How Canada Rigged Brexit

James O'Brien, who hosts a call in show on LBC radio, London, explores how a furtive little company from Victoria, BC, AggregateIQ, helped the Leave campaign fix the Brexit referendum.

Cambridge Analytica - "In the Beginning"

It began as a means to thwart Islamist recruitment. But then...

Here is Chris Wylie describing how they built the technology that came to be diverted into the effort to skew Brexit and the 2016 American elections.

What many don’t know is that Cambridge Analytica has its origins in another company, SCL Group. It is a British military contractor, and when I first started working there CA did not exist as a structure at all. Our task when I joined was to map out and predict the spread of radical Islamic narratives online and to analyze how recruiters are radicalizing young men and coercing them to do terrible things. We would then build systems and tools to act as early warning signals, so that a military or civil agency could interfere with recruiting and radicalization operations in different parts of the world. It all changed as soon as Steve Bannon sat at the helm of the company. All the technologies that were designed to interfere with the effectiveness and cohesiveness of terrorist organizations got fully inverted. With a few tweaks, they were now used against voters in the American elections – we started looking at ordinary Americans the same way the military was looking at radicals, and the dirty game of disinformation began to unravel.

Initially our algorithms easily identified parts of the American population that were more narcissistic, neurotic and conspiratorial. They were then targeted with messaging that encouraged more conspiratorial and neurotic thinking and lured them into forums, chat rooms and Facebook groups with people who shared the same thinking – or oftentimes bots that were parroting the same narratives. Once these groups grew to include a couple of thousand members, local events would be set up. At that point, even if only 5 percent of users actually showed up to those events, that would be enough to form a tangible community where conspiratorial thinking was completely normalized. What started as a digital fantasy had become their reality. The exact same techniques that the military would use to undermine a narcotics or terrorist operation were being used reversely, to essentially create an American insurgency that then became what we now know as the alt-right.

Wylie believes that, but for Cambridge Analytica's brainwashing techniques, the Brexit Leave victory and the US election of Donald J. Trump would not have occurred.

It is absolutely reasonable to make that assertion, especially if we look at how narrow the margins were for Donald Trump and Brexit – both results were within a couple of percentage points. In Brexit we are talking about less than 2 percent of the vote. You see, because elections are a zero-sum game, you essentially only need one more vote to be the absolute winner. Even if Cambridge Analytica only added a margin to the effectiveness of the campaigns – and we know that it actually targeted millions of people – the Trump and Brexit campaigns wouldn’t need much more. I have few doubts that the outcome would have been different if these shady techniques were not used.

Democracy on Trial - In the United Kingdom

The New York Times headline reads, "‘We’re in the Last Hour’: Democracy Itself Is on Trial in Brexit, Britons Say."

As I'm going through the article, over on LBC radio, London, callers are having their say on whether the UK needs electoral reform, an end to "first past the post." Here's what NYT reports:

The whole world of Britain’s Parliament — its effete codes of conduct, its arcane and stilted language, its reunions of Oxbridge school chums — seemed impossibly remote from the real, unfolding national crisis of Brexit, the process of extricating the country from the European Union.

Over the past weeks, as factions within the British government have grappled for control over the country’s exit from the bloc, the mood among voters has become dark.

Those Britons who wished to remain are reminded, daily, that a risky and momentous national change is being initiated against their will and judgment. More striking is the deep cynicism among those who voted to leave, the group that Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to satisfy. They are now equally bitter and disillusioned, as the government’s paralysis has called into question whether Britain will ever leave.

In interviews, many Britons expressed despair over the inability of the political system to produce a compromise. No one feels that the government has represented their interests. No one is satisfied. No one is hopeful. 

It has amounted to a hollowing out of confidence in democracy itself. 

“I don’t think the central institutions of government have been discredited like this in the postwar period,” said William Davies, who teaches political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London.

...The referendum question has divided Britain into warring tribes, unable to settle on any shared vision of the future. An ancient, robust democracy is groaning under the weight of conflicting demands — on the executive, to carry out the will of the people; and on the members of Parliament, to follow their conscience and to act in what they believe to be the people’s interest. 

In such a situation, the country might have united in its resentment of the European Union, which had vowed to make Britain’s withdrawal painful. But that has not happened. Britons are blaming their own leaders. 

“I think people have totally lost confidence in democracy, in British democracy and the way it’s run,” said Tommy Turner, 32, a firefighter. He was perched on a stool at the Hare & Hounds, a working-class pub in Surrey, where nearly everyone voted to leave the European Union. Among his friends, he said, he sensed a profound sense of betrayal that Britain was not exiting on March 29, as promised.

Suddenly Greenhouse Gas Emissions Don't Seem Quite as Bad

Most days I use my spare time to follow and explore environmental issues, climate change foremost among them. That means delving into unpleasant issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, what they're doing and what they're going to do, and campaigners such as Greta Thunberg.

This stuff builds up and I needed a break. That led me to focus more attention on politics, especially the unfolding clusterf#@k known as Brexit. Then there was the summary of the Mueller report and SNC-Lavalin. Fiascos abound, everywhere. Chaos ensues.

At home, the Liberals' ox is gored. The voting public, it seems, has had its fill of the Dauphin. He's now a millstone round his party's neck with general elections months away.  Trump continues to drive the US and America's historic allies into a ditch. Then there's Theresa May's debacle, Brexit.

The cadaverous prime minister has failed to sell her "deal" to Parliament. The EU's deadline for UK approval has passed.

Many Tories want Theresa May out - now. Yet the names commonly bandied about to replace her are the very greasy, Boris Johnson, and the even greasier, Michael Gove.

Now a dark cloud has formed over those two.  Johnson and Gove were participants in the Vote Leave campaign. Gove was co-convenor of Vote Leave while Johnson was its figurehead.

Vote Leave was found by Britain's Electoral Commission to have broken campaign funding laws involving hundreds of thousands of pounds spirited in and out of the campaign. A good chunk of that dark money apparently made its way into the coffers of Victoria, BC's Aggregate IQ that has been tied to Cambridge Analytica.

Vote Leave appealed the decision. Gove and Johnson sheltered behind the appeal to avoid answering difficult questions. However Vote Leave has now abandoned its appeal, throwing Johnson and Gove back into the spotlight. With their focus now on becoming Britain's next prime minister that's the equivalent of vampires dragged out into the noonday sun.

Anna Soubry, the former Tory MP who joined the Independent Group, called for a full explanation from both men, and dismissed the claim the appeal had been dropped for financial reasons. 

“The one thing we do know, all these people have access to considerable amounts of money, so to say they are dropping it for lack of funds is absolutely ludicrous,” she said. 

“Johnson and Gove should be providing a full and proper explanation to the British people following the dropping of this appeal.” She added she expected to one day see a “public inquiry into what happened and how we got into this terrible mess”. 

Gove and Johnson played key roles in Vote Leave, Gove as co-convener and Johnson as a figurehead for the official Brexit campaign. A series of other senior government or Tory figures also sat on its committee, including Liam Fox, Iain Duncan Smith, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and the former international development secretary Priti Patel. 

Labour MP David Lammy called for an update on a police investigation into the campaign. The commission has shared its files with the police to investigate if any other offences had been committed outside its remit. 

“There are profound questions for our democracy about whether senior cabinet ministers are now above the law. The Metropolitan police and National Crime Agency need to act urgently to update the public on the extent and breadth of their investigation,” he said. “It’s also deeply worrying that the political establishment seems mute on law-breaking at the highest level.”

For a country already neck deep in turmoil, the Gove-Johnson scandal can only make the waters murkier if that is even possible. With the National Crime Agency (akin to the FBI) looking into Vote Leave's financing and the evidence showing criminal acts, this can only get worse.

How does any of this possibly end well?

Another Mad Week for Westminster

The meltdown continues. I expect to spend a few hours this week watching live stream coverage from the UK House of Commons.

Prime minister, Theresa May, just acknowledged that her controversial television address last week was a tantrum, an act of frustration.  May went directly to the British people and lay the blame for her bungling on MPs, that seemed to fuel a lot of death threats and, in one case, an assault. May continues to refuse to apologize to the House for her broadcast while saying she regrets the blowback.

It's thought that May's stunt will undermine her chances of a "third time lucky" meaningful vote on the UK-EU withdrawal agreement.

An opposition backbencher called the Brexit squabbles a "psychodrama inside the Conservative government." There's some truth to that.

Oh dear, parliament is scheduled to recess at the end of next week.

The Guardian's Nick Cohen writes that Westminster's Brexit chaos has at least united the public - under a sense of national humiliation.

May says her government will entertain a series of non-binding 'indicative votes' to gauge the will of parliament, perhaps to explore alternatives or tweaks to her withdrawal agreement but that doesn't seem to be going over well.

Earlier, May admitted she does not have the votes to put her "deal" to a third vote.  May desperately needs the backing of the DUP MPs from Northern Ireland, the party that is propping up the minority Conservatives. That got May a "hard no" from Democratic Union party leader, Arlene Foster.

It's pretty clear that a political autopsy is underway in the House with the opposition parties positioning themselves to stick the blame where it largely belongs - on Theresa May and the Tories.

Update:

The House of Commons has narrowly passed an amendment giving Parliament control of the Brexit process, another loss for  Theresa May. Earlier May's business and industry minister, Richard Harrison, resigned, saying the government was playing roulette with the future of Britain.

“At this critical moment in our country’s history, I regret that the government’s approach to Brexit is playing roulette with the lives and livelihoods of the vast majority of people in this country who are employed by or otherwise depend on business for their livelihood."

 

Why the Brits Ignored How 'Leave' Rigged the Brexit Referendum

The Leave campaign had its thumb on the scales in the Brexit referendum. Through various devices it was a rigged outcome. Now the national crime agency is investigating some of the culprits. The list of suspects includes a number of shady Brits but also a few prominent Americans and perhaps even a Russian or two.

Last week, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Canadian computer whiz Chris Wylie, put it bluntly:

“The thing is that there was such a huge weight of evidence which has now all been proven,” says Wylie. “Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened. It’s insane to me that people get more upset by doping in the Olympics, when the consequence of this is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of the country.”

It is insane but why, how?

The best answer I've come up with is from an article in the Irish Times from July, 2018. Everyone, the Conservative government, the opposition Labour Party, the media including the vaunted BBC, even the British public simply chose to ignore it. Evidence of criminality and other wrongdoing - mountains of it - doesn't matter. The country is tearing itself apart, its parliament a hopeless shambles, over a rigged vote - and the corruption doesn't matter.

In a stinging report, the Electoral Commission found that Vote Leave had broken the law by failing to include Grimes’s spending in their return. 

The official Leave campaign breached spending limits by almost half a million pounds. That’s a significant amount in British politics, especially in a knife-edge referendum like Brexit. 

Nor is this the first time that the British elections regulator has found serious irregularities in how the campaign to leave the EU was won.
In May, another pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, was fined £70,000, again for breaking electoral law. Leave.EU was bankrolled by Arron Banks, a controversial businessman who emerged from obscurity to become the biggest donor in British political history, giving more than £8 million to pro-Brexit groups. 

Russian ambassador 

The extent and source of Banks’s fortune has been under discussion, as have his political connections. Recent reports revealed that Banks had extensive, previously undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador in London in the run-up to the Brexit vote. 

Then, on the night of the referendum former Ukip leader Nigel Farage twice conceded defeat live on British television. When the results came in sterling’s value collapsed, and a number of prominent pro-Brexit hedge fund managers made millions.

So, what has been the response in Britain to all this? A parliamentary inquiry? Politicians on all sides demanding changes to electoral law to protect the democratic processes?

Not exactly. On Tuesday, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries accused the Electoral Commission – an independent regulator – of being biased. 

News that the largest Brexit campaign broke the law has provoked hardly a peep from the party of government. 

The opposition benches have scarcely been much louder. With a few honourable exceptions, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has been largely silent, no doubt wary of being seen to oppose “the will of the people”.

...But it is not just Britain’s parliament that has been incapacitated by Brexit. Almost every aspect of British public life is now refracted through the simplistic slogans of June 2016. 

Take the media. Ordinarily news that the largest campaign in British political history had broken the law would be met with headlines excoriating Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – both senior figures in Vote Leave – and calling for full investigations. 

But these are not ordinary times. In a climate where some newspaper front pages have declared judges “the enemies of the people” and called on May to “crush the saboteurs”, there is a marked reluctance to pose awkward questions about how the referendum was won.

Democratic poverty 

Brexit has revealed the poverty of the system that regulates British democracy. The Electoral Commission itself only looked in depth at Vote Leave after internal emails released under Freedom of Information legislation showed that the watchdog was deeply uneasy about the campaign’s spending but was wary of launching a full investigation.

...Remarkably, unlike a general election, the victory in the referendum cannot be challenged in an election court because the vote was not legally binding. 

Brexit means Brexit. But does Brexit mean ignoring mounting evidence that the democratic process was compromised during the 2016 referendum? If that’s the case, then Britain could be living with the consequences of the vote to leave the EU long, long after March 2019.

Bear in mind that everything you've read from this Irish Times report was before the UK's National Crime Agency launched a criminal investigation into the Leave campaign and its officials, an investigation that's still underway.

Add it all up. 1. Brexit was a "non-binding" referendum. There was nothing carved in stone. At best it was a loose effort at testing the waters. By virtue of being non-binding there must have been many people who simply gave voting a pass, content to leave the issue to parliament. 2. Evidence surfaced of financial chicanery by the Leave campaign that was confirmed by the country's Electoral Commission. 3. Evidence emerged of the covert role played by an American-owned Cambridge Analytica, a company developed to manipulate public opinion for electoral purposes.  A company that was owned by American far right billionaire, Robert Mercer, and directed by noneother than Steve Bannon. A company that was exposed by hidden camera video promising to rig an African election. A company that was thrown into liquidation quickly upon being exposed. 4. With all this evidence of corruption, Leave won the non-binding referendum by a very narrow, 52-48 margin, hardly a conclusive result. Nobody went to the polling station believing such a result could plunge Britain into a deal that even today cannot be defined that could plunge the UK and the EU into a no-deal "hard Brexit."

Despite all of these problems, 1, 2, 3, and 4 above, the Tories treated this dodgy result as a binding obligation to tear the UK out of the European Union and the opposition Labour leader and his caucus went along with it.

Hard as this is to believe, nobody in Britain is willing to defend the country's democracy and its institutions. They would rather sweep the dirt under the carpet and get on with leaving the European Union, even if that wrecks their economy.

Trump Backers Sought to Bury Cambridge Analytica So Deep No One Would Uncover Its Secrets

Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct company believed to be instrumental in the Brexit Leave campaign and the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House, is now before a British court.

The company, once owned by ultra-right billionaire, Robert Mercer, and directed by noneother than Trump aide, Steve Bannon, and Mercer's somewhat odd daughter, Rebekah, was tossed into court-ordered administration (receivership) when undercover videos revealed its scurrilous dealings. It seems there was more to its liquidation than a piffling scandal. It was thrown into administration to bury its darkest secrets and prevent people from looking into its conduct.

The High Court in London heard on Monday that Cambridge Analytica was up to its old tricks from beyond the grave—by surreptitiously trying to halt investigations that could expose allegedly nefarious tactics before the company was shut down for good. 

The company filed for the British equivalent of chapter 11 bankruptcy last year after secret recordings of its boss, Alexander Nix, emerged in which he claimed that Trump’s data gurus had carried out illicit election campaigns all over the world. The company was also accused of using up to 87 million clandestinely harvested Facebook profiles to create a state of the art voter database that helped Trump win election in 2016.

A lawyer representing a New York professor, who believes his private data was misused by the notorious campaign operatives, claims Cambridge Analytica’s data secrets are being shielded from justice and exposure by administrators in the pay of a shadow company set up by a band of executives linked to the Trump campaign veterans. 

The High Court heard that administrators had deliberately misled a judge during a previous hearing by obfuscating their financial links to Emerdata, a company which was set up by Nix, Rebekah Mercer, and other senior figures who were previously involved with Cambridge Analytica.

In Britain, court-appointed administrators are supposed to work independently on behalf of all creditors to take over running of the company, similar to chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. But the legal team of David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School in New York who is fighting for access to the data compiled on him, claimed that the administrators of Cambridge Analytica has succumbed to undue influence. Emerdata appointed the administrator and subsequently committed to pay them up to $1 million in fees. 

The administrators, Vincent Green and Mark Newman of Crowe U.K. LLP, were accused of trying to liquidate the company before a full investigation into the company could be held.

“It is extremely unusual, in my submission, to have the fees of an administrator underwritten effectively by the people who may themselves be the principal focus of any subsequent investigation,” said Andreas Gledhill Q.C., the lawyer representing Carroll in court.

...“This needs to go to the official receiver and there needs to be a whole set of investigations—someone needs to crack the vault,” Ravi Naik, a lawyer for Carroll told The Daily Beast outside court. “Without this case being successful, there cannot be an investigation because the company will liquidate. This is the dying embers.” 

In documents submitted to the court, Gledhill claimed that Emerdata was due to pay the administrator up to £800,000 ($1 million) but had only handed over around £220,000 ($290,000) so far. 

“With their legal fees funded by Emerdata, the administrators have treated this as hostile litigation between themselves and Mr. Carroll, making their lack of independence abundantly clear,” Gledhill said.

...Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer, daughters of billionaire Trump donor Robert Mercer, are listed as directors of Emerdata. As is former Cambridge Analytica chairman Julian Wheatland, who is named on the list of people close to President Trump being probed by the House Judiciary Committee, alongside Nix, who resigned as a director of Emerdata on the same day that he was called back for further questioning by a committee in Britain’s House of Commons. Nix remains a shareholder. 

The court is expected to rule on the removal of Emerdata's token receiver in a few days.

Having practiced extensively in the field of insolvency and receivership, it is hard to believe this conflict by a court-appointed administrator. He functions as an officer of the court by virtue of that appointment and ought to be held to the strictest standards of transparency and accountability. This, to me, is astonishing.

Chris Wylie Resurfaces.

There's nothing we do quite so well as to "lose the plot." We lose our ability to understand or cope with things that are then flushed down the memory hole. We do that a lot on things that are challenging or frightening such as climate change. Someone releases a credible report that, over 30 years, we have caused the loss of half the planet's wild life. A few days later it's down the memory hole, forgotten and then erased.

It's the same story when it comes to technological threats. Remember Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ, shady billionaire Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, the election of Donald Trump, Brexit? It's all largely forgotten now, in some cases swept under the carpet, safely down the memory hole.

So it's timely, a year on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that the journalist who broke the story, Carole Cadwalladr, got together with the boy wonder from Victoria, B.C., Chris Wylie to rehash what happened and how little it achieved.

Wylie is perplexed how the Tory government in Britain simply ignored the whole thing.

“I was asked by a journalist to sum up the story in a minute,” he says, “and I was like: ‘No’. It goes from Trump to Brexit to Russian espionage to military operations in Afghanistan to hacking the president of Nigeria. Where do you even begin?” 

He’s referring to the fact that Cambridge Analytica was part of a much bigger company, SCL, which had worked as a defence contractor for governments and militaries around the world, then branched into elections in developing countries, and, only in its final iteration, entered western politics. That’s one of the things, he says, that “frustrates me about how dominant the Facebook angle of the story was, when there’s so much fucked-up shit that Cambridge Analytica were doing in different parts of the world. But if you go to a developing country and do grossly unethical things, that’s not ‘newsworthy’.”

...If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny to Wylie that one of the biggest takeaways of the story – which was generating 34,000 news stories a day at its height and cost one of the biggest companies on Earth billions – is how it failed. The Brexit angle of the Cambridge Analytica Files, the explosive revelations of a second whistleblower, Shahmir Sanni, fell inexplicably flat. Sanni revealed in the Observer how Vote Leave deliberately broke the law in the way it funnelled money to the data firm AggregateIQ, an associate company of Cambridge Analytica. It’s believed to be the biggest breach of electoral law in a century, but it was given minimal coverage by the BBC and all but ignored by Britain’s political class. The law-breaking was confirmed by the electoral commission in July, and it has now been referred to the police.

“The thing is that there was such a huge weight of evidence which has now all been proven,” says Wylie. “Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened. It’s insane to me that people get more upset by doping in the Olympics, when the consequence of this is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of the country.” 

Perhaps what the scandal has really revealed is a situation that is too embarrassing, too disastrous to acknowledge. We know that Facebook has been used to undermine elections all across the world, including our own. But we’re in this strange historical moment where we’ve realised it, but we don’t have the power, currently, to do anything about it.

It is to me, utterly mind-boggling, to hear Theresa May say she's only giving effect to the will of the British public in pursuing Brexit when she knows, everyone knows, the whole Leave campaign was corrupt. Yet in all the hours of debates over Brexit in Westminster I've followed I have not heard a single mention of it. It's as though none of it ever happened.

"The Control Freak Who Lost Control"

A "control freak who lost control." That is how the Observer's chief political correspondent sums up prime minister Theresa May who now finds herself neck deep in the quagmire known as Brexit.

The charge list against her is certainly a lengthy one. She triggered article 50 before her government had an agreed strategy for withdrawal and her senior team then wasted months squabbling with itself rather than advancing the negotiations with the EU. Ignoring advice to the contrary and without advance discussion with her cabinet, she made a prison for herself by laying down red lines that made the negotiations more difficult and set her up for a string of ignominious subsequent reversals. When she threw away her majority at an election she didn’t have to call, she carried on as if nothing had changed rather than trying to reach out to other parties to forge a broad consensus about a way forward. That made her the hostage of the Democratic Unionist party and the Brexit ultras on the right of her party. Mrs May has one quality that is of value in a political crisis. She has resilience. She lacks all the other ones, such as imagination, advocacy and agility.

True, all true, and yet not the whole truth. Any account of this nightmare that holds Mrs May solely culpable is not a complete explanation for how we got here. In a dark corner of what remains of its political brain, the Tory party knows that it is collectively guilty of driving the country it professes to love into this shaming mess. With a few prescient exceptions, the Conservatives all backed David Cameron when he promised a referendum on the cynical basis that he might not have to deliver it and with the arrogant assumption that, if he did have to, he would easily win it. Leading Tories fronted a Leave campaign that peddled fantasy promises that could never be realised. Since Mrs May came up with a deal that tried to reconcile withdrawal with realities, she has been repeatedly sabotaged by the political arsonists in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s gang. Her party has had several opportunities to remove Mrs May and it has always passed up the chance. This is not because there is any shortage of Tories who ache with ambition for the job; it is because no one has really wanted to take on the job while the Brexit torture endures. It has suited them all to keep Mrs May at Number 10 as their human sponge.

What about May's plan to bring her twice-rejected EU withdrawal agreement back for a "third time lucky" vote?

Incredible as it may seem, if Mrs May is defeated again, but gets closer to the winning post than before, we can’t be sure that she won’t go for a fourth attempt. 

That could require the EU to agree to an emergency summit at which its leaders would be asked to give her time to try. Here we must register the ingloriously ironic consequence of all these Westminster games, especially those played by the ultras. Their astonishing achievement has been to make the EU more powerful in our national affairs than it has ever been. A delay to Brexit is entirely in the EU’s gift and requires, as I noted last week, the unanimous consent of every one of its members. Each state, large or small, can say no or demand something in return for a yes. It is a fairly safe assumption that the EU will grant a British request for an extension because its leaders don’t want a calamity crash-out Brexit. But the EU gets to dictate not only whether a supplicant Britain is granted a postponement but for how long and on what terms and conditions.

What We Saw This Week in Westminster

It looks like utter chaos in Theresa May's House of Commons. The Conservatives are fractured, Labour is fractured, whipped votes aren't. The Scots want something, the Northern Irish want something else, the Welsh are playing it cool for the moment, at least compared to everyone else. Some are calling for snap elections. Others want another referendum. A small camp wants a hard Brexit, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Another group wants to settle for the withdrawal agreement May negotiated with the EU. That includes the "backstop" for the Irish border that infuriates the hard Brexit camp.

What the world is witnessing, with a lot of puzzlement, is a nation governed by representative democracy having to deal with the result of direct democracy. It doesn't help that the Brexit referendum was botched. Leave voters were seduced by empty promises that bordered on outright lies, coupled with financing irregularities and, of course, the manipulative prowess of Cambridge Analytica.

After two years of wrangling, there isn't a person today who can accurately define Brexit. What is it? Who knows? Having recently spent hours listening to Brit talk radio (LBC London) or the Guardian live stream coverage of the House of Commons, it's obvious that there is no central factual framework to this. One will eventually emerge, possibly by default. There may be no real managed outcome and that will be a cloud over Parliament for years to come.

The referendum was direct democracy. Brits were asked to choose Leave or Remain and the Leave camp won by a small margin. Team Farage might have spun Leave supporters with sugar plum dreams but they had no accountability once the votes were counted.  Like Jacques Parizeau their only challenge was to get enough "lobsters in the pot."

The referendum outcome then fell to Parliament, representive democracy, to enact in some form or another. That's where the real slogging began. MPs had to represent their constituents and the nation. And doing that meant dealing with other affected parties that had no vote, no say, including the entire European Union, especially the Irish Republic. There were fears of a resumption of "the Troubles" between north and south. It wasn't easy getting the UK into the EU and it wasn't going to be easy to get out either.

What lies ahead in the next few weeks? Nobody knows. Theresa May will keep trying to grind down MPs until she gets enough support for her withdrawal agreement. Third time lucky? Then she needs the support of all 27 other members of the EU for a postponement of the March 29 trigger date.

A lot of mistakes have been made since David Cameron called for the referendum. The United Kingdom, if it can even remain united, will be paying for those mistakes for years to come.

Brexit - the Madness Ensues

What do Theresa May and Jaques Parizeau have in common? They both see/saw the electorate as lobsters in a pot.

Parizeau made the clumsy remark in the 2006 Quebec sovereignty referendum that, thanks largely to Jean Chretien's neglect, Parizeau very nearly won.

Parizeau's "lobster" reference was about "leave" voters who might be won over by assurances of follow-on negotiations with Ottawa, a second chance, etc. that conveyed the idea that the vote wouldn't be a trip over the cliff if the PQ won. Instead, he confided to his associates, those gullible voters, once the referendum succeeded would be like lobsters in a boiling pot. The PQ would have the unilateral right to secede from confederation regardless. If the gullibillies were duped, so what?

Theresa May is taking a somewhat similar approach to Brexit. Sure the Leave campaign might have rigged the vote - Cambridge Analytica, dodgy campaign finance irregularities, laughably empty assurances pulled straight out of Nigel Farage's ass - but, so what? Who cares if the razor-thin vote for Leave was manipulated? Who cares if no one had to give voters the truth about Brexit? Who cares about the shift in public opinion? Who cares if the Irish problem was not foreseen and remains unresolved? What matter if, less than two months before Britains' date with the headsman, nobody still knew what Brexit will look like? The lobsters are in the pot, that's an end of it.

The Tories are divided into camps. The opposition Labour party is divided into camps. There is no consensus in the House of Commons. Theresa May has been repeatedly rebuffed in Parliament. The country is divided, more in favour of Remain than Leave. Preparations for the chaos of a hard Brexit are virtually non-existent save for a plan to mobilize the army and, if necessary, get the Royals out of Buck House to safety.

There'll be no snap election. No second referendum. The lobsters have spoken, even if they now wish they hadn't.

If you want to experience the power of misinformation and misdirection, listen to James O'Brien's call in talk show on LBC radio.  I wrote about him the other day, even posted a clip of O'Brien shredding Nigel Farage, lie by lie. Go to YouTube and there you'll find plenty of episodes of O'Brien talking with hopelessly confused Brexiters who still believe it'll all be milk and honey. You might find that a bit shocking that, even now, many Brits are still hopelessly confused.

I have my own thoughts on what this means for modern democracy, not just in Britain but elsewhere too. They're somewhat disjointed and not fully fleshed out so I'll keep them to myself for now. I think I'll wait until the end of next month to see how May's Brexit unfolds.

The Slippery Slope of Privacy

Those implicated in the Cambridge Analytica/AggregateIQ scandal inevitably contend that their uninvited intrusions and targeted messaging may have been unethical but they dispute that their acts were illegal and close with the assertion that there is no proof that their skulduggery actually changed anything, that it manufactured any votes for the client or suppressed voting for the adversary.

It was, in their parlance, a giant "nothingburger".

Okay, so Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, the Trump campaign and the cash-conscious Brexit Leave campaign thought it looked pretty and decided to take a flyer on it.

We still don't know what uber-rightwing US billionaire, Robert Mercer, paid for his 90 per cent interest in Cambridge Analytica but it would be useful to find out. At its core this targeted advertising/brainwashing technology is a function of algorithms who had to learn long division and did our calculations with slide rules is probably a bit out there. They're not to Robert Mercer. He was an algorithm wizard. It's how he amassed his billions. When it came to shelling out for control of Cambridge Analytica, Mercer was what you might call an informed buyer. He knew what it was, how it worked, what it could achieve and what it was worth - to a buyer, a guy just like him.

To Mercer it probably meant this technology could generate + or - this many thousand votes in this state and + or - this many thousand votes in that state and + or - this many tens, perhaps thousands of votes for Donald J. Trump overall.

Illegal? Hard to say. It's certainly unethical and, in such matters, we often set limits, conditions in which the merely sordid passes into the realm of criminality. 

Should this stuff, cyber ratf@cking, be illegal. I vote yes. I expect most would. But we would have to find a government willing to enact a pretty major overhaul of our election laws to outlaw this sort of thing and impose adequate penalties for those who flout them.

That might begin by clearly stating that a citizen's vote is something not to be messed with. You can't get a voter liquored up by capture his vote. You can't put a wad of cash in his shirt pocket either. You shouldn't be permitted to target that voter online with sophisticated messages the purpose of which is to manipulate his or her free will. That sort of thing ought to be an indictable offence. It should earn the perpetrators a stretch in the Greybar Hotel. And the political parties and their campaigns if found culpable should also pay a hefty price. It's "the buck stops here" thing.

Unfortunately electoral problems aren't a great priority with the government of the day. This is, after all, the same Justin who told us to get stuffed when he reneged on his promise of electoral reform. Indeed there are indications that the Liberal campaign had some sort of dealings with these cyber ratf@ckers in 2015.

These days, when you're faced with an upset victory, be it Brexit, or Trump, or Trudeau, you have reasonable cause to question just what happened. Did Mulcair really lose his lead all by himself or were voters perhaps assisted in switching from the NDP to someone else? I don't know only now I really, really want to.

We are in an era of widespread decline in liberal democracy. In America, money is free speech. Elsewhere we don't state it so openly. Ours is a world in which the political power of the citizenry and their votes has become discounted, degraded.

It is not alarmist to say we are on a slippery slope. We've seen what this can lead to elsewhere - Hungary, Turkey, Poland, the populist uber-right in France, Britain, Germany and elsewhere; the rise of the corporatist state where legislators, regulators and even heads of state can be captured and harnessed into service not to the public interest but to narrow, private interests. And, as we have seen in America, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere, these things they will do right in front of your face.

Be aware that the only way to stop this slide is to take matters in our own hands - at the ballot box. No matter how loyal you may feel to a party, do not vote for any candidate representing any party that you cannot trust to enact electoral reform. And, yes, that means in 2019 refusing to vote for the Trudeau Liberals. They've had their chance. You don't have to vote Tory. Vote Green, vote NDP. We've survived worse.

Another Watergate? Maybe.

Revelations about Cambridge Analytica, its principals (Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Rebekah Mercer and Alexander Nix), its clients or contacts (Corey Lewandowski, Ted Cruz, John Bolton, the Trump campaign), and the Cambridge subsidiary, Victoria's AggregateIQ are a virtual tsunami. This is an unfolding trans-Atlantic scandal, a work in progress.

Today it's AggregateIQ's turn under the spotlight. Gizmodo claims to have proof that the Victoria firm created Cambridge Analytica's software.

A little-known Canadian data firm ensnared by an international investigation into alleged wrongdoing during the Brexit campaign created an election software platform marketed by Cambridge Analytica, according to a batch of internal files obtained exclusively by Gizmodo.

Discovered by a security researcher last week, the files confirm that AggregateIQ, a British Columbia-based data firm, developed the technology Cambridge Analytica sold to clients for millions of dollars during the 2016 US presidential election. Hundreds if not thousands of pages of code, as well as detailed notes signed by AggregateIQ staff, wholly substantiate recent reports that Cambridge Analytica’s software platform was not its own creation.

What’s more, the files reveal that AggregateIQ—also known as “AIQ”—is the developer behind campaign apps created for Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, as well as a Ukrainian steel magnate named Serhiy Taruta, head the country’s newly formed Osnova party.

A link to the Republican National Committee?

In an internal wiki, AIQ developers also discussed a project known as The Database of Truth, a system that “integrates, obtains, and normalizes data from disparate sources, including starting with the RNC Data Trust.” (RNC Data Trust is the Republican party’s primary voter file provider.) “The primary data source will be combined with state voter files, consumer data, third party data providers, historical WPA survey and projects and customer data.”

More on Brexit.

In 2016, Mercer reportedly offered up Cambridge Analytica’s services for free to Leave.EU, one of several group urging the UK to depart the European Union, according to The Guardian. Leave.EU was not, however, the official “Leave” group representing the Brexit campaign. Instead, a seperate group, known as Vote Leave, was formally chosen by election officials to lead the referendum.

Whereas Leave.EU relied on Cambridge to influence voters through its use of data analytics, Vote Leave turned to AIQ, eventually paying the firm roughly 40 percent of its £7 million campaign budget, according to The Guardian. Over time, however, Vote Leave amassed more cash than it was legally allowed to spend. While UK election laws permitted Vote Leave to gift its remaining funds to other campaigns, further coordination between them was expressly forbidden.

The treasurer of the BeLeave group, a recipient of some of Vote Leave's surplus funds, said BeLeave never received the funds that were, instead, laundered through the BeLeave books and disbursed without its knowledge or consent.

Vote Leave inexplicably donated £625,000 to a young fashion design student named Darren Grimes, the founder of a small, unofficial Brexit campaign called BeLeave. According to a BuzzFeed investigation, Grimes immediately gave a “substantial amount” of the cash he received from Vote Leave to AIQ. Vote Leave also donated £100,000 to another Leave campaign called Veterans for Britain, which, according to The Guardian, then paid AIQ precisely that amount.

A review of the AIQ files by UpGuard’s Chris Vickery revealed several mentions of Vote Leave and at least one mention of Veterans for Britain, apparently related to website development. 

In an interview on Monday, Shahmir Sanni, a former volunteer for Vote Leave campaign, told The Globe and Mail that he had “first-hand knowledge about the alleged wrongdoing in the Brexit campaign.” Sanni, who was 22 when he worked for Vote Leave, said he was “encouraged to spin out” another campaign, but that he had “no control” over the £625,000 that was immediately spent on AIQ’s services. 

British authorities are pursuing leads to establish whether BeLeave and Veterans for Britain were merely a conduit through which Vote Leave sought to direct additional funds to AIQ. While the UK Electoral Commission took no action in early 2017, in November it claimed that “new information” had “come to light,” giving the commission “reasonable grounds to suspect an offence may have been committed.”

Ya think?

UPDATE:

The Toronto Star reports that three former Cambridge employees contend that the company, owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, flagrantly violated US election laws by sending at least 20 non-Americans to work on the 2014 mid-term elections.

Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group were overwhelmingly staffed by non-U.S. citizens — mainly Canadians, Britons and other Europeans — at least 20 of whom fanned out across the United States in 2014 to work on congressional and legislative campaigns, the three former Cambridge workers said. 

Many of those employees and contractors were involved in helping to decide what voters to target with political messages and what messages to deliver to them, the former workers said. Their tasks ran the gamut of campaign work, including “managing media relations” as well as fundraising, planning events, and providing “communications strategy” and “talking points, speeches (and) debate prep,” according to a document touting the firm’s 2014 work. 

“Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie said. 

Two other former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear that they may have violated U.S. law in their campaign work, said concerns about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s work in the United States were a regular subject of employee conversations at the company, especially after the 2014 vote. 

The two former workers, who, like Wylie, were interviewed in London, said employees worried the company was giving its foreign employees potentially inaccurate immigration documents to provide upon entering the United States, showing that they were not there to work when they had arrived for the purpose of advising campaigns. 

“We knew that everything was not above board, but we weren’t too concerned about it,” said one of the former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spent several months in the United States working on Republican campaigns. “It was the Wild West. That’s certainly how they carried on in 2014.”

That sounds like a nightmare for a certain rightwing radical nutjob billionaire.

Wylie Outs the Wizards from Victoria, AggregateIQ.

The laws behind the Brexit referendum set strict spending limits for parties wishing to participate in it. The Leave campaign had four distinct supporting groups: Leave, BeLeave (a youth movement), Veterans for Britain, and the Irish gang, the political party that props up Theresa May's Tory government, the DUP.

Each of those four had a spending cap. However the law stipulated that if any of those groups co-ordinated, those parties would be bound by a single spending allotment.

Chris Wylie claims that the evidence admits of one conclusion, all four organizations co-ordinated, using AggregateIQ as a vessel to launder money.

All four groups had employed the services of Aggregate IQ (AIQ), a Canadian company that Wylie said was “set up and worked within the auspices of Cambridge Analytica [and] inherited the company culture of total disregard for the law”. But at the point they employed the services of AIQ, he said, it had effectively no public presence.

“All of these companies somehow, for some reason, all decided to use Aggregate IQ as their primary service provider, when Aggregate IQ did not have any public presence, no media, no website. The only way that you could find them on the internet is if you went to [Cambridge Analytica minority owner] SCL’s website and called up SCL Canada. So, first question that I have is why. Why is it that all of a sudden this company, that has never worked on anything but Cambridge Analytica projects, that had no public presence, somehow became the primary service provider to all of these supposedly independent and different campaign groups,” he told the MPs. 

“When you look at the cumulation of evidence I think it would be completely unreasonable to come to any other conclusion: this must be co-ordination, this must be a common purpose plan.”

“I went and actually spoke with Aggregate, who were very, very pleased with themselves with how that project went – understandably, they won – and said, can you show me what it was you were doing, how can you untease it, what did you do,” Wylie said. “They conceded to me – and this is a verbatim quote, and I stand by it, I remember Jeff Sylvester [the chief operating officer of Aggregate IQ] telling me this: it was, quote, ‘totally illegal’.

“AggregateIQ was just used as a proxy money-laundering vehicle,” Wylie told the hearing. “What [Vote Leave mastermind] Dom Cummings did is he just went round and found places he could launder money through to give it to AIQ so they could overspend. And that is my genuinely held belief.

“For me it makes me so angry, because a lot of people supported leave because they believe in the application of British law and British sovereignty. And to irrevocably alter the constitutional settlement of this country on fraud is a mutilation of the constitutional settlement of this country. You cannot call yourself a leaver, you cannot call yourself someone who believes in British law, and win by breaking British law in order to achieve that goal.”

Oh dear.

The Little Guy With the Funky Hair Lowers the Lumber on Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ, the Upset "Leave" Win on Brexit and the Upset Win of President Donnie Trump.

Christopher Wylie, the former research director for Cambridge Analytica turned whistleblower, is giving evidence today before a British Parliamentary committee.

In the case of Brexit, Wylie says it was not only misuse of data but also money laundering to give the Leave campaign a big financial advantage over the Stay campaign. Wylie's claims go to the very integrity and validity of the referendum vote to pull Britain out of the EU. At least one of the key parties to the alleged skulduggery is a senior aide to the prime minister, Theresa May.  Oopsie.

Misuse of data and “cheating” by Cambridge Analytica and other companies associated with the firm may have altered the outcome of both the U.S. presidential election and the U.K.’s Brexit referendum, a company whistleblower told British lawmakers. 

Chris Wylie, the former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, which has been accused of illegally collecting online data of up to 50 million Facebook users, said that his work allowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to garner unprecedented insight into voters’ habits ahead of the 2016 vote. 

He added that a Canadian business with ties to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, also provided analysis for the Vote Leave campaign ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum. This research, Wylie said, likely breached the U.K.’s strict campaign financing laws and may have helped to sway the final Brexit outcome. 

“If we allow cheating in our democratic process … What about next time? What about the time after that? This is a breach of the law. This is cheating,” he told British politicians Tuesday. “This is not some council race, or a by-election. This is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of this country.”

Over four hours of testimony, Wylie gave insight into how Cambridge Analytica was able to build complex data analysis tools to target potential voters during multiple U.S. campaigns. That included ties to Aggregate IQ, or AIQ, a Canadian company which helped to develop the underlying algorithm that was used by Cambridge Analytica to target Facebook users. Both companies deny such a connection.

Wylie posed a very pointed question about the Victoria startup, AggregateIQ and the campaign it waged on behalf of the Leave campaign.

“I think it’s incredibly reasonable to say that AIQ played a very significant role in Leave winning,” he told British lawmakers. “My question is where did they get the data? How do you create a massive operation in a country where AIQ had not worked before?” 

Wylie also gave insight into how Cambridge Analytica was created in late 2013. The unit was set up by Robert Mercer, a U.S. billionaire; Steve Bannon, a former campaign manager for Trump’s 2016 campaign; and Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, who was suspended following the most recent allegations. 

To give it an air of academic credibility, according to Wylie, the founders wanted to play up potential research ties with Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a American-Russian professor at the university, created a smartphone app that provided Cambridge Analytica with reams of digital information on roughly 50 million Facebook users. These data transfers, according to Facebook, broke the social network’s terms and conditions. 

“Whenever Steve Bannon would come into town, we would set up this fake office to present a more academic side of the company,” Wylie told the MPs. “Steven Bannon said we should call it Cambridge Analytica because of its close association with the university.”

Chris Wylie may be making noise but there's been nothing but deathly silence from Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Mercer and the tweetmeister himself, Donald Trump, the Mango Mussolini.

If, as has been claimed and not just by Wylie but others from CA and the Brexit Leave camp, the Brexit referendum was gamed, Theresa May has a problem. Can she simply ignore it and claims she still has a popular mandate to negotiate Britain's exit from the EU? Remember it was just under 52% to leave, just over 48% to stay, and, after the vote, there was plenty of buyer's remorse among those who voted Leave assuming it was bound to be defeated.

UPDATE:

While I have only watched snippets of Wylie's testimony, he made a point that particularly impressed me about the Brexit vote tampering. He said the Leave campaign flagrantly cheated. Wylie pointed out that if an Olympic athlete was caught doping, he would be stripped of his medal for cheating. There would be no debate over how much the banned substance aided his performance. No one would be heard to argue he would have won without it. He cheated, the medal is gone. Likewise, get caught cheating on a university exam and it's an automatic
 "F".  It doesn't matter how you did on the rest of the questions. You cheated, you got caught, you fail. Wylie argued, convincingly, that there is no distinction to be drawn from being caught gaming a referendum than being caught doping or cheating on an exam. Cheating is cheating.

Trump, Russia and Cambridge Analytica (Maybe the Crew From Victoria Too?)

The plot thickens. The world was awakened to how votes could be hacked, voters brainwashed, by sophisticated software, social networks, and targeted messaging in the upset "leave" vote for Brexit. Fingered in that was a small company from Victoria, B.C., Aggregate IQ, and a shadowy young man from Western Canada, Chris Wylie.

Aggregate IQ and Wylie are believed to have links to American rightwing billionaire, Robert Mercer, his cohort, Steve Bannon, and his Aggregate IQ clone, Cambridge Analytica.

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 is 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."

Now Cambridge Analytica has shown up on the radar of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They want to know if Cambridge Analytica colluded with Russian interests to hack the election and catapult Donald Trump into the White House.  Go figure.

The company is in the process of turning over documents to HPSCI, according to a source familiar with the committee’s work. Another source close to the investigation said that the probe’s focus on Cambridge Analytica is “fruitful.”

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had holdings in Cambridge Analytica worth between $1 million and $5 million as recently as April of this year, Bloomberg reported. Bannon, now back as the chairman of the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart, hasn’t been publicly mentioned as a potential witness for or target of Russia investigators. He previously sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica.

Another key Cambridge Analytica investor is Robert Mercer, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire who also generously backed Trump’s presidential campaign. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah introduced several top officials to Trump’s campaign, including Kellyanne Conway and Bannon. The Mercers also are partial owners of Breitbart—among their many, many investment in far-right media outlets, think tanks, and political campaigns.

A recent Vanity Fair piece highlighted speculation among Washington Democrats that the Trump campaign’s data operation could point to collusion between Trump and Russia.

Cambridge purports to go beyond the typical voter targeting—relying on online clues like Facebook Likes to give a hint at a user’s political leanings and construct a picture of a voter’s mental state. The “psychographic” picture Cambridge ostensibly provides to a campaign is the ability to tailor a specific message based on personality type – angry, fearful, optimistic and so forth – rather than simply aiming ads at voters from likely convivial candidates.

Russian propaganda on Facebook and other social-media platforms passed itself off as authentic American voices; targeting refugees, posing as an American Muslim groupand backing an Atlanta-based duo supporting Black Lives Matter. Depending on which cohort was being targeted, the efforts encouraged pro-Trump voters to intensify political participation, black voters to abandon Hillary Clinton for Trump, and Muslim voters to consider Clinton an Islamophobe.

The Kremlin-orchestrated propaganda efforts on Facebook have evinced a level of sophistication surprising for a foreign entity, prompting speculation that Russians may have received some kind of targeting help. Such targeting reached voters in states where Clinton enjoyed a traditional advantage but went for Trump, including Michigan and Wisconsin, CNN reported.

In May, the Guardian’s Sunday Observer reported that Cambridge Analytica and its UK affiliate SCL––which owns 10 percent of Cambridge Analytica to Mercer’s 90 percent––have worked in 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,” the Observer reported.

Meanwhile, where in hell is Chris Wylie?

We Need to Have This Figured Out by 2019. That Is a Huge Challenge. On It Rests Our Democracy.

If we don't get it figured out, you can pretty much kiss goodbye any hope of exercising your "democratic franchise" when you go to the polls to elect our next federal government. Today, money is all that's needed to buy elections, even in Canada.

It bought the Brexit vote. It can do the same thing here.

The money man is American Robert Mercer and he's out to overwhelm democracy with money to create a new conservative order.


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.”

...

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.

...

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’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."

...

The Military Connection

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.

...

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.

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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.”
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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?

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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. 

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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.”

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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.

Note: This story has been kicking around, slowly emerging, for the past four months. I posted on it in February. This latest article from The Observer connects all the major dots and adds a couple of critical points to the earlier work. Most importantly it links Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Cambridge
Analytica, AggregateIQ to this incredible, democratic suppression machine used to manipulate elections and skew results. Here are a couple of salient passages from my previous posts.


“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous." 

Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. ...with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves.”