Brexit wouldn’t have happened without Cambridge Analytica

Christopher Wylie is the brains behind Cambridge Analytica (CA), the data analytics company that is being investigated for its role in the Donald Trump election campaign and the Brexit vote. The 28-year-old “gay Canadian vegan,” as he describes himself, put the most effective data mining machinery at the service of politics, but was shocked by how it was abused. Wylie has since exposed CA and Facebook for secretly mining the personal information of millions of Facebook accounts. After serving as a source for The Guardian and The New York Times, Wylie sat down with a small group of European journalists to talk about privacy, the failure of Facebook, and political interference.

Question: What was your motivation for speaking out?

Answer: My original goal was to expose the work of Cambridge Analytica, in part because I helped build it and I have a responsibility. If not to correct what has already been done, because there are things that can’t be undone, at least to inform authorities and the people.

Q: What is the most serious thing you have revealed?

A. First, the fact that there is a company that is a military contractor and also an advisor to the president of the United States. In modern democracies, the military is not allowed to take part in elections: why would we allow military contractors to, or for them to act as advisors for some of the most important politicians in the world? When a company with military clients creates an enormous civilian database, some of it collected illegally, there is a serious risk that the line between domestic surveillance and conventional market research will be blurred. People and lawmakers need to get up to date with technology and understand what these companies, Facebook, and others which make money from personal data, really mean. It is important for people not to see it as something abstract but rather as something with a tangible impact.

Q. When did you realize it was time to stop?

A. It built up. The problem was I got lost in my own curiosity. It’s no excuse but I had million-dollar budgets, I could do any research I wanted. That was really attractive. I joined in June 2013 as research director of the SCL group [the parent company of CA] and I began to understand with the passing months what they were really doing. But you get used to the corporate culture. It’s not an excuse, but it was like that. You do more and more, each step isn’t much bigger than the last, until – bang, you have created a privatized NSA [National Security Agency].

Q. Then you left.

A. I left at the end of 2014. It was becoming more and more toxic, especially because Alexander Nix [Cambridge Analytica CEO] and Steve Bannon [former company vice president and ex-chief strategist to Donald Trump]. When Bannon arrived, this freedom to research which had attracted me at the beginning, turned into researching for what we now call the alt-right. Bannon came to London all the time, at least once a month, and we had a conference call with him every Monday morning.

Q. What was your role in Brexit? The latest revelations suggest a data company associated with CA played a key role in the result and helped bend the rules on electoral spending.

A. I didn’t work on the Brexit campaign but I was a phantom presence. I knew everything that happened.

Q. Do you believe Brexit wouldn’t have happened without CA?

A. Absolutely. It’s important because the referendum was won by less than 2% of the vote and a lot of money was spent on tailored ads based on personal data. This amount of money would buy you millions of impressions. If you targeted a small group, it could be the deciding factor. If you add up all the collectives that campaigned for Brexit, it was a third of everything that was spent.There has to be an investigation into the indications that they spent more than what was legally allowed. People should be able to trust their democratic institutions. Cheating is cheating. We are talking about the integrity of all democratic processes, it’s about the future of this country and of Europe more generally.

Q. Has CA worked in other European countries?

A. I know that there was a project in Italy when I was there, but I don’t have the details. I don’t know about others.


More at source
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/%E2%80%9Cbrexit-wouldn%E2%80%99t-have-happened-without-cambridge-analytica%E2%80%9D/ar-AAvdSmV?ocid=ientp

Observer

“Politician. Well that, or just another dissociative smear merchant peddling backroom hackery in its purest Machiavellian form.”

The whistleblower who says social media data harvesting is “grossly unethical”personally wrote a pitch to Vote Leave offering to harvest data for them during the referendum campaign, Guido can reveal. Christopher Wylie, the pink-haired former Cambridge Analytica employee turned Observer whistleblower, has spent the last week talking up his opposition to data harvesting:

“It was a grossly unethical experiment because you are playing with an entire country, the psychology of an entire country without their consent or awareness… It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

Yet after Wylie left Cambridge Analytica, he sent a pitch to Vote Leave offering to harvest data for them during the referendum. In a pitch sent to Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings in January 2016, Wylie wrote:

“We will trial social data harvesting for Vote Leave and use some of our own technology to target and acquire online data about UK voters.”

Wylie went on:

“Several online panels would be set up to target a cross section of voters… We would try to further increase the sample by accessing the social networks of the panel respondents. We would also harvest online and social data”

This is the email Wylie sent to Cummings personally offering to harvest data:

Click to enlarge

This is Cummings’ reply rejecting Wylie’s offer:

Click to enlarge

You can read Wylie’s rejected pitch to Vote Leave in full here. And you can read Cummings’ blog post responding to the latest Observer claims, and explaining how he thought Wylie was a “charlatan“, here.
The Observer and other Remainers seem determined to use Wylie’s claims about “unethical” data harvesting to somehow discredit the referendum result. What they haven’t mentioned is Wylie was himself offering to harvest data for Vote Leave after he left Cambridge Analytica. How does he explain that one?

https://order-order.com/people/christopher-wylie/

veya_victaous wrote:actually that makes sense that he would try and sell it to remainers.
just the Brexit campaign was smart enough to buy it.

Oh it's definitely true about the votes, but he does try and make himself seem ethical which he is not cause everyone new what they were doing when they developed the system to end democracy.

Democracy is dead, long live the Algorithm

Tommy Monk wrote:

Brexit is about restoring democracy!

nicko wrote:Reduce the House of Lords to 200 is a good idea,

Keep your dirty little hands off our Monarchy,   it brings us a lot of money and has no political say on any Government decisions !

nicko wrote:What is the difference between the Monarchy and the EU?     Quill you are fucking unbelievable, and as thick as mince, and supposedly intelligent  !

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:What is the difference between the Monarchy and the EU?     Quill you are fucking unbelievable, and as thick as mince, and supposedly intelligent  !

There is no difference.  Both are non-representative and both are German.  Who denies it?

Tommy Monk wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

There is no difference.  Both are non-representative and both are German.  Who denies it?

Brexit isn't a vote for either... but a vote to leave the EU... so I don't know what youre going on about really...!?

Tommy Monk wrote:1. Not a sound bite... and I know exactly what it means!

2. We decide who is in govt and vote in those who will do what we want... those who don't won't be in govt for long, as we will vote in a new lot who will do what we want... No longer will we just have govt who are subservient to EU, and who just do what the EU tells them, instead we will have govt who do what the UK people tell them, as is 'democracy'...!

3. Wrong... see answer 2...!

4. Wrong again... it is you and other remoaners who are the things you said...!

nicko wrote:What is the difference between the Monarchy and the EU?     Quill you are fucking unbelievable, and as thick as mince, and supposedly intelligent  !

nicko wrote:If you can't see the difference take your head from up your arse !
There's none so blind etc.

veya_victaous wrote:

nicko wrote:What is the difference between the Monarchy and the EU?     Quill you are fucking unbelievable, and as thick as mince, and supposedly intelligent  !

What is the difference?
Really what is the difference?

Fred M. wrote:Technically she could refuse, but by doing so she would almost certainly be rejecting the advice of her principal advisors (The Privy Council) and a constitutional crisis would be inevitable.

Charles the First tried that - and lost his head over the matter.

Original Quill wrote:

Fred M. wrote:Technically she could refuse, but by doing so she would almost certainly be rejecting the advice of her principal advisors (The Privy Council) and a constitutional crisis would be inevitable.

Charles the First tried that - and lost his head over the matter.

As an aside, I don't see that happening.  Charles I was an heir of the de Guise family, the most Roman family of the most Roman country in Europe (France).  The Brits had already committed regicide on his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, and there's no reason to think they felt any differently about Charles' Catholicism.

The protestant revolution was already well on its way, and Charles I just got caught up in it.  His kid, James II, got kicked off the island.  The minutia of the civil war pales when you realize that a Roman Catholic ruling England was just plain intolerable.

veya_victaous wrote:So the difference is one at least tries to appear democratically elected