As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 U. S. midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had…
As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 U. S. midterm elections, it had a problem.
The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Steve Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of U. S. voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.
So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.
The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the U. S. electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.
An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: «Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.»
«They want to fight a culture war in America,» he added. «Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.»
Details of Cambridge’s acquisition and use of Facebook data have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm’s psychographic modeling techniques.
But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but also still possesses most or all of the trove.
Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.
During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But Friday, the company posted a written statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.
«This was a scam — and a fraud,» Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, told The Times earlier Friday.
He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. «We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,» Grewal said.
Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Kogan for violating Facebook’s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago.
In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators, who are scrutinizing possible data privacy violations and allegations that it performed illegal work on the Brexit campaign. In the United States, Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Bannon and Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.
Congressional investigators have questioned Nix about the company’s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.
While the substance of Mueller’s interest is a closely guarded secret, documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm’s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine. And the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, disclosed in October that Nix had reached out to him during the campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and «likes.»
«Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,» Grewal said. «No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.»
Still, he added, «it’s a serious abuse of our rules.» Reading voters’ minds
The Bordeaux flowed freely as Nix and several colleagues sat down for dinner at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan in late 2013, Wylie recalled in an interview. They had much to celebrate.
Nix, a brash salesman, led the small elections division at SCL Group, a political and defense contractor. He had spent much of the year trying to break into the lucrative new world of political data, recruiting Wylie, then a 24-year-old political operative with ties to veterans of President Barack Obama’s campaigns. Wylie was interested in using inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behavior and had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists, some of them affiliated with Cambridge University.
The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.
Then a chance meeting bought Nix into contact with Bannon, the Breitbart News firebrand who would later become a Trump campaign and White House adviser; and with Mercer, one of the richest men on earth.
Nix and his colleagues courted Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter, who shared his conservative views. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. Through a spokeswoman, Bannon declined to comment.
Mercer agreed to help finance a $1.5 million pilot project to poll voters and test psychographic messaging in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November 2013, where the Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, ran against Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fundraiser. Although Cuccinelli lost, Mercer committed to moving forward.
The Mercers wanted results quickly, and more business beckoned. In early 2014, investor Toby Neugebauer and other wealthy conservatives were preparing to put tens of millions of dollars behind a presidential campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, work that Nix was eager to win.
When Wylie’s colleagues failed to produce a memo explaining their work to Neugebauer, Nix castigated them over email.
«ITS 2 PAGES!! 4 hours work max (or an hour each). What have you all been doing??» he wrote.
Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.
But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult.
