged before Congress to apologize like a whimpering
puppy for his role in enabling the British data firm to meddle in elections.
Corporate media leapt on the salacious story, devoting copious air time to
the topic. One journalist noted dozens of tweets about Cambridge Analytica
written in 2018 by CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju, the networks
media critic Brian Stelter, and its primetime host Jake Tapper.
When Wylie testified behind closed doors to members of the
Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee and an Oversight and
Government Reform panel in April 2018, he stunned the lawmakers with claims
that Cambridge Analytica had tested messaging with American voters about
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies in Eastern Europe.
Wylie claimed that people who worked on the US and UK campaigns had
connections to two Russian intelligence outfits, as well as to Russians and
Russian companies which were in turn linked to the Kremlin itself. According
to the self-styled whistleblower, Cambridge Analytica hired known Russian
agents. He painted a sprawling, conspiratorial portrait of a hostile
foreign information warfare operation that seemed almost custom made for a
US media and Democratic Party eager to impeach Trump and wage a new cold war
against Putin.
There was a lot of relationships and a lot of communications with different
fairly senior Russian officials, Wylie told NPR. He has claimed that a
Russian gas company with alleged ties to the Kremlin named Lukoil inquired
about political, non-commercial online targeting in the United States to the
company.
Wylie also revealed Cambridge Analyticas links to Russia. Wylie had the
documents and tapes to back him up, NPR reported.
Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) has said it discussed working
with Lukoil Turkey [to] better engage with its loyalty-card customers at
gas stations, but that nothing came from the meeting. Tellingly, Lukoil
received not one mention in the short section on Russia in the ICOs report.
While the ICO report mentioned possible Russia-located activity
referring to Russian IP addresses found in some data the information was
ultimately referred to the National Crime Agency, which has not taken any
action. These matters fall outside the remit of the ICO, the report says.
In July 2018, Wylie claimed this information was also in the FBIs hands,
and that he had been helping their investigation. However, the reported
DOJ-FBI investigation that ran parallel to the ICO has offered nothing to
corroborate his remarkable assertion.
The ICOs Russiagate section concluded as follows: We did not find any
additional evidence of Russian involvement in our analysis of material
contained in the SCL / CA servers we obtained.
In other words, virtually everything Wylie told US Congress and the media
about Cambridge Analyticas role as a secret Russian weapon the entire
basis of his fame has been discredited by the ICO report he helped to
spur.
Blustery claims of influence exposed as hot air
UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denhams report also surgically
dismantled many of the most sensational claims about Cambridge Analytica
advanced by Christopher Wylies promoters in the media, like Cadwalladr.
In one of the reports most revealing sections, its authors found:
The methods that SCL were using were, in the main, well recognised processes
using commonly available technology. It was these third-party libraries
which formed the majority of SCLs data science activities which were
observed by the ICO
We understand this procedure is well established within
the wider data science community, and in our view does not show any
proprietary technology, or processes, within SCLs work.
However, it is important to stress that the output was only a prediction
the real-world accuracy of these predictions when used on new individuals
whose data had not been used in the generating of the models was likely
much lower.
As in so many previously misreported Russiagate stories, the subjects of the
controversy may have been a victim of their own self-promotional bluster. In
a press release following Trumps victory in 2016, for example, Cambridge
Analytica claimed it was instrumental in identifying supporters, persuading
undecided voters, and driving turnout, and bragged that it had informed
key decisions on campaigning communications, and resource allocation.
We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven
communications played such an integral part in President-elect Donald
Trumps extraordinary win, CEO Alexander Nix boasted at the time.
The ICO report, on the other hand, noted evidence that [SCLs] own staff
were concerned about some of the public statements the leadership of the
company were making about their impact and influence.
SCLs own marketing material claimed they had Over 5,000 data points per
individual on 230 million adult Americans. However, based on what we found
it appears that this may have been an exaggeration, the report stated.
The investigation not only exposed SCL-Cambridge Analyticas claims of
driving tectonic shifts in global politics as hot air; it also found the
companys data protection was almost comically sloppy, with little thought
for effective security measures.
Widespread data manipulation tactics painted as uniquely evil Republican
mind-weapons
Yet as recently as September of this year, media outlets like Channel 4 have
continued to milk the scandal, using Cambridge Analytica data to fuel its
investigative exposés on the 2016 election. Like reporting over the previous
years, the coverage was premised on the dubious notion that Cambridge
Analyticas impact was meaningful.
When the scandal broke, few journalists penned anything counter to the
prevailing narratives on Cambridge Analytica. Among the very few skeptics at
the time was Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret
Military History of the Internet. In March 2018, Levine panned media
coverage of the firms activities.
This story is being covered and framed in a misleading way, Levine wrote.
So far, much of the mainstream coverage, driven by the Times and Guardian
reports, looks at Cambridge Analytica in isolationalmost entirely outside
of any historical or political context.
Everyone working in contemporary data-driven politics employs the tactics
employed by Cambridge Analytica, Levine explained to The Grayzone.
The Koch brothers have their own firm that sucks in data from Facebook and
a million other sources to micro-target voters, he said. The Democratic
Party has its own software that does exactly the same thing. Facebook has a
whole team that works with campaigns to utilize data and profile voters.
Its a huge business with billions slushing around. Everyone promises huge
results, way overselling their capability. If you knew even a little bit
about the way political campaigns use data, it was clear that the whole
thing was a sham the moment this scandal hit.
While Wylie has claimed that SCL conducted counter-extremism information
operations in the Middle East on behalf of the British government, and
suggested that Bannon sought to deploy these tools to foment extremism in
the US, the reality is that the technology was hardly limited to the 2016
election, or to one party.
This May, for example, Fox News reported that technology that received
initial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
was deploying AI-driven information warfare tools originally meant to fight
ISIS propaganda in order to target pro-Trump voters.
An award-winning narrative collapses
According to Elizabeth Denhams ICO report, SCL-Cambridge Analyticas
targeted advertising was likely the final purpose of the data gathering.
However, it has not been possible to determine from the digital evidence
reviewed whether the firms online tactics influenced any political
campaign.
In March 2018, Christopher Wylie testified to the UK parliament that
Cambridge Analytica had shared surreptitiously obtained Facebook data with
AggregateIQ (AIQ), a firm that was contracted by several pro-Brexit
campaigns including Vote Leave. Wylie claimed AIQ was the Canadian front for
SCL. However, the ICO report referred to AIQ merely as a company associated
with SCL/CA.
The ICO report concluded that SCL had only a negligible impact on Brexit:
From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found
no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved
in the EU referendum campaign in the UK beyond some initial enquiries made
by SCL/CA in relation to [the UK Independence Party] data in the early
stages of the referendum process, Denham wrote. This strand of work does
not appear to have then been taken forward by SCL/CA.
The ICO report went on to state that the data harvested by SCL from Facebook
could not have been used by anyone in the course of Brexit campaigns:
It was suggested that some of the data was utilised for political
campaigning associated with the Brexit Referendum. However, our view on
review of the evidence is that the data from GSR could not have been used in
the Brexit Referendum as the data shared with SCL/Cambridge Analytica by Dr.
Kogan related to US registered voters.
In one revealing finding laid out in the report, GSR shared subsets of the
data harvested by the App with Eunoia Technologies Inc, among other
companies.
Unmentioned in the report was that Eunoia Technologies was founded by none
other than Christopher Wylie after he left Cambridge Analytica in 2014.
To be sure, there were real connections between the Donald Trump operation
and Cambridge Analytica. Trumps then-campaign manager, Steve Bannon, was a
vice president at Cambridge Analytica before he joined the Trump campaign.
Top Trump moneyman Robert Mercer had funded the firm, along with Bannons
assorted media projects and the Trump campaign. Anti-Trump forces exploited
these ties to try to frame Cambridge Analytica as a non-existent bridge
between Trump Inc. and the Russians.
There is also no doubt that there was illicit data that was likely misused
in the course of political campaigns by Cambridge Analytica. But Western
media once again crossed the line from mundane fact into Russiagate fiction
by alleging that the Kremlin exploited data non-consensually harvested by
Cambridge Analytica to micro-target US and UK citizens with political
messaging meant to sway the presidential election and the Brexit referendum.
These conspiracy theories were amplified and seemingly legitimized by Wylie,
who was touted as an experienced company insider who came forward out of a
commitment to democratic values. But was he truly who he said he was, or was
he another opportunist seeking to exploit the paranoid atmosphere of
Russiagate for fame and fortune?
A Wylie web of deceptions and suspect associates
Throughout the Cambridge Analytica pseudo-scandal, a series of conflicting
narratives raised questions that were conveniently overlooked by US and UK
media. Was AIQ, the Canadian firm, truly part and parcel of SCL? Was
Christopher Wylie a co-founder, a contractor, or a mere intern? Questions
about the provenance of the data Wylie blew the whistle on have not been
posed.
While Wylie focused on the most seemingly explosive connections, such as
former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowskis meetings with Cambridge
Analytica prior to Trumps announcement that he was running for president,
he omitted crucial pieces of evidence that undermined the conspiracy
theories the media feasted on.
For example, Wylie neglected to mention that his own company, Eunoia, met
with Lewandowski at about the same time in an attempt to retain the
soon-to-be campaign as a client, offering them services similar to Cambridge
Analyticas.
Reporting from Buzzfeed indicated that Eunoia pitched the Trump campaign a
Cambridge Analytica client on micro-targeting services. Wylie told the
website that he deleted the illicit data in 2015. According to BuzzFeed,
Wylie bragged to associates about meetings he had with potential corporate
clients, including Walmart, Monsanto, the American Petroleum Institute,
Burberry, DKNY, Ford, and Virgin.
That was before Wylie blew the whistle.
According to the former campaign director for Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings,
who today serves as Prime Minister Boris Johnsons chief advisor, Wylie
tried to sell me the same crap he accuses Cambridge Analytica of doing.
While Wylie claimed that after leaving Cambridge Analytica he was subjected
to lawsuits from the company in order to make it impossible for him to ever
work in any kind of political thing again or data thing again, and to keep
quiet about the data, Buzzfeeds reporting and Cummings account of his
apparent attempts to poach Vote Leave and the Trump campaign from his former
employer corroborates accusations against him in a report commissioned by
Cambridge Analytica.
Wylie claims he was appalled at the direction of the company following
Bannons takeover, however, he has been credited with personally developing
the illicit data harvesting tactic, and likely exploited it while at
Cambridge Analytica before leaving the company to start his own firm which
also had access to the data. He then allegedly attempted to court the very
same right-wing clients with essentially the same services. It was only
after the failure of his private company that Wylie began sounding the
alarm.
It is not clear exactly when Wylie experienced a change of heart. Cadwalladr
says she first approached him on LinkedIn in 2017. Years earlier, in 2013,
Wylie was discussing plans to found Eunoia Technologies and build it into
the NSAs wet dream.
Buzzfeed noted that Wylie approached SCL colleagues about joining his
Palantir-like data firm. Promotional materials later produced by Eunoia
pitched the targeting of voters for political clients, just as SCL did.
Wylie has also claimed to be a founder of Cambridge Analytica. I got
recruited to join a research team at SCL Group, which, at the time, was a
British military contractor based in London. Most of its clients were
various ministries of defense in NATO countries, he boasted to NPR.
However, the report Cambridge Analytica commissioned in the aftermath of
Wylies emergence as a supposed whistleblower claimed he was little more
than an intern on a student visa who only worked two days per week.
That record stands in stark contrast to the claim by The Guardians
Cadwalladr that Wylie was the man who came up with an idea that led to the
foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica.
Coupled with the damning conclusions of the UK ICO report, the conflicting
accounts of Wylies background seem to shatter his credibility, along with
that of the Western press that accepted his spectacular claims at face
value.
So was his most enthusiastic promoter, Cadwalladr, acting purely as a
journalist, or as a partisan advancing an ulterior Cold War agenda?
At around the same time Cadwalladr was spinning out the now-discredited
Cambridge Analytica story, she was listed by a covert, UK Foreign
Commonwealth Office-funded, anti-Russian propaganda operation, the Integrity
Initiative, as part of a UK-based cluster of journalists that operated under
its watch. In fact, Cadwalladr participated in a November 2018 Integrity
Initiative conference with other members of the cluster called Tackling
Tools of Malign Influence.
Cadwalladr also appears to have enjoyed some form of relationship with the
dubious former British spy and author of the discredited Steele Dossier,
Christopher Steele. Beyond repeatedly hyping Steele and his dossier, the
Guardian writer appears to have meet with the British spook. In fact, Steele
spoke about imminent and urgent threats to democracy at a screening of
The Great Hack, the documentary about Cadwalladr and Wylie. His comments,
however, were off the record.
On Twitter, the Guardian writer has spun out unfounded conspiracies,
declaring that Trump = Brexit = Russia. She has also decried being mocked
as a crackpot conspiracy theorist for pursuing Cambridge Analytica. Lets
hope Im as [sic] wrong about Brexits centrality in Trump-Russia axis.
Wylie, for his part, enjoyed a speaking gig alongside Cadwalladr and Bill
Browder, the vulture capitalist fugitive from Russian justice whose
distortion-laden tale of persecution by the Kremlin inspired the US
governments Magnitsky Act and helped fuel the anti-Russian politics that
now dominate Washington.
Since the UKs ICO report demolished the claims that were central to Wylies
hipster-whistleblower persona, and which provided the basis for Cadwalladrs
award-winning reporting, one has gone off the radar while the other has gone
into apparent damage control mode.
Wylie and Cadwalladr ignore, dismiss a report they had eagerly anticipated
On Twitter, Christopher Wylie has chosen to ignore the damning ICO report
that he once predicted would validate his explosive allegations.
Carole Cadwalladr, for her part, has pumped out a series of Tweets attacking
outlets that claimed the ICO report undermined her award-winning reporting.
In apparent hopes of shielding her reputation from scrutiny, she linked to a
commentary by The Guardian Observers editorial board which bizarrely
insisted this newspapers exposé of the exploitation of private data has
been vindicated [by the ICO report].
The column highlighted certain aspects of the report that seemed to
corroborate the papers reporting. However, it dismissed the meat of the
investigation, declaring that it stretches credulity to present [the ICO
investigation] as a full investigation into potential Russian influence on
Brexit. Like Cadwalladr, it attacked other publications for misreporting
the story.
The ICO report confirmed massive mishandling of private data and its
exploitation for political campaigning. The Observer is proud of its role in
the exposure of these abuses, the article proclaimed.
The editorial is correct about one thing, at least: the ICO investigation
has resulted in a number of penalties. Cambridge Analytica was fined before
it shuttered; Facebook was fined for allowing applications to harvest data
from friends of users; Vote Leave and other campaigns and companies were
also hit with fines for data crimes relating to the Brexit campaign
including pro-Remain entities.
But the high-tech huckstering hipster Wylie and his media muse Cadwalladr
have faced no consequences for the hyperbolic bluster and now-debunked hype
about foreign infiltration they spun out to win fame, film deals, and flashy
journalistic awards. No matter the evidence, the Russiagate show must go on.
