You Can't Handle the
Truth
Psy-ops propaganda goes mainstream.
Slate,
Sept. 19 2005 6:31 AM
Download the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up to get all of Slate's free daily podcasts.
A live "ops center" in a country SCL won't
identify
LONDON—Over the past 24 hours, seven people
have checked into hospitals here with telltale symptoms. Rashes, vomiting, high
temperature, and cramps: the classic signs of smallpox. Once thought wiped out, the disease is back and
threatening a pandemic of epic proportions.
The government faces a dilemma: It needs
people to stay home, but if the news breaks, mass panic might ensue as people
flee the city, carrying the virus with them.
A shadowy media firm steps in to help
orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the
public to the smallpox threat, the company sets up a high-tech "ops
center" to convince the public that an accident at a chemical plant threatens
London. As the fictitious toxic cloud approaches the city, TV news outlets are
provided graphic visuals charting the path of the invisible toxins. Londoners
stay indoors, glued to the telly, convinced that even a short walk into the
streets could be fatal.
This scenario may sound like a rejected plot
twist from a mediocre Bond flick, but one company is dead set on making this fantasy
come to life.
Strategic Communication Laboratories, a small
U.K. firm specializing in "influence operations" made a very public
debut this week with a glitzy exhibit occupying prime real estate at Defense Systems & Equipment
International, or DSEi, the United Kingdom's largest showcase for
military technology. The main attraction was a full-scale mock-up of its ops
center, running simulations ranging from natural disasters to political coups.
Just to the right of the ops center, a
dark-suited man with a wireless microphone paces like a carnival barker,
narrating the scenarios. Above him a screen flashes among scenes of disaster,
while to his right, behind thick glass, workers sit attentively before banks of
computer screens, busily scrolling through data. The play actors pause only to
look up at a big board that flashes ominously between "hot spots"
like North Korea and Congo.
While Londoners fret over fictitious toxins,
the government works to contain the smallpox outbreak. The final result, according
to SCL's calculations, is that only thousands perish, rather than the 10
million originally projected. Another success.
Of course, the idea of deluding an entire city
seems, well, a bit like propaganda.
"If your definition of propaganda is
framing communications to do something that's going to save lives, that's
fine," says Mark Broughton, SCL's public affairs director. "That's
not a word I would use for that."
Then again, it's hard to know exactly what
else to call it. (Company literature describes SCL's niche specialties as
"psychological warfare," "public diplomacy," and
"influence operations.") The smallpox scenario plays out in
excruciating detail how reporters would be tapped to receive disinformation,
with TV and radio stations dedicated to around-the-clock coverage. Even the
eventual disclosure is carefully scripted.
In another doomsday scenario, the company
assists a newly democratic country in South Asia as it struggles with corrupt
politicians and a rising insurgency that threatens to bubble over into bloody
revolution. SCL steps in to assist the benevolent king of "Manpurea"
to temporarily seize power.
Oh, wait, that sounds a lot like Nepal, where
the monarchy earlier this year ousted a corrupt government to stave off a
rising Maoist movement. The problem is, the SCL scenario also sounds a lot like
using a private company to help overthrow a democratically elected government.
Another problem, at least in Nepal, is that the king now shows few signs of returning to democracy.
The company, which describes itself as the
first private-sector provider of psychological operations, has been around
since 1993. But its previous work was limited to civil operations, and it now
wants to expand to military customers.
If SCL weren't so earnest, it might actually
seem to be mocking itself, or perhaps George Orwell. As the end of the smallpox
scenario, dramatic music fades out to a taped message urging people to
"embrace" strategic communications, which it describes as "the
most powerful weapon in the world." And the company Web page offers some
decidedly creepy asides. "The [ops center] can override all national radio
and TV broadcasts in time of crisis," it says, alluding to work the
company has done in an unspecified Asian country.
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The government's use of deception in the
service of national security is not new. During World War II, for example, Allied
forces conducted a massive misinformation campaign, called Operation
Fortitude, designed to hide plans for the Normandy invasion. More
recent efforts have met with controversy, however. In 2002, the Pentagon
shuttered its brand new Office of Strategic Influence after public outcry over its
purported plans to spread deceptive information to the foreign press.
Government deception may even be justified in
some cases, according to Michael Schrage, a senior adviser to the
security-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If
you tell the population that there's been a bio-warfare attack, hospital
emergency rooms will be overwhelmed with people who sincerely believe they have
all the symptoms and require immediate attention," Schrage says.
The problem, he adds, is that in a democracy,
a large-scale ruse would work just once.
The U.S. government has generally sought to
limit disinformation; some agencies—such as the CIA—are explicitly prohibited
by law from misleading domestic press. And while the CIA is fond of
concealment, it takes pride in the belief that truth is necessary for an open
government, a sentiment chiseled into
the agency's lobby.
A successful outcome means thousands, not millions, will die in
a catastrophe
What makes SCL's strategy so unusual is that
it proposes to propagate its campaign domestically, at least some of the time,
and rather than influence just opinion, it wants people to take a particular
course of action. Is SCL simply hawking a flashier version of propaganda?
The spokesman's answer: "We save
lives."
Yes, Broughton acknowledges, the ops center is
not exactly giving the truth, but he adds, "Is it not worth giving an
untruth for 48 hours to save x million people's lives? Sometimes the means to
an end has to be recognized."
Who buys this stuff? Broughton declined to
mention many specific clients, noting that disclosing SCL's
involvement—particularly in countries with a free and open media—could make its
campaigns less effective. However, he says that post-apartheid South Africa has
employed SCL. So has the United Nations, he says.
The company's Web site is even vaguer,
mentioning international organizations and foreign governments. A Google search
produces only a handful of hits, mostly linked to the company's Web site. The
company's work is based on something that even the spokesman admits you
"won't find on the Web": the Behavioral Dynamics Institute, a virtual
lab led by Professor Phil Taylor of Leeds University.
But the company, which is funded by private
investors, is now taking on a higher profile, and visitors flocked to the
flashy setup here at the show. "Basically, we're launching ourselves this
week on the defense market and homeland security market at the same time,"
Broughton explained.
If SCL has its way, its vision of strategic
communications—which involves complex psychological and scientific data—could
be used to shape public response to tsunamis, epidemics, or even the next
Hurricane Katrina.
Well aware that the company may face
controversy, particularly with its push into the defense market, Broughton
emphasizes the company's role in saving lives.
"It sounds altruistic," he said.
"There is some altruism in it, but we also want to earn money."
Sharon Weinberger, a writer based in
Washington, is working on a book about the Pentagon and fringe science.
Cambridge
Analytica: the Tea Party’s New Atlantic Bridge
Textifire,
May 25, 2017
Military psychological research
& lobbying money have brought Brexit Boiz & Team Trump’s radical
nativists together for years.
Steve Bannon-owned Cambridge Analytica LLC, a US subsidiary of
UK defense contractor SCL Group, has been increasingly faulted for its dual
role in both Donald Trump and Brexit’s victories. Its elevated & expensive
role in the Trump-GOP digital media & marketing team’s self-proclaimed
voter suppression rollout was the culmination of several years of preparation
by military and anti-government interests on both sides of the Atlantic, as
well as nationless finance & technology kingmakers seeking to enhance their
own profit power.
Our previous article looked at the undertold
history of the nonprofit organization Citizens United regarding highly
influential American political media & advertising and its moneyed creators
from 1988 to 2011, and we’ll continue right where we left off.
SCL was in a down period at the beginning of our
tale, and its Cambridge Analytica did not yet exist. Donald Trump was engaged
in early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s
David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012
presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal
aspirations on hold.
Still, the fire rises.
Three years after meeting Steve Bannon in 2004 — at
the Beverly Hills movie premiere of Bannon’s directorial debut In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War
in Word and Deed — Andrew
Breitbart left The
Drudge Report to start
his own media outlet, Breitbart
News, which
he said was intended to be “unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel.”
Breitbart rapidly became the darling of the ultraconservatives and elbowed his
way into mainstream relevance, becoming a driving force in the 2009–10 rise of
the explicitly anti-Obama Tea Party.
With their respective stars on the rise, it’s
impossible to know who was more smitten with whom at the Spring 2011 Club For Growth meeting, but Breitbart took enough
interest in nascent conservative activist Rebekah Mercer and her father Robert
Mercer—a wildly successful robotic hedge fund co-CEO, former IBM Watson AI
coder, and increasingly major GOP donor—to later introduce them to his man
Bannon. Having been with Breitbart News since
its inception, Bannon ended up hitting it off with the Mercers and they
immediately joined forces. In June 2011, the Mercers invested $10m in Breitbart, becoming co-owners in the
process, but one of their contract stipulations demanded that their brand
new friend Bannon be promoted to the board of directors.
Bannon
& Breitbart
Cash was flying every which way during that time
period, but perhaps the most important development and deployment of what we’ll
call ‘Mercer Money’ in 2012 came in the form of a $5,000,000 investment in a
relatively unknown British defense contractor, then called Strategic
Communication Laboratories Ltd but now known as SCL Group. The Mercers tossed
the pounds across the pond to enable data analytics research, with Rebekah
wanting a “results-oriented consultant.”
This investment has been noted elsewhere as a
natural fit for Robert Mercer, as his background in algorithms and language
processing mesh with what we now know about SCL’s recent use of big data to
enhance electioneering communications, but that actually didn’t yet make sense
at the time. Back then, the only technology strongly tied to SCL would have
been communications hardware (as opposed to database software), but only as one
aspect of their rather straightforward advertising-cum-propaganda tactics.
SCL had worked on some elections, in a few war
zones, and for the Pentagon over the years, with perhaps their most notable
appearance being in 2004 Ukraine at the time of the Orange Revolution
(allegedly on behalf of the vested interests of British intelligence, according
to one untrustworthy source, as previously noted by TEXTIFIRE). SCL carries a
Secret clearance as a ‘List X’ contractor for the British Ministry of
Defence and had always portrayed themselves as experts in the field of
behavioral dynamics and psychological warfare, but had no known background in
the algorithmic data processing with which they are now associated.
So why would an ill-equipped foreign defense
contractor like SCL be called upon by the Mercers to do big data research? The
answer again appears to lie somewhere in the weeds near Steve Bannon.
Header
for Nigel Farage’s dozens of Breitbart essays (Source)
WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS
ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?
Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics
in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation.
He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly
those tied in with Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A
hard right party commonly disparaged as fascist, UKIP sought to
restore what it saw as true conservatism. Bannon was greatly invested in the
USA Tea Party ‘movement’ at the time, as evidenced by his movie productions and speaking engagements, so he viewed UKIP as a natural
comrade in arms.
UKIP had been stagnating as a political force while
known as a single platform party, focused almost entirely on immigration
crackdown and demand for UK’s exit from the European Union. Co-founder Farage
had returned to lead the party for a 2nd time in November 2010 — later in the
same week as the first Tea Party Republicans were elected in the US
midterms — after failing in his bid to become House of Commons Speaker earlier
that year, and began to incorporate a wider variety of populist messaging with
a focus on local elections to increase growth.
Soon after Bannon took over Breitbart in the summer of 2012, he
brought Farage to the USA for a grand tour of New York and Washington, D.C.
During this trip, Bannon introduced Farage to a number of movers
& shakers, including the staff of Jeff Sessions, the then-senator from
Alabama who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first
connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.
Throughout the previous year, a UK political
activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge was garnering a lot of press
for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox, after being founded in 1997 by Fox and
Reagan BFF/ex-UK-PM Margaret Thatcher, its stated goal was to protect the 80’s
holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special
relationship’ from “the European integrationists who would like to pull Britain
away from its relationship with the United States.”
Louise
Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee)
defending Liam Fox and a Brexit
Atlantic Bridge fell into the sea in late 2011,
after extensive investigations found Fox had been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” by internationally courting
a variety of corporate lobbyists and military contractors via the dark money
donated to Bridge as a falsely-labeled charity. Fox then resigned his Cabinet position, taking a few others
down with him.
One of those affected was yet another powerful
hedge fund manager, ex-Goldman Sachs head trader, climate-change denier & funder, and longtime Tory/Conservative donor named Michael Hintze who provided the
majority of those donations and lent his private jet to Fox for schmoozy jaunts
to meet with D.C. defence contractors. With a strong interest in geopolitical
wargames, a habit of supporting Defence Secretaries, and a
predilection for hiring senior military officials at his powerful
firm Convertible & Quantitative Strategies, it’s small wonder Hintze sought
to establish a Western security superhighway before the Bridge collapsed.
Back in 2007, however, Atlantic Bridge was still in
its prime, and it gained even more power when a giant among US political
activist groups began an official partnership with it. The American Legislative
Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic
Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between
conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, so they may further the ideals
exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”
Atlantic
Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008
ALEC’s decades-old modus operandi is to write complete versions of
new legislation, which invariably benefits only its powerful corporate members,
to be passed off to complicit politicians and introduced in Congress as
original products. An official ALEC newsletter from Dec 2007 bragged of the
Bridge Project’s new plans to enact “a series of events aimed at conservative
leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia — exposing
them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and
helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.”
Catherine Bray is pictured in the newsletter as the
Director of International Relations for Atlantic Bridge; she had previously
worked for prominent UKIP member & climate change denier Roger Helmer and
subsequently worked for Tory Daniel Hannan, “the man who brought you Brexit.” In 2015, Bray
married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s
presidential campaign.
JD
Gordon’s extremely interesting client list.
Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was
Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen, Atlantic Bridge’s
Washington DC Director, and J.D. Gordon, a retired Pentagon spokesman and well-traveled
defense lobbyist. Lee Cohen is now an ardent Trump supporter, publishing an IJR essay in November 2016 predicting Trump and new UK
PM Theresa May will be the new Reagan & Thatcher.
Within a few days of Liam Fox’s resignation, J.D.
Gordon took a job as communications director for Herman
Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier Cain promised to reduce
corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA. Cain began
briefly leading Obama in the polls at that time and was
the most reported-on GOP candidate in 2011, but quit
the race less than 2 months later after sexual misconduct charges arose.
Gordon was slightly controversial when he
originally joined up as one of Cain’s foreign policy advisers, as he had
recently left a fellowship position at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank (or
perhaps hate group) devoted to advancing founder and
former Reagan official Frank Gaffney’s pet cause of extreme Islamophobia.
Cain’s campaign also absorbed the staff of Gordon’s own embryonic
thinktank, the Center for Security and Democracy, which included a former
Heritage Foundation manager.
J.D. Gordon is most recently known for his work as
a key foreign policy adviser to Cain clone Donald Trump, who counted Herman
among his early campaign rally speakers/surrogates, and about whom
Gordon wrote a pro-Trump foreign policy Breitbart article in April 2016. Gordon was also Jeff Sessions’
deputy, traveled to Budapest six times during the campaign, participated in the infamous July 2016 Republican
National Convention meeting — hosted by the Heritage Foundation — involving co-adviser Carter
Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and is said to have previously
recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow.
Gordon also claims he personally asked to water down the RNC
platform with noncommittal language omitting lethal weapons support for
Ukraine, and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.
(L to R)
Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio
Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress
was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, then frequently cited as one of the
farthest-right sitting Senators. An ardent tax reformer, Family member, and anti-immigration crusader, he was on
board with the Tea Party from its inception in early 2009, setting the stage
with the establishment of his Senate Conservatives Fund
PAC in 2008. The Fund attacked Republicans for being too ‘moderate’ and then
gave millions to the successful 2010 Senate campaigns of such first-time Tea
Party candidates as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Pat
Toomey. Also in 2010, DeMint introduced the first bill intended to repeal the Affordable Care
Act, aka Obamacare.
Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few
months later with his first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage, so
he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he endorsed Tea Party
candidate Ted Cruz for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s
monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.
A large chunk of the money for that tactical
assault was provided by Robert Mercer, with other miniature
morsels of Mercer Money going to DeMint, Toomey, and Rubio at various times.
Unsurprisingly, Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the
only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time, with Lee and Demint tying for
the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.
“Breitbart
Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)
DeMint resigned from the Senate less than two
months after the 2012 election in order to become president of Heritage — a thinktank which shares
an enormous number of historical, practical, and membership commonalities with
ALEC — by which time Atlantic Bridge had been dead [in the UK] for over a year.
Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, Liam Fox, J.D. Gordon, and/or any of the
other Atlantic Bridge ambassadors still managed to make their way to any one of
the legendary parties thrown at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a four-story townhouse
rented (?) by Breitbart near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
As for the gregarious and cigar-chomping heavy
drinker Nigel Farage, we don’t have to imagine anything. He was treated as the guest of honor at a Breitbart Embassy dinner &
cocktail party in September 2014, where the stars of the new right rubbed
shoulders with journalists from across the media spectrum. Other guests that
night included LifeZette’s Laura Ingraham, a reporter
from Rolling
Stone, Jeff
Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.
Steve Bannon had been partially living at the
Embassy since at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first
encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially expected to serve
as a means to rub shoulders with the movers & shakers of the DC political
elite. “Andrew [Breitbart] said that if you didn’t have a place within spitting
distance of the Capitol, no one would come,” Bannon told The Washington Post at an Embassy blowout
schmooze-and-boozefest CPAC rager in 2014. “He loved to throw big parties.”
But regardless of the precise circumstances by
which Bannon became enmeshed with the UK’s conservative elite prior to
mid-2012, engrossing as the detailed story may be, his ongoing friendship with
UKIP & Brexit’s Farage tells us all we need to know. As such, we should be
unsurprised to learn it was allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers in summer 2012 to invest US$5m
in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.
PSYOPS GOES MAINSTREAM
In October 2012, a few months after the
Bannon-driven deposit of Mercer Money toward new election management
technology, a Strategic Communication Laboratories subsidiary named SCL
Elections was registered in the UK. All company shares were initially owned by
Alexander Nix, Director of SCL Group and public face of the conglomerate, but
its first and current Managing Director is Mark Turnbull.
Turnbull had previously worked for the tremendously
influential public relations and strategic communications firm Bell
Pottinger — co-founded by infamous PR guru Lord Timothy Bell — spending 18 years at the company. In 2004, he founded and
led Bell Pottinger Public Advocacy (BPPA, fka Bell Pottinger Special Projects),
which claimed to specialize in “understanding and
influencing the human and social dynamics of conflict and
cooperation…[using]…people’s identities, interests, networks and narratives
that are the focal point for communications designed to deliver measurable
change in support of political, social, developmental or military objectives.”
Bell Pottinger (B-PC) landed a 2004 Pentagon
contract in Iraq devoted to manufacturing pro-Coalition media — including
in-house advertising, video production, and paid placement of newspaper/TV/radio
news items — in support of post-Saddam Hussein nation building and anti-Daesh
messaging. The creative team of BPPA collaborated on the media directly with US
military intelligence, with the crews working side-by-side in the most highly
secured locations, such as Baghdad’s Camp Victory.
Though initially intended to be a 4-month contract,
first granted by Ian Tunnicliffe’s Office of Strategic Communications
of the Coalition Provisional Authority under USA’s pseudo-viceroy of Iraq, L.
Paul Bremer, the project ultimately extended all the way to 2011. Upwards of 40
‘stratcom’ companies — including BKSH & Associates, formed from the ashes of
Black, Manafort, and Stone — followed B-PC’s lead, creating a veritable vortex
of political propaganda and psychological operations experimentation. B-PC came
out as the big winner of the free-for-all, as by the end of its time in Iraq,
B-PC’s contract payouts had ballooned from US$5.8m to a total of $540m–660m.
Also present in Iraq during those years was a
specialized British Armed Forces tri-service unit, the 15 (UK) Psychological
Operations Group, formerly known as Shadow. Its stated objective was to “influence attitudes in
order to affect behaviour” with “planned, culturally sensitive, truthful and
attributable activities directed and disseminated by various means to an
approved target audience.” It drew from the Army, Navy & Air Force, seeking
out Reserves who were also “TV & film producers, camera operators, radio
presenters, [and] graphic designers/illustrators for print/web.”
Two important members of 15 (UK) PSYOPS (aka 15 POG) were Stephen Jolly of
the Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham, both graduates
of Cambridge University-affiliated schools. A linguistic scientist, certified
psyops planner, and instructor for 15 POG, Jolly went on to serve as the UK’s Director of Defence
Communications, starting in Dec 2012. He retired in 2015 as the most senior
serving psyops officer in British Defence, moving on to become Fellow of the UK Defence
Academy and Fellow in Communications at the Cambridge University Judge Business
School.
As Defence Comms Director, Jolly embraced the new
‘Army 2020’ holistic reform initiative, pushing a “full spectrum” approach
which combines the fields of public relations, media operations, information
operations (IO) and psyops. This led to the creation of the 77th Brigade of the British Army, which absorbed several specialized units,
including the 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group. Its establishment received a fair amount of media coverage, due to the
claim it would partially focus on utilizing social media
to wage the ‘dark arts’ of asymmetric warfare, but its №1 Column focuses on “the behavioural analysis of
actors, audiences and adversaries.”
Commander Steve Tatham served with 15 POG in Iraq,
but commanded its Afghanistan regiment for years. He also plied his trade as Director of
Communication Research at the UK Defence Academy, and was the UK’s longest
continuously serving Influence Activities officer. Upon retirement he became
Director of Operations at IOTA-Global, a UK company owned by Nigel Oakes, the
founder of SCL and its research arm, Behavioural Dynamics Institute (BDi).
Grown just outside battlefields across the globe,
Tatham designed a course titled “Target Audience Analysis” for the National Defence
Academy of Latvia on behalf of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of
Excellence, teaching several agencies how to counter Russia’s
propaganda in Eastern Europe. Originally a 9-week intensive training, delivered
as a collaboration between IOTA-Global, BDi, and SCL Defence (formerly an SCL
Group subsidiary), Tatham has repeated the course in Moldova and Ukraine. As
IOTA-Global recently disbanded its corporate status, Tatham is currently Director of Defence Operations at SCL
Group.
Verbalisation’s
RAID
Another pair of 15 (UK) PSYOPS veterans and avowed
fans of the new 77th Brigade, Sven Hughes and David Stanhope, are leaders at the
behavioral marketing firm Visualisation, which bills itself as “the world’s first consultancy
dedicated to changing behaviour by precision-engineering language.” Hughes, who
also assisted NATO forces in Afghanistan, says his staff members are “largely
ex-military personnel and political campaigners.” Stanhope spent eight years
with 15 POG, serving under Cdr Tatham for a spell in Afghanistan, and also
worked in 2011 for SCL (briefly joining fellow ex-IO/psyops agents Jerry Knight & the aforementioned Ian Tunnicliffe, both former SCL directors). The POG
vets claim Verbalisation’s RAID aka Rapid Audience Insight Diagnostics®
software tool can help military and marketing clients — including several News Corp media outlets — “decode” personalities
based on 24 set parameters, including language, cognition,
susceptibility, and culture.
Despite years of effort and billions of
international dollars, the Iraq and Afghanistan information operations (IO)
projects were deemed by experts to have been a failure. Cdr Tatham even
co-wrote a UK Defence Academy report lamenting “the corporate failure to adapt
IO and PSYOPS’s operating practices to the 21st century, instead relying upon
ages-old methods of communication,” as well as an “over reliance of IO and
PSYOPS on commercial advertising and marketing strategies.”
“Commercial marketing and advertising methods are
designed to increase the hit rate of customers in a target group. A conversion
of 10% would be considered outstanding and highly profitable. But in military
operations achieving a 10% change in the behaviour of an insurgent group or a
hostile community would be operationally insignificant,” Tatham wrote in the NATO StratCom Target Audience
Analysis (TAA) course summary. He instead advocates for TAA and the use of
scientific research into behavior predictors, such as language, likes, and
motivation, as opposed to focusing the majority of resources on creative media
production glitz.
To this end, the Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory (Dstl), a trading fund of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which is
the equivalent of USA’s DARPA, conducted a study between May-Sept 2013 called ‘Project DUCO’ which contracted SCL and BDi to test
out their TAA capabilities. The evaluation was undertaken as part of the Human
and Social Influence project, funded from the MoD Science and Technology
research budget. In-person questionnaires were verbally completed by young
unmarried males (“YUMs”) in target regions, with SCL-trained interviewers canvassing
neighborhoods like standard solicitors, simply because no other means existed
to gain insight into individual personalities and groupthink.
It seems that the psyops startup incubators of Iraq
and Afghanistan failed to overwhelmingly win the hearts and minds of the target
audiences in those locales, but succeeded in honing the methodological
requirements of the IO traffickers. As Tatham suggested, giant billboards and
radio jingles aimed at a large population based on small sample size indicators
weren’t effective enough, so a product like Verbalisation — listed under
“Counter Terrorism and Security” on R-Cloud, Dstl’s marketplace for partnered
contractors — was born, ready and able to pinpoint individuals & target
groups for analysis and alteration.
Of course, all of this sounds exactly like the TAA
work SCL was contracted in early 2017 to perform for the US State Department’s
new Global Engagement Center, a reboot of the Center for Strategic
Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) and its famously failed 2010s online
propaganda & surveillance program.
SCL and State’s CSCC were not strangers prior to
2017, though, as Nigel Oakes had spoken at a January 2012 CSCC seminar on “The
Most Common Mistakes in Designing Influence Campaigns,” at which Oakes was
pitching the State Dept on knowledge acquired from Iraq and Afghan 15 POG work.
The seminar’s BDi-provided video description explains, “Nigel
highlighted four very common errors made in designing influence campaigns,
especially if one is trying to induce significant behavior change.”
Bits and pieces of the 2000s Middle Eastern psyops
extravaganza had trickled out back then, but the full extent of
B-PC/BPPA’s Iraq work under Mark Turnbull was only revealed in a October 2016
report entitled “Fake News and False Flags” by the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism, a UK nonprofit devoted to extended and unbiased
investigations.
Five years previous, the Bureau conducted another well-publicized investigation into Turnbull’s
BPPA, in which B-PC executives were caught on tape boasting about their unique
“dark arts” ability to initiate political change via their deep infiltration
into the highest levels of UK government. The execs also boasted of their
skills in hiding bad PR by manipulating Google results with juiced-up ‘Google bombing’, and how they had a team devoted to Wikipedia reputation management, which
is common now but was rather cutting-edge at the
time.
NOT EXACTLY MAGGIE
& GORBY
Also back in 2004 — the same year BPPA formed and
their work began in Iraq — B-PC took on a contract to spin their web in Ukraine
for Yulia Tymoshenko in the time of the Orange
Revolution, which would have seen them working against Paul Manafort’s clients
in the Party of Regions, as well as in the vicinity of fellow contractor SCL. A
previous article published by TEXTIFIRE explored
SCL’s role in those events and the related history, which involves
billionaires, rigged elections, the most glamorous Russian spy in history, and
a mythical war room SCL billed as “The Most Powerful Weapon In The World.”
Bell’s involvement in Ukraine did not end in 2004,
for even though they had been employed by future Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko,
it was her frequent antagonist and Party of Regions bigwig Dmytro Firtash who
retained the long-term services of B-PC. Firtash is an oil
& natural resources magnate who also owns Ukraine’s largest TV station, but is now an internationally
wanted criminal suspect trailing a long history of personal relationships with
Vladimir Putin and Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich. Just as with the American
PR firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, whose client list is littered with objectively unsavory
characters, Bell Pottinger has long made itself available to the highest
bidder.
Bell advised the Firtash Foundation while Anthony
Fisher, senior consultant with Bell Pottinger, served as director of the Foundation. Fisher also
co-founded the Firtash front Scythian Limited, which came under fire for
funneling foreign funds to Tory politicians in a scandal which prevented a National Security
Adviser nominee from being confirmed, and is a board member of the Firtash-supported group British
Ukrainian Society (BUS). Chairman of BUS is Lord Risby, an economics graduate of Cambridge
University, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, and current member
of the House of Lords.
Firtash’s direct ties to several well-placed UK Conservatives is a
curiosity. Despite his heavy baggage, Firtash has stayed active in politics via
his BUS, and he donated a truck full of cash to help establish Cambridge
University’s Ukrainian Studies school. Perhaps his open checkbook and loose lips have allowed him to avoid extradition
to the USA, instead roaming free in Vienna while out on US$125,000,000 bail from long-unprosecuted charges.
Without speculating too much about his actual place in this tale, Firtash’s
story in particular is reminiscent of the days of Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev era
Cold War double agents.
What’s old is apparently new again, however, as the
Parliamentary members of the short-lived group Conservative Friends of Russia would no doubt
decline to attest. Conservative Friends rapidly fizzled after public outcry but
quickly relaunched as the Westminster Russia Forum, yet those ex-Friends
could be expected to assure us that their original so-called “Tories for Putin” group was strictly on the up and up.
As Friends co-founder Richard Royal explained at
the time in his 2012 Guardian op-ed, the Tories had turned their
backs on the more liberal Labour leadership but found their increasingly
hardlining nativist gaze met in Eurasia. “We must remember, however, that being
a Friend of Russia is not the same as being a Friend of the Russian
government,” said Royal. “By that reckoning, our Conservative members were not
friends of Britain between 1997 and 2010[.]”
Margaret
Thatcher & Lord Tim Bell (Source)
Retro ’80s stylings abound, in fact, as
Conservative bedfellow Lord Bell was nominated for his knighthood by Margaret
Thatcher, for whom he served as personal media adviser throughout her time as
UK Prime Minister, with their close friendship illustrated by Bell’s official
announcement of her 2013 death.
The Iron Lady left behind quite the well-connected
coterie, with her Atlantic Bridge co-founder Liam Fox overseeing the
aforementioned psyops work while Shadow Defence Secretary & Defence
Secretary from 2005–2011, his megadonor patron Michael Hintze a client of Lord Bell’s
during the time of Atlantic Bridge, and old friend Sir Geoffrey
Pattie — another former vice-chair of the Conservative party who served as
Thatcher’s Minister of State for Industry & Information Technology and
Undersecretary for Defence Procurement — spending a few years as a Director of
SCL.
Though Sir Pattie had switched from Director to President of SCL Group four years prior, SCL
Elections’ official registration in the month preceding President Obama’s
reelection — with Mercer Money in its coffers and Lord Bell’s ‘Special
Projects’ ex-director Mark Turnbull at its helm — set off a chain reaction of
SCL corporate maneuverings that extended across the following four years.
A flurry of declarations of new subsidiaries and
subsequent name changes of those companies culminated on 7 September 2016, when
SCL Director Alexander Nix transferred all 100 original shares of SCL Elections
from himself to the company SCL Analytics. Formed a year prior, SCL Analytics
is 70% owned by Nix and 30% owned by its parent company SCL Group.
As far as is known at presstime, SCL Group and Nix
currently co-own all shares of SCL Analytics, which owns all shares of SCL Elections, which owns all shares of [what was originally named SCL USA Ltd but as of 13 April 2016 is officially
known as] Cambridge Analytica (UK) Limited.
However, that CA-UK is technically separate from
the American subsidiary Cambridge Analytica LLC, which was registered in
Delaware on 31 Dec 2013, over two years sooner. To confuse us
even further, 22 Apr 2014 saw the DE registration of SCL USA
Inc., which is also wholly owned by SCL Elections but is separate from
the 12 Feb 2003 establishment of SCL USA LLC.
If you followed all that, give yourself a pat on
the back and a candy.
Cambridge Analytica LLC — the US company which will
henceforth be referred to as CA or CambAnal — has garnered a large amount of
public interest over the last year and a half for its use of big data in
elections, just like Rebekah Mercer wanted. After recommending that the Mercers
fund the startup SCL Elections in 2012, which was the major catalyst for the
creation of CambAnal, Steve Bannon continued his push into UK affairs.
He flew to England in late 2013 to meet with Raheem Kassam, a young
far-right blogger and frequent thinktank employee. Bannon invited him to
guide the hand of the upcoming Breitbart London bureau expansion site,
which Kassam agreed to do.
Breitbart London successfully launched in February 2014 and began working
surprising magic on the fortunes of UKIP, which would gain its biggest head of
steam yet as it made huge gains in Parliamentary seats and pushed for
an exit of Britain from the EU. This seems to be partially due to Kassam’s positioning
as Bannon’s UK avatar. Kassam not only tirelessly supported the cause on Breitbart,
but switched his voting allegiance from Conservative to UKIP at the time Bannon
visited in 2013, and then suddenly rose to become UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s
chief of staff in 2014.
A landmark moment for CambAnal arrived around that
same time in the USA, as it was rewarded for all of its convoluted preparation
when it received its first publicly recorded paycheck on June 10th, 2014.
It has also recently been revealed that June was
CA’s first claimed month with its heavyweight Vice President/Secretary, who is
primarily known as the former stock trader, Pentagon employee, executive
chairman of the most influential online news outlet of the past few years, and
Tea Party & Brexit supporter extraordinaire who initially helped kickstart
SCL as it rolled down its current path. All of this describes just one person:
Mr Stephen K. Bannon.
CATCHING UP TO THE
PRESENT TENSION
Steve Bannon — the current White House Chief
Strategist who still attends National Security Council
meetings — has owned at least a hefty chunk of Cambridge Analytica, the Facebook-powered,
international military psyops-based, Mercer-funded, Microsoft-enabled,
finance-loopholed, Amazon-trained, far-right-affiliated, foreign-born,
algorithmic-advertising-driven media machine which participated in both the
victorious Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns.
In fact, Bannon is the only publicly documented member/owner of Cambridge Analytica LLC to date.
Every SCL subsidiary in the UK has reported their shareholders on a regular
basis for public dissemination, as is the lawful standard, but similar
information is generally not available in the US. As a result of Bannon’s
required White House financial disclosures, however, we learned he owned between
$1m-$5m in CambAnal, though in defiance of legality he had not sold it as of at least late April 2017.
When Bannon’s CambAnal joined the Leave, Trump
& GOP campaigns’ data teams in employing high-speed AI advertising and
algorithmic purchasing strategies while partnering with Facebook & Google’s
ad deployment platforms during the 2016 elections, it was a very big deal. Here
we had highly motivated, massively funded, ideologically driven, career
specialist military, psychology, and technology minds from both sides of the
Atlantic working closely together to achieve specific outcomes at any cost.
For example, Liam Fox is the first-ever UK
Secretary of State for International Trade, despite all of his outrageous
behavior just a few short years ago. Apparently someone who profits off of
private deals with international military contractors, all while taking a government
paycheck to represent the public’s best interests, is exactly who should be in
charge of Trade as Britain prepares to exit the European Union. Brexit’s
success paved the way for Fox to triumphantly reclaim his lost power, which
makes his role clear.
Brexit kingpin and former financial trader Nigel
Farage was invited to speak at Heritage Foundation in 2015, along with Roger
Helmer & other UKIP “Patriotic Voices from Europe”, delivering a
barrage of Obama attacks to the delight of the crowd. In fact, Farage’s Leave
campaigns were entirely unafraid of identifying their friends across the pond, as evidenced by the namecheck in Go Movement Ltd’s
(GML) application for Leave designation: “GML will further coordinate with the
Heritage Foundation and other think tanks that support an EU referendum, which
will provide a strong ‘outside’ voice within the echo chamber.” Predictably,
the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom is elated
about Brexit.
Heritage Foundation was credited with formulating the exact blueprint for Trump’s first
100 days, which mostly worked perfectly (if we can agree its true intent was to
deconstruct the administrative state). Even its slight
failure might explain why President Jim DeMint was recently ousted, after which
time Steve Bannon was floated as a replacement candidate. Things are now
looking like they might go very bad in the Trump administration, but the
suggestion that a White House Chief Strategist would leave that post for a
thinktank should clarify the extent of Heritage’s power and influence. Rebekah
Mercer’s placement as a strong Heritage board member, along with her donations of millions of Mercer Money, is likely stoking the coals under a
Bannon-Heritage matchup.
Totally
unrelated: Alcohol is outlawed in Saudi Arabia.
Club for Growth, which has received at least $2,000,000 of Mercer Money since 2011, is
welcoming the new administration with open arms. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Spring 2017 Club
event on 19 March, in which he mentioned Tea Partiers Pat Toomey & Mike Lee
by name and regaled the crowd with stories of the Club’s strong support for
Pence since way back in 2000.
Atlantic Bridge’s former partner ALEC has also filled the halls of the US government and
especially the White House, with supporters, donation recipients, and members
running the show at the highest possible level. Those names include CIA chief
Mike Pompeo, EPA head Scott Pruitt, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, United
Nations representative Nikki Haley, and — wait for it — VP Mike Pence.
Robert Mercer’s hedge fund Renaissance Technologies
is a legend in the trading industry, partially because they have consistently
been pioneers of automated financial prediction. In 2017, human quants across
the market spectrum are being increasingly laid off and replaced by AI & algorithms.
Machine learning is so prevalent in finance, with so much more predictive power
than humans, that high-speed algorithms are the new normal on Wall Street.
However, Mercer is poised to dominate the industry with RenTec’s new HFT-killing patent, which will essentially elbow out all
but the largest black box houses, leaving him King of FinTech.
These are the people that profited from techniques
and software honed by the world’s largest militaries and tech corporations,
merging media production intended to craft weapons out of art with… well,
actually that perfectly describes both psyops and advertising, but merging
those with total information awareness and special access to the control panels
of the ubiquitous technologies used by billions of people. Theirs is the money
that flowed freely in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, and that money
has steered the conversations that buoyed their ascendancy.
A foreign defense contractor, specializing in
military-grade behavioral modification techniques enhanced by artificial
intelligence, embedded directly inside domestic political campaigns at the
highest level. What will they think of next?
The preceding is an edited excerpt from TEXTIFIRE’s
behemoth report:
The Latest Cambridge Analytica
Exposé Raises More Questions About the Firm’s Role in the Trump Campaign
By John Cassidy
The New Yorker, March 21, 2018
Alexander Nix, the C.E.O. of Cambridge Analytica, has been suspended by the
company.
Photograph by Dominic Lipinski / PA Images
/ Getty
On Tuesday, Britain’s Channel 4 News showed
the second part of its undercover exposé of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial political
consulting firm that worked for the Trump campaign in 2016. In Part 1, which
aired on Monday, the firm’s British chief executive, Alexander Nix, was shown
boasting of setting up honey traps and bribery stings on behalf of the firm’s
clients in elections around the world. Part 2 focussed on C.A.’s work for the
Trump campaign. These television reports came after the Observer, a
British newspaper, and the New York Times both published articles this
weekend featuring a former C.A. employee named Christopher Wylie, who decided
to go public with details
about how the firm “exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s
profiles” for use in personalized political advertising.
In the latest Channel 4 report, Nix is shown
saying that he had met Trump “many times” and boasting about the firm’s role in
the 2016 campaign. Just before the report was broadcast, C.A. announced that it
had suspended Nix and set up an independent investigation to review the
“comments and allegations” contained in the first report. In a statement, the
firm said, “Mr. Nix’s recent
comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent
the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness
with which we view this violation.”
Yet the Financial Times has reported
that C.A. tried to prevent Channel 4 from showing its report, threatening
lawsuits. If C.A.’s “values” aren’t represented by its chief executive and the
other two senior executives who appeared in the undercover videos, whose values
are being represented? Those of Rebekah and Robert Mercer, the conservative
billionaires who own part of the firm? Those of Steve Bannon, who once held the
title of vice-president at C.A.? Donald Trump’s?
In the Channel 4 report, Nix describes the work that C.A. did for the Trump campaign.
“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting,”
he says. “We ran all the digital campaign, the digital campaign, the television
campaign, and our data informed all the strategy.” Another C.A. executive, Mark
Taylor, the firm’s chief data officer, says, “Donald Trump lost the popular
vote by three million votes, but won the Electoral College vote. That’s down to
the data and the research. If you did your rallies in the right locations, you
moved more people out in those key swing states on Election Day, that’s how he
won the election.”
The C.A. executives also appear to suggest
that the firm coördinated its activities with political groups who were outside
the Trump campaign, such as super PACs
, which, if true, may have violated campaign laws. Mark Turnbull, the managing
director of C.A.’s political division, claimed credit for a “Crooked Hillary”
ad put out by a pro-Trump super PAC
called Make America Number 1. “We made hundreds of different kinds of creative,
and we put it online,” Turnbull said, adding that the company sometimes used
“proxy organizations” to disguise its role.
Many Democrats, and particularly supporters
of Hillary Clinton, have seized upon the latest revelations. “The way Trump won
was by cheating,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American
Progress and a close ally of Clinton, said on Twitter, after the latest stories broke.
“This. Russian hacking. Russian bots. Impossible to say all of this didn’t affect
70k votes.” In the second Channel 4 report, Clinton herself suggests that there
might have been a connection between C.A. and the Russians. “And the real
question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so
precisely,” she says. “If they were getting advice from, lets say Cambridge
Analytica, or someone else, about, ‘O.K., here are the twelve voters in this
town in Wisconsin, that’s whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these
messages’—that indeed would be very disturbing.”
Clinton didn’t provide any specific evidence
to back up this speculation. So far, nobody else has, either. It should also be
noted that Nix and Taylor, in boasting about the centrality of C.A. to the
Trump campaign, thought they were making a pitch to a potential client. (A team
of Channel 4 reporters posing as a wealthy Sri Lankan and his aides shot the
undercover video at various London hotels.) When political consultants are
trawling for business, they sometimes exaggerate the roles they played in winning
campaigns and play down their presence in losing ones. For this reason alone,
it may be unwise to take some of the statements that Nix and Taylor made at
face value.
Additionally, a number of stories have
appeared querying C.A.’s importance during the campaign. On Sunday, CBS News
reported that the Trump campaign “never used the psychographic data” that C.A.
compiled with the help of a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr
Kogan, who had reportedly obtained information from tens of millions of Facebook
profiles. In late September or early October of 2016, Jared Kushner and Brad
Parscale, the head of the Trump digital campaign, “decided to utilize just the
[Republican National Committee] data for the general election and used nothing
from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor,” the CBS
News story said. “The Trump campaign
had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than
Cambridge Analytica’s.”
This report didn’t cite any sources, but it
certainly looked like an effort by people in the Trump camp to downplay C.A.’s
role in 2016. So did a Politico report published on Tuesday, which
quoted a former Trump campaign official who repeated the claim that the Trump
campaign didn’t use any of C.A.’s data, and said that it only used “limited
staffing” from the firm. Matthew Nussbaum, the Politico reporter who
wrote the story, noted that the Trump
campaign is “once again deploying a hardly-knew-’em defense.”
Also on Tuesday, C.A. put out a series of
tweets trying to dispel what it claimed were myths about its actions in 2016:
“We used no data from Facebook in our models. We ran a standard political data
science program with the same kind of political preference models used by other
presidential campaigns.” Another Tweet contested the notion that C.A.
constructed “personality profiles” for potential voters. “We joined in June,”
the tweet said. “There wasn’t time.
Building a presidential data program takes campaigns well over a year.”
Given the content of the video, there is good
reason to be skeptical of anything C.A. says. But the differing accounts of
C.A.’s role emphasize the need for more definitive answers. Finally, some
people in authority are demanding them. On Tuesday, Adam Schiff, the top
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, invited Wylie, the C.A.
whistle-blower, to appear before the panel. Republican Senator John Kennedy and
Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who are both members of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, demanded hearings on the security of user data online. And Bloomberg
News reported that the Federal
Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook, in enabling C.A. to access
so much of its users’ data, violated a consent decree that it signed in 2011.
In Britain, meanwhile, a government minister,
Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, confirmed in the House of
Commons that Britain’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner, was looking
into whether Facebook data had been acquired and used illegally. And a
parliamentary committee that is looking into the possible misuse of online data
has asked both Nix and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of
Facebook, to appear before it. “Someone has to take responsibility for this,”
Damian Collins, the Conservative M.P. who heads the committee, said. “It’s time
for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page.”
·
John Cassidy has
been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column about politics, economics, and
more for newyorker.com.
Digital, Culture,
Media and Sport Committee
Oral evidence: Fake
News, HC 363
Tuesday 27 February
2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 27
February 2018.
Members present: Damian Collins (Chair); Paul Farrelly;
Simon Hart; Julian Knight; Ian C. Lucas; Christian Matheson; Rebecca Pow; Giles
Watling.
Questions 621-848
Witness
I: Alexander Nix, Chief Executive, Cambridge Analytica
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Cambridge Analytica
Examination of witnesses
Alexander Nix, Chief Executive, Cambridge Analytica
Q621 Chair: Good
morning. Welcome to Alexander Nix to this further session of the Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport Committee and our inquiry on fake news and
disinformation. During the course of our investigation so far, it has been clear
to us that understanding of data analytics and behavioural patterns online is
key to understanding the way that messaging works. That is why we were
particularly keen to talk to Cambridge Analytica, which is one of the leading
companies in the world—I think it would be fair to say—in understanding the way
in which data analytics and behaviour activity works online.
We have a range of questions that we want to ask you, Mr
Nix, about that. We are also this morning publishing the letter you sent to me on
23 February following the evidence session we had in Washington, in which you
raised some concerns about things that were said about Cambridge Analytica at
that hearing that you wanted to correct for the record. I am publishing that
letter this morning, but I wanted to start by asking a couple of questions
relating to that letter and to clear up a few things.
One of the issues you raised in the letter in response to Mr
Matheson’s question was to state that Cambridge Analytica had never had any
involvement in the EU referendum campaign. To quote for the record for people
who may not have seen the letter, you say, “Cambridge Analytica had no
involvement in the referendum, was not retained by any campaign, and did not
provide any services (paid or unpaid) to any campaign.” That is what you said
in your letter. We are publishing that today but I wanted to be clear. You will
understand why this confusion has arisen about Cambridge Analytica’s role,
because there have been public statements made by you that did associate you
with the referendum campaign and with Leave.EU in particular. Why are those
previous statements not correct but what you say now correct instead?
Alexander Nix: Let me start by saying thank you for the
invitation to come and speak to this Committee. Fake news is a credible threat
to the public and indeed to the industry that we work in, and we are pleased to
try to help in any way that we can.
We have been very consistent for the last two years about
our involvement, or lack of involvement, in the EU referendum. There was one
statement only, which was put out erroneously, that indicated that we were
involved in the campaign. It was drafted by a slightly overzealous PR
consultant who worked for us, and referenced work that we hoped and intended to
undertake for the campaign. Subsequently, work was never undertaken. The moment
that that statement went out we were absolutely crystal clear to all the media
outlets that we were not involved and that it had been released in error, and
we tried to correct the press again and again and again. Unfortunately, and
somewhat ironically, this was an example of fake news that was disseminated and
spun out virally. By the time it had penetrated the internet it became a matter
of fact even though there was no fact behind it.
Q622 Chair: So
that I am clear, is this the statement? I will read from it. Tell me if this is
the statement you are referring to: “Recently Cambridge Analytica has teamed up
with Leave.EU—the UK’s largest group advocating for a British exit… from the
European Union—to help them better understand and communicate with UK voters.
We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’s social media campaign by ensuring
the right messages get to the right voters online”. Is that the statement you are
referring to?
Alexander Nix: That is the statement, and this was a
statement that was prepared in anticipation of working with that organisation
and was released, unfortunately, ahead of any work starting. Again, it was an
error. We were very vocal about that at the time and we addressed it head-on
immediately when we realised that it had been put out.
Q623 Chair: I
have seen that quotation in an article for Campaign magazine, which is in your
name.
Alexander Nix: That is where it was put out.
Chair: Yes. It is an article in your name and it is still on
their website today, so why have you not asked them to withdraw it if that
statement was put out in error?
Alexander Nix: I cannot speak to that personally, but I am
sure that we have asked them. I can double-check for you.
Q624 Chair: I
think we all understand that sometimes an over-eager press officer might say
the wrong thing. It is quite different when the leading figure in a company
signs off an article that goes out in their name and the key fact in that
argument is wrong. It does not just refer to an anticipated relationship. It
says that you have already worked for them, “We have already helped supercharge
Leave.EU’s social media” messaging and, in particular, references the growth in
the Facebook page for the campaign. Presumably that refers to work that has
been done not just things you hope to do.
Alexander Nix: While your point is valid—we have addressed
it head-on again and again—the facts of the matter are that we did no work on
that campaign or any campaigns. We were not involved in the referendum. While
we could dwell on this, I think we should probably look at the facts of the
matter, which are that we were not involved, period.
Q625 Chair: What
you are saying is clear. Unfortunately, the question will still keep coming up
because people will reference this and think it is odd that a statement was put
out that was totally untrue, when it refers to not just work you hope to do but
work that you have already done. This will not be news to you, but in the
Newsnight programme that you were interviewed in, they had had footage of a
Cambridge Analytica employee sitting in a press conference with Leave.EU. It
was Brittany Kaiser, and she talked about the fact that she would be working on
running large-scale research for Leave.EU. That was in 2015. Was that work
undertaken? Did she do that as a Cambridge Analytica employee or was that done
in a personal capacity?
Alexander Nix: It is not unusual, when you are exploring a
working relationship with a client, to speak in public together about the work
that you hope to undertake. That was simply an example of that.
Q626 Chair: She
was talking about work that they hoped to do, but that work was not done.
Alexander Nix: Exactly right.
Q627 Chair: When
we talk about you or your organisation, when you say that work was not done and
there was never any work done, does that apply to not just Cambridge Analytica
but all your affiliate companies and companies in your group as well?
Alexander Nix: That is absolutely right. No company that
falls under any of the group vehicles in Cambridge Analytica or SCL or any
other company that we are involved with has worked on the EU referendum.
Chair: Any associates or anyone?
Alexander Nix: Or any associates.
Q628 Chair: In
April 2017, Andy Wigmore, the communications director at Leave.EU, put out a
tweet in response to some news from the Conservative party about the people it
had hired to advise it on the last general election for its digital campaign.
He says, “You should use Cambridge Analytics—we did apparently can highly
recommend them”. Why would he have said that?
Alexander Nix: You are going to have to speak to Andy about
that. I cannot begin to second-guess why he would have said that. My
understanding is that he subsequently changed that statement, but, again, you
would have to speak to him.
Q629 Chair: He
also put out another tweet saying, “Leave.EU campaign brings in US voter data
and messaging firm Cambridge Analytica”. That was a separate tweet.
Alexander Nix: I do not know the date of that, but I can
only assume that at the time he was vying to be the designated leave campaign
and that by associating himself with a data analytics firm such as ours, which
had quite a high profile for our work in the United States in the US
presidential primaries, he was hoping that would give him additional
credibility through association.
Q630 Chair: That
was in November 2015 and that was presumably after the press conference that
Brittany Kaiser took part in as well. Again, that would suggest that there was
a working relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU at that time.
Alexander Nix: I do not know how to explain this to you more
clearly: we did not work with them. However you look at this or however it
appears to you or whatever tweets other people have said about the situation,
we did no paid or unpaid work. We had no formalised relationship with them. We
did not work on the EU referendum with that organisation or any other
organisation.
Q631 Chair: The
reason I think it is important that we ask these questions is that we are
publishing a written statement from you that seems to correct the record on
this point. The reason the questions keep coming up is that what you have said
today is clearly challenged by what you have said in the past, or statements
that have gone out in your name in the past, and what people like Andy Wigmore
have said and what other employees at Cambridge Analytica have said in the past
as well. We are now being asked to believe that the version of reality that was
portrayed at the end of 2015 and 2016 is false, and the current statement is
that there was no work of any kind done by either Cambridge Analytica or any
associates during the referendum. They are at such odds it is not unreasonable
that these questions keep coming up.
Alexander Nix: You are looking at that in isolation. As I
said before, that press release went out in error. After it went out, we were
very quick to go to the press and to correct it and to say to them, “This was a
mistake. For the record, we are not doing any work. We have not been retained
or contracted by any of these organisations”. We consistently put this message
out over a two-year period. One press release you are referring to was
instantly corrected, and we have been consistent in our messaging ever since,
so I do not think your line of inquiry is entirely fair.
Q632 Chair: It
is an article, not a press release, in your name, and it is still on the
website of the organisation that published it, in your name. It has not been
taken down.
Alexander Nix: That is out of our control, clearly.
Chair: You could have made a request to them.
Alexander Nix: We have made several requests to leading
newspaper publications to retract statements that we have been involved with
this. We have told news outlets, and we have put out our own press releases,
but unfortunately we are not always successful in these entreaties.
Q633 Chair: It
is normal for companies, when they are pitching for work—and from what you said
it sounded like you were in the process of pitching for work for Leave.EU even
if it did not come about. Probably a fair interpretation of the article we have
been discussing is that you anticipated that you were going to be hired to do
some work for them and that did not happen. What sort of work was done in order
to pitch? Normally you go out and see prospective clients and you pitch to them
and show them what you can do and the value you could add if you were hired.
Alexander Nix: That is exactly right. We have a political
division. It is not uncommon for us to go and speak to political parties.
Indeed, in this country I think I have spoken with every political party—or at
least been approached by Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP, SNP, Conservatives—on
how we might be able to help them with their campaigns, various different
campaigns, and to present our services, talk about our track record, our
extensive 27-year history in managing election campaigns around the world, the
technologies that we have developed to help campaigning and make it more
efficient and then to talk about how our services might be most relevant to the
clients that we are seeking to assist. I think that is pretty common practice.
Q634 Chair: I
used to work in the advertising industry many years ago, part of the “Mad Men”
style mass messaging industry that you say is now dead. What was normal there
is that you would produce draft campaigns. You would say, “If you hired us,
these are some of the advertisements that we would run for you.” Given that
what you do is for many people, and probably for many of your clients, quite a
new area of activity, do you create demonstrations, saying, “This is a sample
of the sorts of work we would do for you based on our understanding of this
issue and the understanding of your audience. Here are some examples of the
work we would do if we were hired”?
Alexander Nix: Unlike the “Mad Men” days of advertising
where it is creative-led, so you can draw on the imagination to come up with
these sorts of examples, our communications are rooted in data and in science.
As a result, in order to produce these things there is considerably more time
and effort and work involved and we also need access to the appropriate
datasets. It would be almost impossible for us to provide a client with a
meaningful demonstration of what we might be able to do for them unless we have
access to their data and have spent a lot of time modelling. More often—I would
say that this is always is the case—we will simply show them work from other
projects that we have worked on, to give them an understanding of the sort of
work that we might be able to deliver to them.
Q635 Chair: In
your discussions with Leave.EU, did they say that they had a dataset that they
could make available to you in order to assist targeting in that campaign?
Alexander Nix: I am not sure that they did have a huge
dataset or any dataset. I would have to revert to you on that. I think the idea
was that we would help them go out and capture their data for them.
Q636 Ian C.
Lucas: I have a quotation in front of me, dated 8 February 2017, from Bloomberg
Businessweek: “We did undertake some work with Leave.eu, but it’s been significantly
over-reported”. Are you saying that that is not correct, you never said that?
Alexander Nix: What I am saying is that the work we
undertook was exploring a business relationship together.
Ian C. Lucas: You explored a business relationship but you did
not begin a business relationship?
Alexander Nix: That is correct, sir.
Q637 Ian C.
Lucas: Do you know who Arron Banks is?
Alexander Nix: I do know who Arron Banks is.
Q638 Ian C.
Lucas: Have you read this book?
Alexander Nix: I know I have not.
Q639 Ian C.
Lucas: It is called The Bad Boys of Brexit and it was sent to me by Arron
Banks. Do you have a copy in your office?
Alexander Nix: That is correct. I was given a copy as well.
Q640 Ian C.
Lucas: Can I suggest you read it, Mr Nix, because on 22 October 2015, according
to this book, Mr Bank says, “We have hired Cambridge Analytica, an American
company that uses ‘big data and advanced psychographics’ to influence people”.
Are you saying that is incorrect?
Alexander Nix: I am saying that is incorrect.
Q641 Ian C.
Lucas: Were you aware of that statement?
Alexander Nix: I saw the statement in the book.
Ian C. Lucas: You said you had not read it.
Alexander Nix: I have not read the book. I have seen the
pages relevant to Cambridge Analytica.
Q642 Ian C.
Lucas: You are aware of that statement.
Alexander Nix: Yes, I am aware of that statement.
Q643 Ian C.
Lucas: Do you think that improves the business reputation of Cambridge
Analytica?
Alexander Nix: Unfortunately, that is something that is out
of our control. We have spoken to Mr Banks about this statement, and we spoke
to Mr Wigmore about some of the statements that he made. We told them that we
disagreed with them and that they were not true. I believe that they retracted
some of their statements. The book came out, and it was already published by
time I knew that that statement was going to be included in it. There was very
little that I could do at the time to change that.
Q644 Ian C.
Lucas: You could have sued, couldn’t you? You could have sued if it was
damaging to the reputation of Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix: I could have but I did not think that was
adequate use of time and resources.
Q645 Ian C.
Lucas: What he says is not true?
Alexander Nix: That is not true.
Q646 Ian C.
Lucas: He is a liar.
Alexander Nix: It is not true.
Q647 Ian C.
Lucas: He not only says that he used Cambridge Analytica; he said,
specifically, that he hired you.
Alexander Nix: That is not true.
Q648 Ian C.
Lucas: There are no financial payments from Leave.EU to Cambridge Analytica or
any of associates?
Alexander Nix: Let me be absolutely crystal clear about
this. I do not know how many ways I can say this. We did not work for Leave.EU.
We have not undertaken any paid or unpaid work for them, okay? There is nothing
else I can add to that that is going to clarify that statement in any more
detail.
Q649 Ian C.
Lucas: Mr Nix, I am sorry, but I am going to quote back to you what you said,
which is, “We did undertake some work with Leave.EU”. It is in the quotation,
and you have just said exactly the opposite. Which is true?
Alexander Nix: I was using the word “work” to mean that we
met with them to discuss an opportunity. That is working. Unfortunately, having
meetings, even if they do not lead anywhere, is still work but it does not
entail the sort of relationship that you are trying to suggest existed between
their organisation and our company.
Q650 Ian C.
Lucas: Would you disclose your bank statements to show that no payments have
been made from Leave.EU to Cambridge Analytica?
Alexander Nix: Yes, I would. I would be pleased to do that.
Ian C. Lucas: I would be very grateful if you would send
those to the Committee so that we can check them.
Q651 Simon Hart:
Why are you so desperate to distance yourself from Leave.EU?
Alexander Nix: I am not. I am desperate to make sure that
the facts of the matter are crystal clear, because that is the purpose of this
inquiry, although I thought the purpose of this inquiry was that I could help
inform the Committee on how data and targeting are used in communications.
Q652 Chair:
Absolutely, and believe me we do want to come on to that. It is just that
because you raised this in your letter to us we feel this is something we have
to bottom out with you.
Simon Hart: Keep going. You were just getting to the end of
that.
Alexander Nix: I was simply saying that we were trying to
establish the facts.
Q653 Simon Hart:
You suggested that the work that was involved was around preparatory
discussions that might or might not have led to some form of contract. As a way
of expanding on the answers you gave to Mr Lucas, what went wrong? Have you any
idea why you did not get the job? Have you any idea why Arron Banks is
apparently so determined to argue that you did? I do not understand how
something so simple could become so complicated.
Alexander Nix: Deals fall down or transactions fall down for
all manner of reasons. It could be price, or it could be personalities.
Q654 Simon Hart:
What was it in this instance?
Alexander Nix: There simply was not the appetite to move
forward.
Q655 Simon Hart:
By you or by them?
Alexander Nix: I think by both parties. We did not feel that
the marriage value of Cambridge Analytica working with Leave.EU, and clearly
vice versa, was going to bear a fruitful and successful relationship.
Q656 Simon Hart:
Yet it would seem that Leave.EU are, according to you, making claims now that
suggested that that relationship did exist. Why, if there was not the will go
forward and if there was not the will to enter into any sort of contract, do
you think that they are misrepresenting the truth or, as you put it, commenting
inaccurately?
Alexander Nix: I cannot possibly speculate on Arron Banks or
Andy Wigmore or anyone else’s motivations. That would be an unfair question.
Q657 Simon Hart:
A final point on this, and I think we will come back to the data element. There
is a sense of irony in the way you seem to have found yourself to be the
victims of misinformation being peddled online, which is arguably one of the
accusations that is made about your company since you assist people in playing
to the fears of vulnerable sections of the electorate in order to alter their
voting plans. Do you set a moral compass anywhere in the manner in which you
advise clients on vulnerable-voter sections in order to try to move them from
one position to another? Do you see that as a positive contribution to society
or do you just say, “They are paying the bills, therefore we will provide
whatever it is they want”? Where does the social responsibility sit in all
this?
Alexander Nix: I think that is another entirely unfair
question that stems from a total misunderstanding about what it is that we are
trying to do and how we help our clients. We are trying to use data and
technology to allow campaigns to engage with voters in a more informed and
relevant way. We are trying to make sure that voters receive messages on the
issues and policies that they care most about, and we are trying to make sure
that they are not bombarded with irrelevant materials. That can only be good.
That can only be good for politics, it can only be good for democracy and it
can be good in the wider realms of communication and advertising.
Q658 Simon Hart:
It is not an unfair question to simply report the fact that some people
consider the manner in which the data is used for electoral purposes is quite
subliminal. It is arguably manipulative. I am simply asking for comment; I am
not expressing a view myself. Quite a lot of political parties wish they could
afford your services, I suspect, but they do not. I am simply asking whether
there is any element of this that causes you concern. If you are trying to
nudge—we were all watching the presentation you made yesterday, where you are
trying to help people move from one voting position to another. It is not
anything that is particularly drastic; it is just moving a couple of notches on
the dial. Do you have any comments about whether it is unusual when you see a
political party using the advice that you have given perhaps to alarm certain
sections of the voting community into taking a position on the basis of what,
in the old-fashioned term, would be subliminal advertising? Is that an unfair
accusation?
Alexander Nix: Let’s start by establishing the fact that the
use of big data and predictive analytics in political campaigns was something
that was really championed by Obama’s campaign in 2008. They were the ones who
made the significant advances in what is known now as micro-targeting—the use
of data to start to look at the electorate as very small groups of people,
hopefully, ideally as individuals as opposed to homogeneous masses, and to
start to serve them most relevant messages. Again in 2012, the Democrats
pioneered the use of addressable advertising technology in order to improve the
way that they use this data to target people as individuals.
As Mr Collins well knows, they have been using these sorts
of techniques in the realm of advertising to personalise advertising for many
years—decades even—as they seek to build relationships between brands and their
consumers such that you do not get blanketed with generic messaging but everything
becomes more relevant to you. That is an entire industry that is moving in this
direction. It is not Cambridge Analytica. All we have simply done is look at
the industry—the advertising industry—and at what is going on in the political
industry, and we have taken the best practices and in a very short of time we
have replicated them and, I would like to say, improved on some of these
techniques and methodologies and served them up to a different political party
in order to help them have an equal chance of competing in a free and fair
democracy.
I think part of the issue is that our candidate is somewhat
polarising and so people see the work that we did in a negative light, and they
refuse to accept the fact that Clinton’s machine was twice the size or three
times of anything that we were doing for Trump. She had hundreds of data
scientists and digital practitioners working for her. They were using very
similar techniques, and they were targeting the audience in a very similar way,
yet they do not come under the limelight and they do not get the scrutiny that
we get simply because of the candidate involved.
I think if you look at the industry and you say to yourself,
“Is it good for politics that you can make communications more relevant, that
you can start to run a national campaign that involves millions or tens of
millions or even hundreds of millions of voters and you can start to treat that
campaign as you would a small mayoral election or a local election in the UK
and you can start to speak to press releases about very local concerns that are
relevant to them?” Whether it is speeding cameras or regulation of parking
permits or whatever it is—things that matter as opposed to blanket
messaging—that has to be good to make politics more personal, more
individualised and more engaging.
Q659 Simon Hart:
Last question, and I should know the answer to this: were you involved in the
2017 election here?
Alexander Nix: No.
Q660 Simon Hart:
2015?
Alexander Nix: As a rule of thumb, we do not involve
ourselves in politics in the UK.
Q661 Chair: You
said as a rule of thumb, but have you?
Alexander Nix: I have been with the company for about 14
years and I have never worked on a campaign in the UK, simply because, as a
predominantly British campaign, we think it would be complex and possibly
divisive to ask our employees and staff to support a particular political party
in the country that they reside in.
Q662 Chair:
Following up, you took umbrage at one of Simon’s questions about playing on
people’s fears, but you gave a presentation about your work for the Ted Cruz
campaign where you demonstrated that, based on the psychological profile of the
audience, you might use an advertisement that played on a woman’s fear of being
attacked in her own home to support the gun lobby. You might say that
techniques like that are used by other people, but is that not a good example
of the sort of campaign that Mr Hart was referring to?
Alexander Nix: Both sides used fear of spending and fear of
economic exclusion as arguments for staying and remaining in Europe. I think
presenting a fact that is underpinned by an emotion is not fearmongering. If
you believe that yourself, it is very sensible. I think there is an argument to
say that, in the particular instance you are talking about, there are people
who look to the second amendment for self-protection. In fact, I would say
there are quite a lot of people who fall into that bucket.
Q663 Chair: In
that example there that you gave, fear was the emotion that you were playing
on.
Alexander Nix: You are looking at the drivers that are going
to influence the decision making.
Chair: In that case, the driver that was selected in that
example for that decision maker was fear.
Alexander Nix: The fear of being unable to protect yourself.
Chair: The answer to that question is yes?
Alexander Nix: Yes, in that case.
Q664 Christian
Matheson: Who is Brittany Kaiser?
Alexander Nix: Brittany Kaiser is an employee of Cambridge
Analytica.
Q665 Christian
Matheson: Is she still an employee?
Alexander Nix: As of three years, I believe—three or four
years.
Christian Matheson: Is she still an employee?
Alexander Nix: She is still an employee.
Q666 Christian
Matheson: She spoke, representing Cambridge Analytica, at a panel on the launch
of Leave.EU, did she not?
Alexander Nix: I believe so.
Q667 Christian
Matheson: Representing Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix: Representing our proposed involvement as a
company that was going to support Leave.EU.
Q668 Christian
Matheson: She said at the time that, “The most important part of this
referendum is appealing to first time and apathetic voters”.
Alexander Nix: Yes.
Q669 Christian
Matheson: We have had the press release put out by the junior press
officer—that was scotched straight away—but your involvement with Leave.EU
continued up until the very launch and her speaking at that launch.
Alexander Nix: She was not speaking as a consultant to
Leave.EU, she was speaking as a representative of Cambridge that was seeking to
do some work for Leave.EU.
Q670 Christian
Matheson: Did she get paid for being on that panel?
Alexander Nix: No, she did not.
Q671 Christian
Matheson: We had the tweet from 29 November, which again was quickly being
scotched by Andy Wigmore, but a couple of months later, on 10 February 2016,
you were quoted in Campaign magazine as saying, “Recently Cambridge Analytica
has teamed up with Leave.EU… to help them better understand and communicate with
UK voters. We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’s social media
campaign”. I know you are unhappy with the line of questioning, but it is yet
another piece of evidence, is it not, Mr Nix, that is contradictory to the
statement that you have given in your letter to the Chairman?
Alexander Nix: I think it is the same piece of evidence that
has already been brought up, so rather than go round the houses and have
exactly the same conversation that we had 20 minutes ago, we have probably
addressed this one.
Q672 Christian
Matheson: My fear is that there are several individual pieces of contradictory
evidence that provide a weight to each other.
Alexander Nix: No, there are two pieces of evidence that
suggested an association, and we have addressed them both.
Q673 Paul
Farrelly: I want to try to close this opening line of questioning in my own
mind, because I fear that I am hearing the English language changing in my ears
as this session has gone on. You firstly described that you were not working
for someone, but by “work” you meant that you had meetings about working for
someone, which to my mind does not count as working for someone, so that rather
confused me. We have two sets of characters: you and Mr Banks. I use the book
as a coffee mat in my office, because we were all sent unsolicited copies of it
during the election. Mr Banks is saying, “Hey, we are hiring Cambridge
Analytica”, and you are wanting to be Cambridge Analytica working with
Leave.EU, so you are both going around professing love for each other and your
intention to get hitched. Then you say there was no marriage value in this.
What did you mean by that?
Alexander Nix: That we did not get hitched, to use your
metaphor. To use your metaphor, we dated each other, we had a couple of dinners
but we did not get married. Again, how can I spell this out to you? It is
pretty obvious.
Q674 Paul
Farrelly: I am continuing your metaphor. I do not know what a marriage value
is, so perhaps you could help me. There was no marriage value in it for you.
What do you mean?
Alexander Nix: The idea that when two parties come together,
the sum of the relationship is better than the individuals staying on their
own.
Q675 Paul
Farrelly: I am still confused as to why your relationship broke down.
Alexander Nix: I am sure, as experienced businesspeople, you
understand that there are often situations where you engage in conversations
about working together with clients and they do not lead to a relationship
being formed. Unfortunately, this is the nature of business.
Q676 Paul
Farrelly: Could you spell it out? Did they not think you could deliver or were
they not prepared to pay the rate that you wanted? Could you be a little bit
clearer?
Alexander Nix: I cannot be more clear because I cannot
recall. This was four years ago or three years ago. It was one meeting three
years ago that did not lead to business. We do dozens of meetings every day and
some of them lead to contracts and some of them do not, so I cannot be more
clear. All I know is that we met some representatives from Leave.EU, we had
some discussions, but no business was taken forward.
Q677 Paul
Farrelly: It also led to a presence on a launch platform for something that is
pretty seminal in the recent history of this country, but your memory is not
very clear.
Alexander Nix: At the time we were preoccupied with some
fairly important work in the United States and other countries as well.
Q678 Chair: Mr
Nix, you are very clear in saying that Cambridge Analytica received no payment
for any work relating to the referendum. Is that also the case for SCL, your
parent company?
Alexander Nix: It is not our parent company, but that is
also the case, yes.
Q679 Rebecca
Pow: I want to look at the system that you used—I think you might describe it
as a trait-profiling system, the OCEAN system—and at how you gather data and
what you include. Could you very briefly explain the OCEAN method to us?
Alexander Nix: Obviously, depending on which territory you
are operating in, there are different means to gather data depending on the
legislative environment available. In a country such as the United States, we
are able to commercially acquire large datasets on citizens across the United
States—on adults across the United States—that comprise of consumer and
lifestyle data points. This could include anything from their hobbies to what
cars they drive to what magazines they read, what media they consume, what
transactions they make in shops and so forth. These data are provided by data
aggregators as well as by the big brands themselves, such as supermarkets and
other retailers. We are able to match these data with first-party research,
being large, quantitative research instruments, not dissimilar to a poll. We
can go out and ask audiences about their preferences, their preference for a
particular purchases—whether they prefer an automobile over another one—or
indeed we can also start to probe questions about personality and other drivers
that might be relevant to understanding their behaviour and purchasing
decisions.
Q680 Rebecca
Pow: I think the stated commercial aim of the SCL Group said that you then
collate all this information to micro-target people with all your analysis in
order to influence their long-term behaviour. Can you give an example or a
couple of examples of where this has been very successful?
Alexander Nix: Let me try to route this into something that
is a bit more relatable. If you were an automotive company and you were seeking
to advertise your product to an audience, just knowing whether that audience
was more interested in the engine and performance of the vehicle, as opposed to
the safety features or the boot space or anything else, is going to be very
relevant to how you communicate with them. That is an example of one or two
data points. If you can expand on that and start to really understand what it
is that you, as an individual, care about in purchasing decisions—purchasing a
car for instance—you can start to tailor the product to the individual and
start to tailor the communication in a similar way. Then you can talk about, in
the case of somebody who cares about the performance of a vehicle, how it
handles and its metrics for speeding up and braking and torque and all those
other things.
Q681 Rebecca
Pow: I assume you are gathering all this data on the British population as
well.
Alexander Nix: Obviously there is a different set of
regulations in the EU as opposed to the US. The EU is an opt-in data culture as
opposed to an opt-out data culture, as is the case in the United States, so the
datasets that we have in the UK, for instance, are not the same as those that
we have in the US.
Q682 Rebecca
Pow: Does any of the data come from Facebook? I have read that you have said
that within so many “likes” you can almost predict what somebody is going to
think about something, or indeed possibly how somebody might vote, and that you
might know more about them than, say, their partner or spouse or work colleague
does within a few simple steps. Is that right?
Alexander Nix: I have read a similar article. It was not
published by us or written by us, I should say. It was written by an academic
active in the space, so I cannot comment on whether that is true or not. We do
not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data. We do use
Facebook as a platform to advertise, as do all brands and most agencies, or all
agencies, I should say. We use Facebook as a means to gather data. We roll out
surveys on Facebook that the public can engage with if they elect to.
Q683 Rebecca
Pow: But you can put your micro-targeted messages, as you were saying, on
Facebook as advertisements to try to persuade people or nudge them in one
direction or another.
Alexander Nix: We are platform-agnostic. We will match our
offline data segments with any platform out there. Facebook obviously is an
extremely prevalent platform and has an incredible global reach so it is a
go-to platform of choice for many or most agencies, but if there are other more-targeted
platforms, we would use those.
Q684 Rebecca
Pow: We had a gentleman before our panel called David Carroll, who was an
associate professor of media design in the States. He said that there is no
indication of where Cambridge Analytica obtained its data for any of your
rankings. Do you not feel people ought to know where you are getting your data
from and then what you are doing with it, how you are sharing it, whether you
are processing it or even whether people ought to have a right to be able to
delete it?
Alexander Nix: In the United Kingdom, individuals, as
governed by EU law and data protection regulation, are entitled to make a
subject access requests and, as they will be able to under GDPR with all
companies, they will be able to ask for their data and have that data removed
from those companies’ databases. We are fully complicit with the law and the
legislation that is currently in place.
Q685 Rebecca
Pow: Do you see yourselves as being an all-powerful presence with all the knowledge
and data that you have and that it is not surprising people are trying to find
out whether you are doing anything perhaps you should not do in the way of
influencing elections? You do seem to be in a position where, with all your
knowledge and your powerful data, you could do that.
Alexander Nix: It is very flattering that you suggest that
people might see us as having these incredible powers. What we are doing is no
different from what the advertising industry at large is doing across the
commercial space. We are a small technology company that is trying to develop
best-in-practice technologies. We are not a political agency, and we do not
have a political ideology. We work on as many elections each year that are left
of centre as are right of centre. We only work for mainstream political
parties; we do not work for fringe actors. We only work in free and fair
democracies. The science of political campaigning goes back hundreds of years
and what we are doing is a very natural evolution to what has been done before,
and what is being done by many other people as well.
Q686 Rebecca
Pow: Doesn’t the very fact that you are working on political campaigns mean
that you must be influencing them, given that your remit is to influence
people’s long-term behaviour?
Alexander Nix: All campaign management consultancies or
agencies are there to help their customers or their clients, as a good
advertising agency is there to help the brands that it represents. We are there
to make sure that our candidates are able to communicate with the electorate in
the most relevant and effective way. That is what campaign consultancies do, as
most of the people in this room should well know because of their involvement
in politics.
Q687 Ian C.
Lucas: Do you share data between, for example, SCL and Cambridge Analytica?
Alexander Nix: SCL is a very different company to Cambridge
Analytica. It is a different company that has different employees who sit in a
different office. It has a different board and a different board of advisers.
It has different datasets, and it has different clients. The short answer is
no. The only relationship between Cambridge Analytica and SCL is some
shareholders. Apart from that, they are completely separate entities.
Q688 Ian C.
Lucas: There would never be circumstances when you would transfer data from SCL
to Cambridge Analytica?
Alexander Nix: We could transfer data from Cambridge
Analytica to SCL, but because SCL is a company that operates in the government
and defence space, it acts as company that has secret clearance—X-list
accreditation in the UK—so we could not transfer data the other way.
Q689 Ian C.
Lucas: You could transfer data from Cambridge Analytica to SCL, you said?
Alexander Nix: Certain data, yes.
Q690 Ian C.
Lucas: Are there any individuals who work for both organisations?
Alexander Nix: There are individuals like myself who, at a
high level, sit on a board of both organisations, but there are no employees
who work for both organisations.
Q691 Ian C.
Lucas: Is it your understanding that if I lawfully give one of those businesses
information about me, another one of those businesses can use that information?
Alexander Nix: I said certain data. There are certain data
that we can go out and commercially—I am talking about the United States, by
the way.
Ian C. Lucas: I am talking about the UK.
Alexander Nix: In the UK that is not our practice.
Q692 Ian C.
Lucas: It is not your practice. Is that because it is unlawful?
Alexander Nix: We do not share data. No, it is simply
because there is a different legislative environment here.
Ian C. Lucas: So it is because it is unlawful.
Alexander Nix: In America, we can go out and acquire data.
In the UK, we can still work with data, but as a data processor not as data
controller. We can work with client data. I am sure you are familiar with the
distinction between the two. We never own these data; we are simply processing
these data on behalf of our clients.
Q693 Christian
Matheson: Very briefly on that—going back to the answer you gave to Mr Lucas
about not having any common employees, just common shareholders—the registered
representative with the Information Commissioner for Cambridge Analytica is
Jordanna Zetter. Does that sound right?
Alexander Nix: Sorry, the registered representative for—
Christian Matheson: With the Information Commissioner.
Alexander Nix: Right.
Q694 Christian
Matheson: Is it not the case that she is also publicly named as the Operations
Executive for SCL Elections Ltd and Cambridge Analytica?
Alexander Nix: Jordanna has been acting as the liaison in an
administrative capacity for helping the ICO with some of their inquiries into
data and data protection. We have a data compliance team who are undertaking
the work. Her role is more about co-ordination and administration.
Q695 Christian
Matheson: You would stand by the position that there are no common employees or
employees who spend time working for both?
Alexander Nix: Jordanna’s employment is with Cambridge
Analytica.
Q696 Ian C.
Lucas: Can I come in on that? That is a very important role, full stop, but
particularly in an analytics company—the person in charge who is lawfully
responsible to the Information Commissioner.
Alexander Nix: There is a misunderstanding. She is not the
person in charge. Ultimately, the CEO is in charge and our data compliance team
is in charge. She is simply the liaison who passes messages between the two
bodies.
Q697 Christian
Matheson: What is the difference between owning the data and processing it?
Alexander Nix: In the UK, if we were to undertake work for a
big corporate, their data would be owned by them and they would always be the
data controller. They would have control and responsibility for their data.
They could bring us in to work on their data, but we would never take receipt
of that data and we would never own that data. We would simply come in and
perform analytic function on that data. Their data would remain their data.
Q698 Rebecca
Pow: This is just a small point related to data. I believe I asked you whether
you gathered the data from Facebook and whether you were using all that
information. I think you said you did some surveys. Could you expand a bit more
on what those surveys are, what you are asking people and how you are gathering
the data? Do you keep that data on surveys carried out on Facebook or does
Facebook keep it?
Alexander Nix: I cannot speak to Facebook, but as far as I
am aware the process works a bit like an opinion survey. If I want to find out
how many people prefer red cars or yellow cars, I can post that question on
Facebook and people can agree. They can opt in to answer a survey and they give
their consent and they say, “I prefer a yellow car” and then we can collect
that data. That is no different to running a telephone poll or a digital poll
or a mail poll or any other form of poll. It is just a platform that allows you
to engage with communities.
Q699 Rebecca
Pow: Are they a big part of your data-gathering service?
Alexander Nix: When we work for brands, whether it is in the
UK or in the US or elsewhere, we often feel the need to probe their customers
and find out what they think about particular products or services. We might
use Facebook as a means to engage with the general public to gather this data.
Q700 Simon Hart:
Let me ask a very quick question on the Facebook survey opt-in option that you
were describing. If you are asking somebody what kind of car they prefer and
they opt in, does that facilitate access to other data that may be held by
Facebook, which is irrelevant to car colour, or is it only the data you collect
on car colour that is relevant? Nothing else that is part of the data held by
Facebook would be available to you.
Alexander Nix: You are absolutely right—no other data. As
far as I am aware, Facebook does not share any of its data. It is what is known
as a walled garden, which keep its data—
Q701 Simon Hart:
People are not in any way accidently giving you consent to access data other
than that that you specifically asked for.
Alexander Nix: That is correct. People are not giving us
consent and Facebook does not have a mechanism that allows third parties such
as us to access its data on its customers.
Q702 Simon Hart:
Even with its customers’ consent.
Alexander Nix: Even with its customers’ consent.
Q703 Chair: I
have taken one of your surveys. It was found through your website. I think it
was a profiling survey that is linked to the OCEAN model. The incentive to take
the survey is to understand more about your psychological profile. When you
complete the survey—this is where I bailed out of the process—it invites you to
complete the survey and get the information back you want by logging in with
your Facebook log-in at the end of the process. If someone does that, what data
are they allowing you to share from their Facebook process? What is the purpose
of the Facebook log-in at the end of the survey?
Alexander Nix: Logging in with Facebook is a fairly common
practice in the digital realm. It simply saves you the time of putting in your
name and e-mail address and so forth, such that we can then send you that
report on the survey that you have just taken.
Q704 Chair: Does
that give you the right to access any other data points from my Facebook
profile?
Alexander Nix: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.
Q705 Paul
Farrelly: I just want to clear up two things—I am sure we want to pursue the
use of Facebook. You mentioned that SCL Group, or whichever of the companies it
is—you can perhaps be more precise—has X-list accreditation for work with
Government and defence. Can you explain that? I have not come across an X list
before. Forgive my ignorance.
Alexander Nix: Not at all. I am sure you are not ignorant at
all. SCL is a behavioural communications agency that was set up specifically to
service the government space. We do an awful lot of work in the UK, but it is
principally in the US, working with Government Departments such as the DOD,
State, Pentagon and so forth. We are trying to use an understanding of group
audience behaviour to address often hostile actions. Specifically, that
includes programmes of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation. We are
looking at how we can use an understanding of audiences to address problems in
the drug trade, in children and women trafficking, programmes of social change,
Government information programmes, a huge number of health programmes—trying to
understand how we can encourage people to live more healthy lives.
Q706 Paul
Farrelly: Is this all in the US, not in the UK?
Alexander Nix: It is in the US, the UK and globally.
Obviously, the US is a larger market for this kind of work.
Q707 Paul
Farrelly: Are all the various SCL entities involved in this?
Alexander Nix: That is correct.
Q708 Paul
Farrelly: What does SCL stand for?
Alexander Nix: Historically, going back some 14 or 15 years,
it stood for Strategic Communication Laboratories. It has been abbreviated now.
Q709 Paul Farrelly:
One more loose end. To Rebecca Pow’s question about Facebook, where she said
that with a certain number of likes you could know someone better than this,
this or this, you attributed that to some professor somewhere.
Alexander Nix: I do not think I attributed to anyone by
name.
Paul Farrelly: No, you said it was something that had been
written by a professor.
Alexander Nix: I think I said by an academic, but that is my
understanding, yes.
Q710 Paul
Farrelly: You said that yourself in a speech to the fabulously titled Online
Marketing Rockstars conference in 2017. You made those claims about Cambridge
Analytica’s capability.
Alexander Nix: Could you read that out, please?
Paul Farrelly: You claimed, “With 10 Facebook likes,
Cambridge Analytica can predict an individual’s behaviour better than their
work colleague might. They only need 70 to make”—that is you—“behavioural
predictions better than a friend, 150 to understand a voter better than their
parents”. With 300 likes you claimed your organisation can, “predict a person’s
actions, thoughts and feelings better than their spouse”.
Alexander Nix: Those are not my words. I am familiar with
that text. That was the text that your colleague Rebecca was quoting from but
those were not Cambridge’s words. That was a statement that was made by an
academic who spent a number of years, I believe at Stanford University, looking
into this area. That was his work, and that was his statement. I do not know
why that has been attributed to Cambridge.
Q711 Paul Farrelly: You have not made those
claims on Cambridge Analytica—
Alexander Nix: That is not my statement, period.
Q712 Paul
Farrelly: Did you quote it?
Alexander Nix: No, I did not quote it. I have never
memorised those statistics in order to include them in a quotation.
Q713 Ian C.
Lucas: Is Cambridge Analytica a Facebook developer?
Alexander Nix: No.
Q714 Ian C.
Lucas: What is your relationship with Facebook?
Alexander Nix: We are a client of Facebook. We purchase
advertising through Facebook, as every other digital agency does.
Q715 Chair: Mr
Nix, I would like to clarify one or two things that you have said, and I have
one or two things about Facebook before we move on to other topics. You were
asked earlier about Jordanna Zetter’s dual role working with SCL and with
Cambridge Analytica. Was that dual role created in response to the inquiries
from the Information Commissioner or was she working on that dual role before
those inquiries were made to your company?
Alexander Nix: As far as I am aware—and I would be pleased
to circle back to the Committee to confirm this—Jordanna Zetter is employed by
our office in London to work for Cambridge Analytica. She has no formal role
with SCL Group, which is based out of Arlington, Virginia, in the United
States. I think, as far as I am aware, she has never even visited those offices
and has no relationship with them. She was simply asked to help with the ICO’s
inquiries into data and data protection. She kindly agreed to act as a liaison
in that respect. Should they have any questions—I am not sure that they do or
did, but again I would need to confirm that for you—for SCL in the United
States, she would pass them on and be the conduit of that, simply because they
do not have a relationship with those people. It is purely an administrative
role. She is not a senior member of staff.
Q716 Chair: If
you were able to confirm that in writing we would be grateful for that, and
also whether that liaison role was in place before the Information
Commissioner’s investigation commenced.
Moving on to Facebook, in response to other questions you
drew a distinction between being a data controller and a data processor. Could
you explain a little bit more to us about that distinction between those two
roles?
Alexander Nix: Again, this is certainly not my area of
expertise. I run the leadership team, not the data compliance team. My
understanding of how this works in the United Kingdom is that the brands that
we work with remain the controllers of their own data. That is, if you are a
large retail brand and you have collected a lot of data on consumers, you own
and are responsible for that data and for looking after it and securitising it
and protecting it and all the regulation that governs it. These brands are
allowed to engage with companies and agencies such as Cambridge Analytica in
order to help them to process or model this data. We perform an analytic
function as a subcontractor or as a contractor on this data. We do that work
for them, often on their own servers within their own data ecosystem and then
we leave. We do not control that data, and we do not have a copy of that data.
Q717 Chair: You
said in your letter to me that, “Cambridge Analytica does not gather” data from
Facebook.
Alexander Nix: From Facebook?
Chair: Yes.
Alexander Nix: That is correct.
Q718 Chair: The
actual quote from the letter is: “On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that
Cambridge Analytica ‘gathers data from users on Facebook.’ Cambridge Analytica
does not gather such data.” But from what you said you do, do you not, through
the surveys?
Alexander Nix: Yes, I think I can see what has happened
here. What we were trying to say in our letter is that we do not gather
Facebook data from Facebook users. We can use Facebook as an instrument to go
out and run large-scale surveys of the users, but we do not gather Facebook
data.
Q719 Chair: By
that do you mean that you do not have access to data that is owned by Facebook?
Alexander Nix: Exactly.
Q720 Chair: You
acquire data from Facebook users through them engaging with surveys and other
things.
Alexander Nix: Exactly right.
Q721 Chair: Is
your engagement, either directly or through any associate companies you may
have, just through the placing of surveys or are there other tools or games or
things that are on Facebook that you use to gather data from Facebook users?
Alexander Nix: No, simply through surveys.
Q722 Chair: We
referenced earlier the presentation you gave at the Concordia Conference in
2016 about your work for the Ted Cruz campaign. Were you hired to work for
Donald Trump on the basis of your work with Ted Cruz? I imagine you could not
have been working for two candidates in the same race, so did you start—
Alexander Nix: Actually we were working for two candidates
in the primaries. We were working for Dr Ben Carson’s campaign and for Ted
Cruz’s campaign, and we were seeking to work for Donald Trump’s campaign
throughout the primaries as well but the Trump campaign did not wish to engage
with us other than on an exclusive basis. We had two clients who we were well
established with and we were not willing to give those up, so we said to the
Trump campaign that, “In the event that you win the primary let’s reopen the
discussions that we started almost a year beforehand”.
Q723 Chair: The
work that you did for the Trump campaign was obviously after Ted Cruz’s
campaign had ended. Is that right?
Alexander Nix: Immediately after Trump won the primary—Cruz
coming to second to him—we reopened a dialogue with the Trump campaign about
how we could take all the technology that we developed, largely for the Cruz
campaign, and pivot it across to Trump to give him the same or similar
capability.
Q724 Chair: Is
that what you did?
Alexander Nix: That is exactly what we did.
Q725 Chair: In
your presentation you said that the Cruz campaign relied on a sort of
tripartite strategy where the campaigns were based on understanding behavioural
communications, which is where the OCEAN survey and psychological profiling
comes in, data analytics—data from multiple sources where it is available—and
then ad data to place the messaging. Is that the same approach you used for
Donald Trump’s campaign?
Alexander Nix: We would have liked it to have been, but it
was not the same approach, simply because when we joined the Trump campaign we
had about five and a half months before polling to build or re-engender the
entire analytics capability that Clinton’s team had and that we had been giving
to Cruz. We simply did not have the time and resources to be able to go into
the same depth of services that we provided to the Cruz campaign, which we had
been working on for very many more months. It was a very extended and
protracted programme. We made the decision to focus on the data and analytics
elements of the campaign and the tech, digital and data-driven TV elements of
the campaign. We did not have time to bake in or to incorporate the behavioural
approach, the psychographics that we had used on the Cruz campaign.
Q726 Chair: Why
not? You said that the psychographic information is based on surveys you have
done, which means you believe you have an accurate model for understanding
every voter in America. Presumably that database could be migrated to support
other campaigns as well. It is not data specific to a particular campaign, is
it? It is generic profiling of people.
Alexander Nix: Yes, but then you have to take these data and
contextualise them into the campaign that you are working on. Everything that
we did for Cruz in that regard was centric around Cruz. We would have to then
replicate that for Trump and that would have just been the most enormous piece
of work.
Q727 Chair: In
that case, I don’t understand why you were hired. You have made it quite clear
in your presentation on your work for Ted Cruz that your model is based on the
combination of these different elements. The ad data is about message
targeting—the media placement bit of it—but the smart bit is the merging of
psychological profiling and data analytics. In fact, what you do here in this
country is based on that too. That seems to be your USP. Why would none of that
psychological profiling have been used to augment the data in the Trump
campaign when that is the way you work?
Alexander Nix: As I said before, the reason it was not used
was because we simply did not have the time and resources to include it. If we
had had that opportunity, we would have. We did not and we are just trying to
be transparent about that fact. To say that the smart bit is simply that would
be doing an injustice to the 40 or so PhD data scientists who spent 100 hours a
week for five months crunching data and numbers in order to develop the very
accurate and insightful models that they did for the Trump campaign.
Q728 Chair: The
way you sold yourself and what your company did was based on the combination of
these elements together. If I was someone in the room that day—the way these
conferences work is that you are effectively there pitching yourself and your
company in the hope of winning new business and new clients on the back of it.
You have a very clear model and it is quite interesting that one of the three
supports of that stall has been taken away to go and work on another high
profile campaign. It seems very strange.
Alexander Nix: You can only provide a client, whether it is
political or brand, with the services that you are able to deliver within the
constraints of the project timelines that you are presented with. You are
absolutely correct that, in an ideal world, not only would we have liked to
have delivered the services that I spoke about in that presentation but many
other services that we have developed across the engagement space, as digital
and television in particular, but we simply did not have time. Unfortunately,
unlike running a brand campaign where you are selling automotives or toothpaste
or something where you don’t have the same time pressures, we have a finite
amount of time. You have to choose which technologies in your arsenal are going
to be the most important and that can be deployed most effectively, and we made
a decision.
Q729 Chair: In
that presentation I think there is a slide on data analytics where you describe
that data is sourced from multiple sources and any marketing company will know
that there are companies that specialise in data analytics to analyse consumer
behaviour. I think on your chart you had logos of different companies. I think
Experian was one and Nielsen was one. You had Facebook on there as well. Again,
just to confirm on this, is that because you are highlighting the fact that you
can gather data from Facebook?
Alexander Nix: Collect data through Facebook—that is exactly
right, yes.
Q730 Chair: Does
any of your data comes from Global Science Research company?
Alexander Nix: GSR?
Chair: Yes.
Alexander Nix: We had a relationship with GSR. They did some
research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the
answer is no.
Q731 Chair: They have not supplied you with data
or information?
Alexander Nix: No.
Q732 Chair: Your
datasets are not based with information you have received from them?
Alexander Nix: No.
Chair: At all?
Alexander Nix: At all.
Q733 Ian C. Lucas:
Can I go back to an answer I think you gave earlier? I just want you to confirm
something. Did you say that you had never worked on any political campaigns in
the UK?
Alexander Nix: I said that I personally had not been
involved in any political campaigns in the UK. I have been with the company for
about 14 years and, as far as I am aware, in the last 14 years we have never
worked on any campaigns in the UK.
Ian C. Lucas: That is Cambridge Analytica and—
Alexander Nix: Cambridge Analytica was only formed in 2012,
so this would have been a company that I worked for prior to forming Cambridge
Analytica, which was called SCL.
Q734 Ian C.
Lucas: By political campaigns, that means general elections. What about for
candidate elections for political parties within the UK?
Alexander Nix: Again, as far as I am aware, since I have
been in the company we have never worked—we don’t seek to work in the UK, for
the reasons I discussed earlier. We don’t see the UK as a commercial market of
interest for SCL or—
Q735 Ian C.
Lucas: That really puzzles me because there are lots of other businesses that
might do work for different political organisations within the advertising
sector or within the information sector. Why is it that you are so involved in
politics in the US but you are not involved in the UK?
Alexander Nix: I think I have addressed this already but let
me explain it again for you. First, we only entered the US market in 2012. We
have been running election campaigns since 1994. We take on a number of
national elections every year. That could be three, four, five, six, seven
elections across the world in every single year for prime ministers and
presidents. That could be in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa or beyond. We
entered the US market relatively recently. We saw a commercial opportunity to
bring some of the technologies that we had developed to that market,
particularly to help with Republican politics because they were losing the tech
arms race, if you like, to the Democrats and that is where the opportunity
existed. We have no more interest in servicing the US political market than we
do helping political parties in Africa or Asia. Specifically in regards to the
UK, as I said before, originally we were a British company with most of our
staff based in the UK, and we felt that it would be unfair on our staff for
senior management to make a decision about which political party the company
supported, especially if that was at odds with the political views of our
employees, so we did not want to put them in that awkward position.
Q736 Ian C.
Lucas: That is very thoughtful, because lots of other businesses don’t do that
in the UK. Could you tell me who your clients are in the UK?
Alexander Nix: We work for brands in the UK. Although the
current impression is that we are a political consultancy, I have tried to
explain to this Committee that we are not a political consultancy. We are a
technology-driven marketing firm, and the majority of our business is in the
brand space. We work for big and small brands, trying to help them market and
sell their products and services to consumers around the world. We also have a
government and defence division, which I am very proud of and which does
enormously important work in saving lives all over the world in campaigns about
issues that really matter. We have a political division, but our political
division is only, say, 20% or 25% of our entire business.
Q737 Ian C.
Lucas: Given your thoughtful approach with your employees about not getting
involved in political campaigns, what led you to start to discuss with Leave.EU
about getting involved in probably the most contentious political campaign in
British history?
Alexander Nix: It was only an exploratory discussion and, as
I have said to the Committee already, we have these sorts of discussions with
all parties in the UK. Without exception, every single party has approached us,
and every single party has asked about our services. We have had these
discussions. Some of them have been more protracted than others and we have
never engaged with anyone—not on my watch—but it does not mean we are not
interested to understand more about their needs and concerns, to understand
more about the technology they are embracing and to see what the market is
like. This was an example of that. In the end the decision was made not to move
forward.
Q738 Ian C.
Lucas: You are not a partisan political outfit.
Alexander Nix: I don’t think we would be particularly good
at our job if we were partisan. We try to be objective. We try to walk into a
country and service our clients with the best, most cutting edge technology and
methodologies available for communications and campaigning.
Q739 Ian C.
Lucas: Why was Steve Bannon on your board?
Alexander Nix: Steve Bannon was on our board to help a
British company to understand a new market that it was trying to penetrate. I
can’t think of many people who would be better to help a company enter a
market, particularly into the Republican space, than somebody who had extensive
experience of the commercial and business landscape through his time at Goldman
Sachs and the like, who understood the media landscape through other
experiences, and who also had a very attuned political knowledge.
Q740 Ian C. Lucas:
I can’t think of anyone who is a more partisan political figure.
Alexander Nix: I can’t speak to your—
Ian C. Lucas: Okay, but it does not sit easily with the fact
that you are non-partisan in one country but you are massively partisan in
another.
Alexander Nix: In the United States, the practice is not to
switch sides. You either work for the Republicans or you work for the
Democrats. You don’t do one election for one and then change sides. That is how
the convention is. In other countries, we always give our previous clients
first bite and first sight of our services, but if for any reason they do not
wish to engage with us, we are at liberty to go and work for opposition parties
and sell our services to them.
Q741 Chair: You
might be interested to know, Mr Nix, that various people are watching the
evidence session. It is being broadcast and people are tweeting about it.
Julian Assange has tweeted about it, sharing a link to the session where people
can watch it. Has Cambridge Analytica or any of its associate companies ever
worked on campaigns to distribute information that has been sourced from
WikiLeaks?
Alexander Nix: We have no relationship with WikiLeaks. We
have never spoken to anyone at WikiLeaks. We have never done any business with
WikiLeaks. We have no relationship with them, period.
Q742 Chair: That
was not quite the question I asked, which was whether you had ever been
involved in advising on or organising campaigns to distribute information that
has been sourced from WikiLeaks.
Alexander Nix: We have never been involved in organising or
advising on campaigns that distribute data or information from WikiLeaks.
Q743 Chair:
Arron Banks has also been following the session and tweeting about it. He has
invited himself to come and give evidence to the Committee, which we might well
take him up on—Mr Lucas suggested that earlier on. If Mr Banks is still
watching, if he wants to keep his diary free over the next couple of weeks, we
may well be in touch. What he says in his tweet about your negotiations—this
potential marriage or courtship that failed—is that, “CA wanted a fee of £1m to
start work & then said they would raise £6m in the states. We declined the
offer because it was illegal.” Is what he is saying correct?
Alexander Nix: Absolutely incorrect.
Q744 Chair: That
is the second time he has lied, according to you.
Alexander Nix: Mr Banks is at liberty to say whatever he
likes, but I don’t have to agree with it.
Q745 Chair: What he
has said in that message is totally untrue?
Alexander Nix: That is totally untrue.
Q746 Simon Hart:
I have a quick question on the attitude to your staff and not wishing to put
them in a difficult position when it comes to choosing campaigns. Do you apply
the same principle to which brands you choose to represent? Do your staff have
a say? They may feel more comfortable with some brands than others. Do you
consult them over that?
Alexander Nix: We always give our staff a choice about which
projects they would like to work on. If anyone for any reason does not feel
comfortable working on a particular brand, we are happy to offer them the
opportunity to work on a different brand. If, for instance—and I keep using the
example—you don’t believe that the automotive industry is necessarily good for
the environment, you do not have to work on it. You can go and work on selling
bicycles.
Q747 Simon Hart:
Likewise, UK employees working on the Trump campaign could also choose—
Alexander Nix: All our employees have that opportunity.
Q748 Chair: I
wanted to ask you something about data that I meant to ask you about earlier.
You gather data from various sources, including from Facebook through the
survey tools you have on the platform. Do you retain that data and information
unless you receive a request to hand it back or to destroy it?
Alexander Nix: In a country like the United States, we
retain that data. Some of that data is purchased and some of that data is
licensed, so then you need to either return it or delete it or refresh it.
Q749 Chair: When
you talk about data being purchased, who are the people you have purchased it
from in that case?
Alexander Nix: It is possible to go out and purchase
commercially available datasets. There are people who make a living from
selling data in the United States.
Q750 Chair:
Could you give us an example of a company?
Alexander Nix: This would be people who collect data off
their customers, for instance.
Q751 Chair:
Given that Facebook is such a major platform, would that include customer
Facebook data that has been gathered by other people that you can buy?
Alexander Nix: I don’t know. My understanding—you would have
to speak to Facebook and I know you have spoken to Facebook—is that they do not
share any of their data, and it would be bad for their business model, I
assume, if they did.
Q752 Chair: Yes.
That is certainly what they said to us in their evidence session. You would
hold data that you have acquired on people in America in particular. That data would
be used in different campaigns. You might gather that data as part of one piece
of work you are doing for one client, and you might even use that data in
another campaign if it was relevant to that campaign.
Alexander Nix: Yes. At a high level, yes, but it depends on
the data agreement that is signed with the person that you acquire or license
that data from. Different datasets might have different licensing regulations.
Q753 Chair: In
that presentation, you cited the Iowa caucus as being a campaign you have
worked on. Could data that you used working for Ted Cruz in Iowa have been used
in the Trump campaign as well?
Alexander Nix: Hypothetically, it could have been, yes.
Q754 Chair: We
have talked a lot about profiling, both psychologically and through data
analysis. The third pillar of your presentation was about ad data and ad
placement. Do you advise clients not just on how to reach people and what
message they should see, but also how frequently they need to be contacted
about a message in order for it to be persuasive?
Alexander Nix: Yes, we do.
Q755 Chair: Do
you advise on the architecture for distributing that information as well? We
have taken a lot of evidence about networks of accounts on Facebook and Twitter
in particular that are used and set up to reach audiences and target audiences
with information. Would you advise people on how those should be set up?
Alexander Nix: Do you mean physical architecture or are you
talking about the balance between different channels and how they are weighted?
Chair: I suppose it is a combination of those things. If you
are saying that you give advice on how frequently someone needs to see a
message and, let’s say, that Facebook is going to be one of the chosen media in
order for that message to be seen, do you advise on how that message should be
delivered by Facebook? You could just set up a Facebook page with some
information on, you could use advertising to supplement the reach of that, or
you could use the interaction of other accounts and other pages to bring
audiences to that page. Is that the sort of advice you give clients as part of
advising them on not just what they should say, but how frequently they need to
say it?
Alexander Nix: It is either the advice that we would give
them or the work that we would undertake on their behalf.
Q756 Chair: We
have looked at the role of bot accounts, in particular on Twitter. Is that
something that you would advise clients on, how to set up networks of bot
accounts to augment messages and make sure that people see them frequently?
Alexander Nix: Absolutely not. That is not something we
engage with. It is not something that we would engage with. It goes against
everything that we are trying to achieve. What we are trying to do is make sure
that the most relevant messages hit the right audiences. The idea that you
could use bot accounts to spread messages is contrary to everything we are set
up to do. That goes back to the area of blanket advertising and spamming people
with irrelevant information. That is not what we do.
Q757 Chair:
Twitter were very clear when they gave evidence to us that bot accounts can be
used for good and bad. There is a bot account in my constituency that tweets
the weather every day, which is a perfectly harmless service that someone is
providing. The question is what they are for, but clearly any one of these
accounts is used to target information at people you want to receive it. It is
a targeting tool, not just a broadcasting tool. Is that the sort of advice you
give people on how to use these networks of accounts in order to reach the
right people?
Alexander Nix: No, it is not. It really isn’t, because there
would be no need to invest in our services if that was the implementation or
the engagement process that you were seeking to use. What we are trying to do
is get away from everything that could be construed as mass communication,
spamming or large-scale media engagement. We are trying to make our
communications more personal—really personal. We are trying to build the
individual relationship between the brands and their customers. I agree with
you that bots can be used for good, but it is generally not a technology that
aligns with what we have been set up to do and what we have been doing for the
last 10 years.
Q758 Chair: If
you had a client and you were advising them on how to reach their audience and
the frequency with which they need to reach their audience with a message, and
Twitter and Facebook were the chosen platforms through which that communication
would take place, how would you go about planning and developing that campaign
and delivering it?
Alexander Nix: What we are trying to do is look at an
audience and segment that audience into as many different groups as possible
such that we can begin to identify what each of those subgroups in the target
audience care about most in relation to a specific product or service or,
indeed, political candidate or campaign. Then we start to tailor messaging that
can be made most relevant to the concerns, issues, hopes and fears of those
particular people, so that we can give them the facts of the matter in the most
relevant and personal way. It is about breaking messages down into multiple
messages and then nuancing them to make them more relevant.
Q759 Chair: I
understand the message creation; I am asking about the message delivery. How do
you deliver the message to somebody with the media that you use?
Alexander Nix: In the instance of Facebook, we are able to
take these offline segments, and we can match them to cookies and target the
specific adverts that we have made for that group of people, whether it is 100
people or 100,000 people, and serve that message to them through their cookies.
Q760 Chair:
Through cookies on any site?
Alexander Nix: On Facebook or any other platform.
Q761 Chair:
Given that Facebook is a closed platform, how do you do that? Do you go to
Facebook and say, as other advertisers would do, “We have got this campaign. We
want to target Facebook users. This is the profile of the people we want to
target”?
Alexander Nix: Exactly that. It is an anonymised match based
on a target profile that we have developed through our data analytics.
Q762 Chair: Then
you just pay Facebook in the ordinary way for targeting those people?
Alexander Nix: Exactly that.
Q763 Chair: Do
you gather data that enables you to plan campaigns that might be targeted at
people who have certain religious beliefs or come from a certain ethnic
background or hold certain political opinions?
Alexander Nix: In our campaigns we are trying to get away
from demographics. We are trying to look at people based on their fundamental
drivers and, in the case of politics, this is about who is likely to be
supporting a Republican versus a Democrat and what issues are most relevant to
those audiences. I don’t think that targeting in the way that you have implied
is going to help us.
Q764 Chair: If
someone came along and said, “I want to run a campaign that is going to be
particularly relevant to people that I think are voting Republican but have
very strong religious beliefs”, would you say, “We can create that campaign for
you because we not only understand people’s political motivations but we also
can identify people with strong religious beliefs because of the profiling we
have done on them”?
Alexander Nix: I think that would depend very much on the
data that we have access to or have already gathered. I would not be able to
answer that question specifically, but hypothetically it would be possible if
you had enough data, say on evangelical Christians in America, to have a look
at that audience and see if there is a correlation between that and some
political agenda.
Q765 Chair:
These sorts of data are gathered that theoretically makes it possible.
Alexander Nix: It certainly is not gathered by us, but
obviously there are very large church organisations and religious organisations
that might have access to these types of data.
Q766 Chair: We
have talked a lot about America and I appreciate the data laws in America are
different and, in some ways, I guess that makes what you do easier in America
than it does in the UK. What steps do you take as a company to make sure that
you are always fully compliant with UK data protection laws?
Alexander Nix: Data is the core of our business and so we
take data incredibly seriously. We have an in-house data compliance team who
are working continually with the legislators not only to help understand the
laws, but to help inform on data legislation and how it could be updated and
kept forward. We anonymise and encrypt all data that we receive from clients,
and we would like to believe that we are very much at the cutting edge of the
technologies behind both of those services. We do not store data locally on
devices in order to mitigate the possibility of data breaches and so forth.
Internally, we have our policies on how we treat data and so forth. It is
something that we have given a great deal of consideration to and something we take
incredibly seriously.
Q767 Chair: When
you say you are at the cutting edge of this industry and the way you use that
data is part of being at the cutting edge of that, what sort of data processing
do you do? You say you are receiving raw data but then you are organising it in
some way to make it more relevant. Can you explain a bit more about how that
process works? What would you consider to be an ethical use of that data being
processed in such a way?
Alexander Nix: Certainly. We are not a data miner or a
company like that. We are a data analytics company, so our job is to turn data
into insight—to take very large datasets and try to identify patterns in that
data and to use the data to make predictions about audiences. We are just
trying to run algorithms on the data to try to find meaning in it.
Q768 Chair: Is
it fair to say that there would be many people who have given their data to you
who are not aware that their data is being used in this way and that they could
be targeted in a way that they would never have expected, because they do not
understand that that is how their data can be not only gathered but processed
and then used to support other campaigns?
Alexander Nix: There are several answers to that. The first
answer is that these are not particularly intrusive data. This is not like
someone has given up their health data or their financial data or their private
data. These data are commercially available, as I have said. These are data on
your consumer and lifestyle habits: what car you drive, what magazines you
read, whether you have Weetabix for breakfast and the like. I think most people
understand that there is a reciprocity with large brands whereby they agree,
for instance, to receive a loyalty card and get discounts and offers on
products and services from that company. Most people understand that their data
is being taken in return to help that brand to drive its marketing. Let’s say
that large UK supermarkets—Tesco or Sainsbury’s—all have these types of things.
People are not naive. They understand that reciprocity and they say, “If people
find out whether I buy a loaf of bread and a pint of milk and I get 10%
discount off, that is a fair trade-off”.
What is this going to look like in the future? I think that
the landscape is changing, clearly with GDPR coming in. What we are seeing is
that people are going to want to have more sovereignty over their data and are
going to want to see a greater reciprocity of how their data is used and
greater control. I think that is very healthy and something that we are
investing very heavily in and look forward to. It is going to improve the data
landscape, improve how data can be used where people say, “Okay, I recognise
that my data has a value and why should other companies simply benefit from
that? Why should I not be a participant in receiving some of that
remuneration?”
Q769 Chair: Do
you not see there is a big difference here between saying, “I understand that
you like a particular brand of car and, therefore, I am going to send you
information about other brands of car that are similar and you might be
interested in because we know you like a certain type of car”—which I think
people understand as it has been a marketing technique or a direct marketing
technique for very many years—and saying, “Because of the information I have
gathered about you, I know how to make you frightened”? Isn’t that a very
different proposition?
Alexander Nix: These are only opinions we are looking at.
You can go and speak to people yourselves and you can form an opinion based on
those conversations about what might be the most relevant information to them.
All we are doing is looking at data and making our own personal opinion about
what we think is going to be important insights from that data.
Q770 Ian C.
Lucas: Can you help me a little with these surveys that elicit information from
the people who fill them in? I have filled in a couple of these surveys online
over the years but to my knowledge I have never filled in a Cambridge Analytica
survey. When you are eliciting information, what does it look like on a
platform? What does it look like on a Facebook platform?
Alexander Nix: It might start with basic demographic
information: your name, your age, your gender.
Q771 Ian C. Lucas:
Does it say who is asking?
Alexander Nix: That will obviously depend—I am sure you have
seen an opinion survey in your life. They are all fairly similar. They follow a
fairly standard structure, which is generally establishing who you are speaking
to and then asks you some questions.
Q772 Ian C.
Lucas: Does it say it is from Cambridge Analytica? Would you ever present a
survey on Facebook as saying, “This is a Cambridge Analytica survey. Please
give us this information”?
Alexander Nix: We have done and we do, but it depends what
the purpose of the survey is.
Ian C. Lucas: I have never had one.
Alexander Nix: I think we rolled out 350,000 to 400,000
surveys a month for the Trump campaign in the United States over a five-month
period. These were being done on and behalf of the Trump campaign and that was
the label of the survey. The fact that we were helping them to gather these
data was less relevant.
Q773 Ian C.
Lucas: I think it is important that people know who is asking. You have just
said that was for the Trump campaign, and I think that is entirely legitimate
and fair, but when individuals fill in a survey, do you think they should be
told who is the client, who is the person asking them and where the data is
going?
Alexander Nix: I can see no reason to obfuscate that truth.
These are entirely voluntary surveys. If someone knocks at your door and says,
“Could you fill out a survey?” you don’t have to undertake that. They might
say, “Who is this for?” and you say it is for cancer research.
Q774 Ian C.
Lucas: I am not sure that people understand what their data is being used for.
Alexander Nix: I think I would disagree with that. Most
people understand that data is being gathered. You are not filling in a survey
simply for your own entertainment. I think they do understand that the
companies that are collecting this data must be using it for something.
Q775 Ian C.
Lucas: When you obtain that data for a particular client, do you retain that
data as Cambridge Analytica and then use that as a resource for other clients?
Is that what you do?
Alexander Nix: As I have already mentioned to your
colleague, that depends entirely on the relationship that we have with the
client and also the territory that we are operating in and what the legislation
is. It is case by case.
Q776 Ian C.
Lucas: Let’s talk about the UK. If you collect data for an individual client as
Cambridge Analytica, do you use that data for another client?
Alexander Nix: The client data that we collect for clients
in the UK belongs to the clients, who are ultimately the data controllers. We
are just processing or, in this case, collecting, which is part of the
processing function for these clients.
Q777 Ian C.
Lucas: In those circumstances, you never collect data yourselves as Cambridge
Analytica? You only collect it for clients?
Alexander Nix: In those circumstances, yes.
Q778 Ian C.
Lucas: But you do collect data for yourselves sometimes?
Alexander Nix: For instance, Mr Collins filled out a survey
on our website, or nearly filled it out. That would be data we are collecting
for ourselves.
Q779 Ian C.
Lucas: That is very clear, but within the UK you would need the consent of the
individual who is supplying you with the information in order to transfer it to
another client.
Alexander Nix: That is correct.
Q780 Ian C.
Lucas: But that would not apply in the United States.
Alexander Nix: Again, it might apply. Some customers might
say specifically, “Our data is our data. Do not share it” and that comes down
to the discussion you have with them at the time you engage with those clients
about how they want their data treated.
Q781 Chair: Mr
Nix, the purpose of your surveys is to support psychological profiling of
people, isn’t it?
Alexander Nix: The purpose of our psychological surveys is
to do that but, as I just mentioned, we were undertaking up to 400,000 surveys
a month for five months. These were not psychological surveys at all. These
were just political surveys trying to understand what issues were most relevant
to which audiences and to help us understand our resource allocation, our
targeting, our messaging and so forth. They were nothing to do with that.
Q782 Chair: I
appreciate the questions are being framed in that way, but the way the OCEAN
process works is to analyse people’s answers to different sorts of questions
and, from that, to develop a profile of the sort of person they are, the world
view they have, what their motivations are, what makes them happy and what
makes them sad.
Alexander Nix: The OCEAN methodology was simply one of many
methodologies that came out of experimental psychology to help understand
behaviours. Your Government have an—I am going to get this wrong—institute of
behavioural science that they use to help understand how to increase people’s
tax payments or to encourage people to reduce smoking and so forth. All they
are doing is taking academic literature in order to understand audiences in
order to increase compliance, often for very importance issues.
Q783 Chair: But
if from your surveys you are saying that we know someone is frightened of crime
and they have concerns about gun use and about whether Hillary Clinton is weak
on crime, what you are doing is building up a psychological profile of someone
and you are using that data to target them with a message. That is the purpose
of these surveys.
Alexander Nix: If you can identify that an audience group is
frightened of crime and that is really important to them, you can then share
with these audiences your candidate’s policies on how they intend to tackle
crime and how they intend to address a major fear of those constituents, and I
think that is really healthy. These people have an identified problem—they are
frightened of crime—and you are able to say to them, “Don’t be frightened of
crime because look what our candidate is going to do. We have set out our
policy. This is our position on crime,” and you make sure that that information
gets to the people for whom it is a worry. That has to be good.
Q784 Chair: You
could send a message saying, “You are right to be frightened of crime because
the other candidate is weak on crime and if they win you and your family is in
danger”. I think anyone would recognise that as a kind of psychological
profiling. You have other layers on it as well, such as, “Are you frightened
about immigration? Is immigration the cause of crime?” We saw a lot of
messaging like that around the referendum campaign here as well. That is not
just data analytics and people answers to individual questions; that is using
that data to build up a psychological profile of individuals and then target
them, isn’t it?
Alexander Nix: I can’t speak to the UK referendum but—
Chair: It applies to any election or any campaign, and it
certainly applies to the American campaign.
Alexander Nix: I think I have made my position clear, which
is that we are trying to make sure that we can use data to understand what
people care about and we can seek to address those concerns. If those are
fears, we can allay those fears by telling audiences how we are going to solve
those problems and that has to be good.
Q785 Simon Hart:
If you can identify a section of the audience that is expressing some concerns,
perhaps about immigration or gun crime or whatever it is, are you arguing that
what you do is help to allay those fears or is it the accusation that has been
made that all you do is oxygenate those fears in order to suit the guy who is
paying you the big fee? Which of those accusations is correct? You are making
it sound like you are doing a public service.
Alexander Nix: We are doing a service to our client. Our job
as a campaign consultancy is to make sure that we provide the best
communication technologies and methodologies in order to allow our clients to
get their messages across.
Q786 Simon Hart:
I am sorry, I did not put it very clearly earlier on. Is that the same thing as
when you identify an area where fear may be a factor? Are you saying that you
do not contribute to exacerbating that fear, you do not then develop messages
that make people perhaps more fearful than they previously were, rather than
less fearful?
Alexander Nix: I think you need to look at campaigning over
the last 100 years. Negative campaigning is a part of every campaign regardless
of the technologies that are being embraced at any given time. The ability for
one candidate to stand up and say, “You know what, under this particular
candidate or political party the country is going to be worse off. You are
going to have less money in your pocket, you are going to have more crime,” is
just an integral part of the political process.
Q787 Simon Hart:
That is true, but they are the candidates, they are the name on the ballot
paper.
Alexander Nix: And their campaign teams are doing exactly
the same and you well know that, as does everyone in this room. Extolling the
virtues of your candidate and the weaknesses of your opposition is a fair
practice in political campaigns globally.
Q788 Simon Hart:
In countries that have similar electoral rules as this country, and they vary
significantly, how do people account for your fee when they are making their
declarations over election or referendum expenditure? Into what detail do they
necessarily go? I accept that you may not be able to answer that.
Alexander Nix: If it is their responsibility to report on
their fees in their own country, the onus is on them to do so.
Q789 Simon Hart:
Are you ever asked to explain or to provide some kind of a brief description of
what the service actually is or do you simply—
Alexander Nix: At its broadest level we are providing
campaign consultancy and communication services, but if anyone wanted more
specific details, we are more than happy. The contracts that we engage in are
based on a statement of work that is mapped out with the client and these are
well documented. It would be very easy for us to point to these agreements that
detail exactly what areas we are working on.
Q790 Simon Hart:
You mentioned that you have 4,000 or 5,000 data points on every adult in the
United States—the entire voting population. Does every adult in the United
States know that you have 4,000 or 5,000 data points on them?
Alexander Nix: I can’t speculate on what every adult in
America knows. That would be absurd.
Q791 Simon Hart:
It is very closely related to the earlier question about the extent to which
people—you say you are not a data miner. How do you acquire that vast quantity
of data without a certain amount of mining? Is it not a responsibility of yours
to be able to ensure that the population is aware that vast quantities of their
data, personal and otherwise, is held by you and used for electoral purposes?
Alexander Nix: We have made no secret of this fact, as you
all know, because you have referenced at least two occasions that I have stood
in a public forum and talked about the methodology that we use. That includes
the data that we underpin it with. I think we have been pretty consistent.
Q792 Simon Hart: But you said you were not a data
miner?
Alexander Nix: Well, we are not because there are companies
out there whose singular purpose is to go out and collect and aggregate data,
as Mr Collins said. With his background, he is very familiar with the
experience in the Axioms and Infogroups and other very large companies who have
hundreds, or indeed thousands, of employees whose singular job is to sit on the
phone and speak to companies and acquire their data, match it together, hygiene
it, put it into a database and record, such that they can then license these
data to companies like ours. All we have done is gone to all the vendors,
large, medium and small, and taken these data and put them into one database
and record.
Q793 Simon Hart:
That then excuses you from the accusation that you are a miner? The fact that
you are just mining what other people have mined does not contradict in any
sense what you said earlier on?
Alexander Nix: I don’t like the word “accusation” because
that implies that we are doing something wrong. This is an established business
in the United States, which is selling data, and we, like many or most brands
and many or most agencies, are able to go out and license these data for
marketing purposes.
Q794 Simon Hart:
At no stage was I suggesting there was anything illegal about it. I was simply
saying that you make a virtue out of the fact that you possess probably more
data on the entire voting population of the United States, thereby making a
political point, than anybody else in the market. My question was simply to the
extent to which that is known about—I know we know about it, we are talking
about it here—and the extent to which the individual voters know exactly how
and would have access to that information should they require it. If they come
to you, you would be able to disclose the 4,000 to 5,000 data points that you
possess. If I was an American citizen, would you provide me with those 4,000 to
5,000 data points were I ask you for them?
Alexander Nix: Let me address your first question. We are
incredibly proud of the fact that we walked into one of the most competitive
political markets, if not the most competitive political market, in the world
as a small British tech company and were able to develop the sort of
technologies and methodologies and bring them to market so effectively. This is
going to help the communications landscape way beyond politics. It is going to
help in advertising and marketing and make it more relevant and much more
economical. In terms of what you have asked about American people undertaking
what we call in Europe a subject access request, the legislation is not
currently in place in America for them to do that, but were it there, we would
be able to provide exactly the same service that we provide for companies in
the UK and across Europe. Following GDPR, we will be providing that for very
many businesses to help them manage their own data as they seek to be compliant
with the new legislation that is being implemented.
Q795 Chair: Mr Nix, when Leave.EU applied for
designation to the Electoral Commission to be the official leave campaign, it
named Cambridge Analytica in its designation document. Why was that?
Alexander Nix: I was not aware of that but I can only
assume, as I mentioned before, that they felt that associating themselves and
aligning themselves with Cambridge Analytica would give them extra credibility
and leverage in trying to compete in a bidding process where they were clearly
the underdogs to be the designated campaign.
Q796 Chair: Has
the Electoral Commission raised this with you as part of its investigation?
Alexander Nix: No, it hasn’t.
Q797 Chair: That
is slightly strange. It is doing an investigation looking at Leave.EU’s
activities in the referendum. Your company is cited in their designation
document as being someone they are working with and it has not asked you about
that.
Alexander Nix: Again, let me circle back to you, but I have
not been asked that question. I can certainly find out for you whether my data
compliance team or colleagues have been asked it. I would like to think that
this inquiry has been going on for some time and we are delighted to help
because we really want to make it clear that we did no work, as I have been trying
to do today in this Committee. I am hopeful that the Electoral Commission and
the ICO have taken on board the evidence that we have presented to them and
that they are going to arrive at the same conclusion as I hope you will, which
is that we were not involved, therefore we can’t speak to these things.
Q798 Chair: That
itself is a matter for the Electoral Commission. It is not something we are
investigating but it is just another point of information that is out there in
the public domain that links the two of you.
I have a few follow-up questions and then I think we will be
done. If you were conducting 300,000 to 400,000 surveys a month for the Trump
campaign over a five-month period, so let’s say nearly 2 million surveys, do
you or your associates hold the data that was gathered from that exercise?
Alexander Nix: These data belong to the Trump campaign.
Q799 Chair:
Okay, so you don’t have any ongoing access to that?
Alexander Nix: Again, I will circle back to you on those
specific pieces of research, because I don’t know what the data-sharing
agreement was with the campaign on that specific piece of research. Generally
these would belong to the campaign, but if they have permissioned us to retain
a copy of them, we would have a copy of them.
Q800 Chair:
Thank you. Presumably with the Cruz campaign, you did have permission to have a
copy of the data, because you said some of the data from the Cruz campaign
could have been used in the Trump campaign.
Alexander Nix: That is correct.
Q801 Chair: From
a layman’s point of view, how is this data held? The data must exist in a form
that means it can be used for one campaign and then repurposed for another
campaign. Do you have data storage centres where you keep this data or how does
it work?
Alexander Nix: That is right. Some data is stored in secure
facilities and some is stored in the cloud, depending on how we need to access
it.
Q802 Christian
Matheson: You took on Sophie Schmidt as an intern. Why did she want to come and
work for you?
Alexander Nix: You are going to have to speak to Ms Schmidt
about that. I can’t speculate.
Q803 Christian
Matheson: When you were interviewing her, did you not say, “Why do you want to
come and work for us?”
Alexander Nix: I would like to think that we were a company
that she found interesting and exciting to work for.
Q804 Christian
Matheson: When she went back to America, is it likely she then introduced you
to some of the senior players or the better known players in the tech world,
such as her father, who is the boss of Google, and Peter Thiel, who is
obviously very well known in the area as well? Did she introduce you to Peter
Thiel?
Alexander Nix: No, she did not introduce me to her father
and she did not introduce me to Peter Thiel. That is not correct.
Q805 Christian
Matheson: She has now gone to work for Uber. Have you shared any data from
Google? Has Google given you any data?
Alexander Nix: As far as I am aware, Google, like Facebook,
is a walled garden and does not share its data. It certainly has not shared any
data with us.
Q806 Christian
Matheson: That is you, as in Cambridge Analytica and SCL.
Alexander Nix: That is us in the broader sense of the word.
Q807 Christian
Matheson: What about Uber? Have they provided you with any data?
Alexander Nix: We don’t work with Uber at the moment.
Q808 Christian
Matheson: Did you previously?
Alexander Nix: No, we have never worked with Uber.
Q809 Christian
Matheson: Okay, so there has not been any sharing of any data from Uber to any
of your companies?
Alexander Nix: That is correct.
Q810 Christian
Matheson: Thank you. Can I talk about the process here? You must deal with huge
amounts of data, and the Chairman was asking about the way that you hold it and
manage it. When you bring it all together, do you aggregate it yourself or do
you use a company? Do you buy in aggregation services?
Alexander Nix: No, we do it ourselves. That is part of the
service that we offer to our clients, and we do that both manually and have
products that we have developed to automate some of that functionality.
Q811 Christian
Matheson: Have you ever used a third party in the past to do that?
Alexander Nix: Never.
Q812 Christian
Matheson: What is your relationship with Aggregate IQ?
Alexander Nix: We have no relationship with Aggregate IQ. We
have historically used Aggregate IQ to develop some software for us. It was a
standalone project that lasted about six months, possibly, in 2014. My
understanding—I will have to check this—is that we have not had any
communication with them since early 2015.
Q813 Christian
Matheson: There was a licensing agreement in September 2014. Is that what that
was?
Alexander Nix: That is right, yes. They built a small piece
of software for us, as a software development company.
Q814 Christian
Matheson: I have a diagram of the structure of the group, and it seems very
complicated, with a bit of ownership here and a bit of ownership there and some
shareholdings here and there. In section 10 of the latest accounts of SCL
Elections Ltd there was a £24.2 million payment. Does this relate to the 19% of
Cambridge Analytica in America LLC that is owned by SCL Elections or is it
payment for work that would have been undertaken by SCL Elections?
Alexander Nix: You are going to have to help me understand
the relevance of the question of ownership of a private company to this inquiry
into fake news, data and communications.
Q815 Christian
Matheson: Fake news obviously is the content that is being put out there, but
it is also a question of the delivery method and how fake news is propagated.
The structure of your companies is such that it is not quite clear not only who
is owning them, but who is propelling that means of delivery. I am just quite
curious.
Alexander Nix: We have never published a structure of our
company, so I don’t know what you are looking at or where that has come from,
but as a private company we don’t speak about our structure, our investors or
our board members. If you would like more information on this, we might be able
to take this out of the public forum in the interests of helping your
Committee, but I don’t think that is something I want to share today.
Christian Matheson: Okay. I will leave it at then. Thank
you.
Q816 Paul
Farrelly: You said that you had worked across the world in political campaigns.
Could you tell us a little bit more about where else in the world?
Alexander Nix: Again, in the interests of our clients, as a
rule we do not speak about client contracts unless we have the specific
permission of those clients, and that includes commercial, Government and
political contracts. What I can say is that we undertake eight or nine
elections every year, and we are not limited by geography, so this really could
be from the Caribbean to Asia to Africa to Europe or everywhere. Some of these
are very large, very important national elections and some are smaller, more
local mayoral or state elections. It is really anywhere that you can think of.
Q817 Paul
Farrelly: For the Ukraine?
Alexander Nix: Potentially.
Q818 Paul
Farrelly: Have you?
Alexander Nix: Well, as I said, we do not talk specifically
about clients but there are elections coming up in the Ukraine in the future.
If there is a good commercial opportunity there, we might look at it. I would
have to speak to my elections team.
Q819 Paul
Farrelly: Would you work for anyone?
Alexander Nix: I think I have already addressed this. We
only work for mainstream—
Paul Farrelly: One person’s despot might be one person’s
hero, but generally there are certain people who are unsavoury.
Alexander Nix: We work for mainstream political parties. We
try to work only in free and fair democracies, and we also have to be mindful
of our other divisions. As I have already told this Committee, we do an awful
lot of work for the British Government, the US Government and other allied
Governments. If there is any question whatsoever about a client that we might take
on in the political sphere, or even in the commercial sphere, we always discuss
this with the relevant parties in the US and in the UK—so that would be the
Foreign Office or the State Department—saying, “We have had an inquiry to work
in this country. Do you have any objections to this?” It is in the interest of
us to make sure that we are not building a business over here that could damage
our part of our business over here.
Q820 Paul
Farrelly: With candidates and parties, would you work for campaign
organisations such as super PACs?
Alexander Nix: Yes, we have done a number of campaigns on
behalf of super PACs.
Q821 Paul
Farrelly: All on the Republican side?
Alexander Nix: That is correct.
Q822 Paul
Farrelly: What about campaigning organisations like the American Enterprise
Institute? Would you work with that sort of organisation?
Alexander Nix: Actually, I am not familiar with them, but we
do work for organisations and lobbying and advocacy groups across America. I
can’t speak to them, but I can speak to other ones.
Q823 Paul
Farrelly: We have only the briefest biography of you that starts with
Manchester University and ends with you joining SCL in 2003. How did you get
into all this? How did you get into this line of business?
Alexander Nix: A huge interest, I think. Fundamentally, I
was working in corporate finance, which I did not find particularly fulfilling.
Q824 Paul
Farrelly: I was the same, actually. Where were you in corporate finance?
Alexander Nix: At a small UK merchant bank up the road from
here, and I was looking for an opportunity to work in a slightly more relevant
and fulfilling occupation.
Q825 Paul
Farrelly: You are not a data processing PhD yourself?
Alexander Nix: I am not a data PhD myself.
Q826 Paul
Farrelly: What qualifications do you have?
Alexander Nix: In terms of this company, I lead a management
team so I don’t need to be qualified as a data scientist. I need to be
qualified to run a business.
Q827 Paul
Farrelly: Lots of people in corporate finance are accountants or lawyers or,
like me, none of them.
Alexander Nix: As the CEO of a company, you know perfectly
well that there is so much you can learn in school and then there is a lot you
can learn in life. We have been doing this for many, many hours a week for many
weeks and for many years now and hopefully the fruits of that labour are
beginning to come together.
Q828 Paul
Farrelly: Did you start off as a lawyer or an accountant or just a generalist?
Alexander Nix: No, neither of those, just a generalist.
Q829 Ian C.
Lucas: Do you exercise any editorial control over the messages that your
clients send to, for example, electoral and political campaigns?
Alexander Nix: All the messages that we propose to campaigns
are signed off by the campaigns themselves and go through campaign legal. There
is an internal compliance structure to make sure that we are not infringing any
legislation of the FEC or any other body that might be governing the work that
we do.
Q830 Ian C.
Lucas: You propose messages as part of your role. In other words, the
initiative comes from you and then it goes to the campaign.
Alexander Nix: That is correct. We interpret and draw
insights from the data, and we use those insights to devise the messaging
strategy and the messaging content. We then share these messages and content
with the campaign, and we discuss our strategy with them. Often there is a
dialogue about that and some tweaks are made. We then push that through legal and
compliance. They will give us their feedback and ultimately the messages are
disseminated.
Q831 Ian C.
Lucas: Presumably the campaign makes proposals to you and a similar process
continues. In other words, they would have an idea for a message that they
wanted to deliver to the elector and they would present that to you. Would that
be a situation that arises?
Alexander Nix: It might well do and then we might go out and
roll out one of those surveys that I talked about. We can go and test that
message, or A/B test it, digitally for instance, and we could give them
empirical feedback about which message was likely to perform better, how it
should be run and who should be targeted.
Q832 Ian C.
Lucas: Have you ever rejected a message from a campaign on ethical grounds?
Alexander Nix: We run possibly thousands. I think in the
last election in the US we ran 4,000 different advertising campaigns—about 1.4
billion impressions. We served for five months. I cannot speak to that.
Q833 Ian C. Lucas:
Can I just say why I am asking you the question? You have been very keen to
emphasise the benevolence of the role that your company is performing,
fulfilling the public good of informing electors about particular candidates
and making campaigns relevant. But we are all grown-ups, here. We are all
politicians on this side of the table. We know that there is negative
campaigning and there is positive campaigning, and one of the dangers of mass
communication in this format is reinforcing, for example, very negative
stereotypes. Do you agree with that?
Alexander Nix: As politicians who understand campaigning, I
think you will also understand that winning elections is not about reinforcing
prejudice on either side of the political spectrum. There is no point in
telling hardcore Republicans how bad Clinton is and how good Trump is, or vice
versa. It is about correctly identifying the people that sit in the middle—the
persuadable or swing voters—and presenting to them very well articulated facts
on the particular policies and issues that they care about most, so they can
begin to make their opinions.
Q834 Ian C.
Lucas: I agree with all of that, but it is also about finding those same people
and maybe reinforcing fears that they have, or perhaps it is about emphasising
bad aspects that they may possibly believe and that could be reinforced. That
is another way of persuading people in different directions.
Alexander Nix: In the case of negative campaigning, you
would be right, and in the case of positive campaigning, it would be about
emphasising the hopes they have—aka Obama 2008.
Ian C. Lucas: Absolutely.
Alexander Nix: It works both ways, and we are no strangers
to positive and negative campaigns.
Q835 Ian C. Lucas: I am talking about one
particular way and, as you know, this is about fake news. The reason I am
asking you has there ever been an ethical reason why you have refused to run a
particular ad is because I am aware of examples of campaign ads that I would
not use in my campaign, and I am a politician. Are you aware of any example of
that kind, where Cambridge Analytica has said, “We are not going to do that”?
This is very relevant to the question of fake news.
Alexander Nix: I would like to say to you, sir, that I am
sure there are dozens of examples, but—
Ian C. Lucas: Can you go away and bring us some?
Alexander Nix: To go through the 1.4 billion impressions
that we served in last year’s US elections, look at each one that we served,
look at all the ones that we rejected and come back to you would not be a
reasonable request to put on us.
Q836 Ian C.
Lucas: What level of control is there over the ads that you project to people?
Alexander Nix: I just discussed this with your colleague.
The adverts that we propose to the campaign are shared with the campaign and
the campaign signs them off. That goes to legal, and legal and compliance need
to sign them off. There is a process. There are checks and balances.
Q837 Ian C.
Lucas: Can you please give one? I am not asking for 1.2 million.
Alexander Nix: Billion.
Ian C. Lucas: Okay, billion. I am asking for one example.
Are they all different from each other?
Alexander Nix: Yes.
Q838 Ian C.
Lucas: Every single one is different?
Alexander Nix: No. There were some 4,000 campaigns that were
different.
Q839 Ian C.
Lucas: All I would like to see is one example of an ad where Cambridge
Analytica said, “We’re not going to allow this to go out. We deny this”.
Alexander Nix: That is certainly something that we will look
into.
Ian C. Lucas: Thank you very much.
Q840 Chair:
Thank you, Mr Nix. Just a couple of final questions. We have spoken quite a lot
about the way in which you store, manage and gather data, and how you seek to
comply with the Data Protection Act in the UK. Rather than going through any
further detail today, perhaps you would be able to write to the Committee to
set out what your policies are on how you source data, manage it, share it with
third parties, and how you ensure that you do so in compliance with the Data
Protection Act?
Alexander Nix: Certainly. We will get back to you on that.
Q841 Chair: You
know that Julian Assange claimed that Cambridge Analytica approached WikiLeaks
to work with them and that they rejected the offer. That is a statement that he
has put out. I know we touched on this earlier, but can you confirm whether any
approach has ever been made to Julian Assange by Cambridge Analytica?
Alexander Nix: Yes, certainly. I would be happy to speak to
that as I did, I think, in front of a very large audience in Lisbon last year.
This was at the time, as you will remember, when the newspapers and the news
channels were reporting that Julian Assange had access to a large quantity of
information that could be incredibly relevant to the outcome of the US
election. We read about these claims. We had no idea, as no one did, whether
this was true or not so we simply reached out to a speaking agency that
represents him—that was the only way we could find to get hold of him—and said,
“Would you pass him a message commenting on this and asking whether he would
like to meet to discuss this?” and we received a message back through this
third party, the intermediary, saying no, they would not. That was it. We, like
probably every other journalist in this room, were very keen to find out what
was in these data and whether they would have an impact. We were all
disappointed.
Q842 Chair: You
said earlier on that you gathered this large amount of data for the Trump
campaign as part of the survey work that was done and that you will write to us
to say whether that was data that you held or the campaign held. If that was
being gathered by you, obviously on behalf of the campaign, would other people
in the campaign have access to that data and the ability to share that with
third parties without your knowledge?
Alexander Nix: Quite unlikely. Hypothetically, anyone could
possibly have taken advantage of that but they would have had to have been someone
on the inside who had taken the data illegally.
Q843 Chair: Yes,
but while you do not know that is the case, it would be technically possible,
even if hypothetical?
Alexander Nix: It is technically possible—and I am certainly
not suggesting this—that an employee may have illegally taken the data and
passed it elsewhere, yes.
Q844 Chair:
Thank you. Again it is relevant to our question. I know that it is a case
relating to America, but to have some written evidence from you about the protocols
you have for data management and how you can make sure that you keep people’s
data secure, and do so without being in breach of the Data Protection Act,
would be very helpful.
Finally, on other countries where you have worked, have you
ever worked in Russia or on behalf of Russian companies or organisations?
Alexander Nix: We have never worked in Russia. As far as I
am aware, we have never worked for a Russian company. We have never worked with
a Russian organisation in Russia or any other country. We do not have any
relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.
Q845 Chair: If a
Russian company came along and said, “Would you work for us?” would you do it
or would you reject that?
Alexander Nix: There are many companies in Russia that are stand-up
companies doing normal and fair business, so we would have to evaluate that
but, given the current climate, I do not think that would be necessarily our
first client of choice.
Q846 Chair:
Would you ever work on political campaigns in a third country on behalf of
someone else?
Alexander Nix: We have worked on advocacy campaigns and we
have worked on communication campaigns that have been for the benefit of other
countries who wish to target other audiences. For instance, if the UK wants to
drive tourism in America, we might do a campaign for the Government here. As a
general rule, however, we look at these things very carefully.
Q847 Chair: A
totally hypothetical example—not one that I have been given but a
hypothetical—is the referendum in Catalonia last year. If, say, a commercial
entity said, “I have a big interest in the outcome of that referendum because
that region is commercially important to me. I want to run a campaign within
that region that would encourage people to stay as part of Spain,” would you
take on a project like that as a UK-based or American-based business, working
maybe for a company in another country but targeting voters in yet another
location?
Alexander Nix: In that hypothetical instance, we could not
necessarily engage with a company, but if the company had an arrangement with a
political party, and that was between them and they wanted to help that
political party and the party brought us in, again those sorts of discussions
would be outside of our remit and they would never need to involve us. We would
be engaged by a political party. If they had a relationship with a business or
another third party regarding financing, dependent on the regulations in their
particular country, that might be possible.
Q848 Chair:
Obviously it depends on the legislation because you could be in breach of
electoral law to be receiving funding from a third country to conduct political
campaigns in another.
Alexander Nix: Absolutely. That is why, again, we look at
these things very carefully. We have an in-house legal team. We have external
legal teams. We choose our clients very carefully. We would never want to put
ourselves in a position like that. Of course not.
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