The Real Targets - Bitly

The Real Targets Oh! what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to deceive!

(Sir Walter Scott, Marmion)

“… held back almost all of our budget and then we basically dumped the entire budget in the last ten days and really in the last three or four days and we aimed it at… roughly at about 7 million people [who] saw something like 1 and a half billion digital ads in a very short period of time”. First, I quote the Sir Walter Scott poem, because this whole saga is an extremely tangled web, in which those involved wanted to deceive! Then I quote from Dominic Cummings, who served as the Campaign Director of VoteLeave throughout the EU referendum Campaign. The figures given by Dominic Cummings are mind-blowing if you break them down! 1.5 billion digital ads aimed at 7 million electors in 10 days maximum - WOW! In 10 days that is close to one digital ad per person per hour - 21 per day! WOW! And, if it was really ‘in the last 3 days’, that’s 3 digital ads every hour of those 3 days!! Examining Evidence All the evidence collected so far, points towards the fact that those digital ads were targeted at the personal Facebook pages of the 7 million persons. We have to assume they were all persons with a vote in the Referendum, otherwise there would have been no point in targeting them in the first place. So, how did VoteLeave and AggregateIQ get to that point? I thought it would be fun to try and piece it all together and work out how it was done so here goes! Nigel Farage In UK terms, it has to start with the one and only Nigel Farage. His early career was in investment banking, and he joined an American company, Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 80s. That company was into the ‘junk bond market’ and went into bankruptcy in 1990 as a result. There is quite a lot of evidence which indicates that Farage had a friendship with Robert Mercer, and later with Steve Bannon, over quite a lengthy period of time. Since Farage has always been on the Right of the political spectrum, since his schooldays at Dulwich College, it is easy to see how he could, and probably would, have developed a friendship with Mercer and Bannon, and the alt-Right of US politics during his time in the States. We know that Robert Mercer has invested many millions of his billions of dollars into the range of companies - SCL Group Ltd, SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica, and the

many other shell companies which have been established and are still being set up. There is a massive interwoven web of companies, most registered in London, with the same players appearing as Directors and key executives in each of them, including two Mercer daughters, Rebekah and Jennifer, the latest being Emerdata. We have to wonder at what point Nigel Farage became a target for the Mercer/Bannon teams, or could it have been the other way round? Did dear Nigel see the Mercer/Bannon teams as his best way to win a referendum on the EU, if one ever came? In her interview in The Guardian, Brittany Kaiser stated she thought the work done for Leave.EU/UKIP was worth about £40,000, so it is interesting to see Carole Cadwalladr’s revelation of an invoice from CA to UKIP for £41,500. Seems like a funny coincidence. In a sense that doesn’t matter now, because what we know of what did happen, fits into patterns which shows determination to influence the direction of politics in the UK. EU Tax Laws, and new Data Protection Directives could well have been a major driving force which entered the mix, once decisions were taken to invest in the UK. Enter Arron Banks, a major funder of UKIP, and a major funder for the Leave.EU campaign for the Referendum, and initially a close friend of Nigel Farage, and I believe also Robert Mercer. Leave.EU Leave.EU started life as ThekNOw.EU campaign, founded by Arron Banks, Richard Tice, and Jim Mellon, all millionaires in their own right. Before launching, the name had changed to become Leave.EU. The platform party for the launch of Leave.EU in July 2015, consisted of Richard Tice, Jim Mellon, Liz Bilney CEO of Leave.EU, Gerry Gunster, of the US Company Goddard Gunster, Arron Banks, and Brittany Kaiser, an executive from Cambridge Analytica. (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuPbAX6Lzhc&t=139s ) Brittany Kaiser, who answered questions during the launch, and indicated she was helping Leave.EU later left Cambridge Analytica, and this is what she told Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian after her departure: She said both organisations offered to share proprietary data with Cambridge Analytica’s lead scientist, David Wilkinson. He requested access to Facebook pages, “subscriber, donation and local group data”, email engagement and call centre records. It is not clear what information they had – or what was passed over. But Kaiser says “the most fruitful work was conducted on data stored on a UKIP computer that was carried into Cambridge Analytica’s London office. UKIP had undertaken a survey on why people wanted to leave the EU or not, and they also had membership data. So, we were able to build personas out of that. That was work that would normally be paid for.” This is an important statement, since it seems to illustrate that Cambridge Analytica began their work in the UK using every shred of data which UKIP handed over, and this formed the basis of the database they were building in the UK. Brittany Kaiser

On 17 April, Brittany gave evidence to the DCMS Select Committee. In her written submission, and in her oral evidence she seems to have given Alexander Nix and Cambridge Analytica a ‘get out of jail card’ by confirming that her ‘pitch’ to Leave.EU/UKIP was just that, a pitch. And, it was not followed through by Leave.EU/UKIP, and appears that her work may have been used by Arron Banks with another company. The sudden appearance the invoice from CA to UKIP for £41,500 was a puzzling coincidence, coupled with the assertion from Brittany Kaiser that it was never paid by UKIP, despite a contribution of £42,000 from Arron Banks to cover it. Brittany in her evidence described, in answer to questioning, her contact with Eldon Insurance, and the degree to which Arron Banks was prepared to use the data from the customers of Eldon. That also has the feel of trying to help CA and AN! She also appeared to let Alexander Nix ‘off the hook’ by suggesting that all was not well between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ after the campaign for Ted Cruz in Texas, as his team were unhappy with the AggregateIQ work. But, she made no reference to the fact that SCL Group owned the Intellectual Property Licence of AggregateIQ. Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix who was, the CEO of CA, was at great pains to deny that CA did no paid or unpaid work for Leave.EU. I can accept that as the truth - their objective of being a ‘good friend’ was to raid UKIP data. That data was a vital component in building a good operation in the UK. Bear in mind that in the 2015 General Election, UKIP came second in 120 constituencies. Not only did that help to identify a lot of electors, it came with membership records, and research data. The next component for CA was the UK electoral register, and since they did work with Experian in the US (according to Brittany Kaiser), it would be no surprise to discover they did the same in the UK. That would have come with demographic data taken from several decades of census data, in addition to providing names and addresses. This is not evidenced in any way, but my experience leads me to say there would have been no alternative. Then there was the component of Facebook data. Andy Wigmore who was the Communications Director for Leave.EU, had this to say in an interview with Carole Cadwalladr: “Facebook was the key to the entire campaign”, Wigmore explained. “A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most ‘potent weapon’. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.” Cambridge Analytica built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre,

research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

SCL Group Ltd At this point we need to take a step back in time. Strategic Communication Laboratories, a British Company, was founded in 1993 by Nigel Oakes, to study mass behaviour and how to change it. It eventually became SCL Group Ltd, aided by a series of substantial investments from US billionaire Robert Mercer. SCL created several offshoots, one of which was SCL Elections, which in turn became Cambridge Analytica. SCL entered US politics in 2014, at about the same time as developing more contacts in the UK. We now know SCL Elections and Cambridge Analytica have gone into bankruptcy, and so we have to assume they are no longer needed. Once the Mercer investments had gone in, it became clear that the primary objective was to ensure a Conservative entered the White House. Initially, SCL and CA worked for Ted Cruz from Texas, but he withdrew from the race to be the candidate, and all the Mercer money then went behind Donald Trump. It could be said that SCL failed in the Cruz campaign, as it also did in Nigeria by backing the incumbent President, who went down to defeat. However, it could be that both campaigns were designed to test the developing systems, improve them, and make it possible to succeed at all costs. Certainly, there is evidence now emerging that the major software used for Cruz, known as the Ripon Project, was in fact still under development. That of course, then raises a question about the SCL/Cambridge Analytica involvement with the UK’s EU referendum. Was it a further test, a further development ahead of the Trump Campaign, or was it a real attempt to win the Referendum? In June 2014 SCL Elections Ltd signed an agreement with Global Science Research Ltd, then at Magdalene College, Cambridge, with the signatory for GS being one Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. That agreement identifies SCL as a Licensee who wishes to use the GS Technology and GS Profiles Data for use as an end user. In layman’s terms, access to any and all of any data analysed by GS from work done on App questionnaires designed to collect Facebook data. There seems a probability that some or all of the 6 million Facebook accounts harvested from the personality quiz conducted by the Psychometrics Centre, were sold by GS to SCL Elections, and from there passed into the hands of Cambridge Analytica. AggregateIQ

Chris Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, has described how he was instrumental in setting up AggregateIQ (AIQ) via his friend Jeff Silvester, who, with Zack Massingham started the company. In September 2014 SCL Elections Ltd purchased the ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ from AIQ, a binding “exclusive”, “worldwide”, agreement “in perpetuity” for all of AggregateIQ’s intellectual property to be used by SCL Elections, the British firm shortly afterwards spun off as Cambridge Analytica. Chris Wylie, in his evidence to the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, said: “You can’t have targeting software that doesn’t access the database. Cambridge Analytica would have a database and AIQ would access that database, otherwise the software wouldn’t work.” He also argued that “AIQ played a very significant role in Leave winning,” because the online ads that the pro-Brexit groups purchased with the help of the firm were “incredibly effective,” with very high conversion rates. On this basis, he said, “I think it is incredibly reasonable to say AIQ played a very significant role in Leave winning.” Cambridge Analytica, which chose AIQ to help build its platform, known as ‘Project Ripon’, once boasted that it possessed files on as many as 230 million Americans compiled from thousands of data points, including psychological data harvested from social media, as well as commercial data available to virtually anyone who can afford it. The company intended to classify voters by selecting personality types, applying its system to craft messages, digital ads, and emails that, it believed, would resonate distinctively with voters of each group. ‘Project Ripon’, was Cambridge Analytica’s system designed to furnish Republican candidates with a technology platform capable of reaching voters through the use of psychological profiling. (the SCL Group had long used behavioural research to conduct “influence operations” on behalf of military and political clients worldwide.) Two other things about AIQ. We have no way, at present, of knowing how AIQ was chosen to do millions of dollars’ worth of work for VoteLeave. We do know from Dominic Cummings:

This was used, for a time by AIQ themselves, and when that is linked to the boast from Cummings, which was highlighted at the beginning, invoices, for example, for amounts

of $930,000 and $1,000,000, provide an insight into the huge amount of work being done. We are indebted to Chris Vickery, the Director of cyber-risk research at the cybersecurity firm UpGuard, Inc., who announced on Twitter that he had found the code used by Cambridge Analytica for its election work. He described it as follows: “It was located in a publicly accessible online repository maintained by an employee of a small software-development firm in British Columbia called AggregateIQ (AIQ) that was under contract with the SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. This code provided a look at the internal mechanics of what the company had been doing.” According to Vickery’s initial report, the AIQ repository includes “a set of sophisticated applications, data management programs, advertising trackers, and information databases that collectively could be used to target and influence individuals through a variety of methods, including automated phone calls, emails, political websites, volunteer canvassing, and Facebook ads.” Its core instrument, which its authors called the “Database of Truth,” was designed to gather and integrate voter-registration data, consumer data, polling data, and data “from third-parties” - it is possible the fifty million (now confirmed by Facebook as 87 million) profiles of unwitting Facebook users Cambridge Analytica acquired, would fall under this vague category. In one area, a script exists to identify areas of Britain with hospital closures, tying these regions to specific postcodes.

Did a voter receiving this, read just one page and leave? Did they view several pages? Did they donate to a candidate?

Given the ability that Saga (one of the applications identified by Vickery) grants to target individuals and specific locations with ads, it is not out of the question for ad campaign administrators to use this technology to attempt to sway views on issues or to push susceptible voters deeper toward a given ideology based on their behaviours online and, perhaps, in the real world. Thus far, it is certain that the software in these projects represented a sophisticated effort to run highly targeted political digital ad campaigns addressed directly at very specific groups of users and even individuals. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Psychographics and Psychometrics I used to think AI was something being used by scientists to develop robots capable of ‘thinking’, and thereby working out how best to complete any task. I now know differently. Artificial Intelligence software was used in the UK EU Referendum, and in the US Presidential Election to win for Leave and win for Trump. And, I now have no doubt that did produce the results ‘they’ wanted. The technical stuff above from Chris Vickery sounds almost too technical to take on board, but just think about it for a moment or two. Any of us with a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, or just an old-fashioned desktop computer, has a pretty good idea what an ‘App’ is nowadays. An App is what we used to call an icon, which, when ‘clicked’ takes you into a program, which provides information, or guides you to answer some questions. Stop for a moment, and think of an AIQ computer in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, the software of which analyses your ‘clicks’, passes them on to a DCL super computer in the State of Delaware, USA, or somewhere in Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands. Your actions are then broken down and added to the profile on you, which has already been garnered from the electoral register and census data held by Experian in the UK, and, if you have a Facebook account harvested for Cambridge Analytica, and added to what is already known about you from second by second analysis of your Facebook activity. Then, the revised data is spewed back to AIQ in Canada, and the software and applications they have developed, decides, without any human intervention, which messages will be sent directly to your smartphone, and your Facebook page that day. Be in no doubt, that is precisely what Dominic Cummings meant when he said: “we basically dumped the entire budget in the last ten days and really in the last three or four days and we aimed it at… roughly at about 7 million people [who] saw something like 1 and a half billion digital ads in a very short period of time”. Scary? Yes, but true!! In my early days in politics, we used to spend polling day in every election I ever worked in - 8 General Elections, something like 40 local elections, 1 Referendum, 1 European Election - travelling around localities in constituencies knocking on the doors of known supporters trying to persuade them to turn out and vote. Now all that is done by a computer, and you have absolutely no idea who or what is controlling it, or where it is located!

The ‘7 million people’ When Dominic Cummings boasted ‘we aimed it at… roughly at about 7 million people’ it was indeed an interesting statistic. Where did the data for those 7 million people come from? Maybe we need to take a step back first. In the 80s and 90s, when I first began to use targeted mailings, and using socioeconomic demographics to identify potential targets, I used to use the simile of McDonalds Big Mac. There are 7 separate ingredients, and in effect 16 layers which go together to make up the latest limited edition Grand Mac. Collecting data on individuals is rather like constructing a Grand Mac. You start with the electoral register to give you the names and addresses you will need, which together with the census data, gives you a demographic breakdown of the electorate. From that moment, you collect, and add, any data you can find. Datasets, as they are known, can be from a variety of sources. It is topped out by data which can be ‘harvested’ from sources close to Facebook. Then, there is a ‘number crunch’ - a bit like squashing your Grand Mac into a single layer, which means each item of data will have been applied to the individual elector. Some will have more elements attached to them than others, as it will depend on the total sources of data you have collected. Finally, this data is searched and examined by the psychometric software which AggregateIQ developed for Cambridge Analytica. Once complete, the datasets are no longer needed, since the profiling will be complete and ready to go. It was therefore easy for Cambridge Analytica to claim they had destroyed the Facebook datasets they acquired from GS. In simpler terms, the purpose of psychometrics is to gain insight on a person’s cognitive abilities, as well as personality and behavioural tendencies. This gives you a profile, or persona for each and every elector you have captured into your database. Therefore, to have the ability to communicate directly to 7 million people is a massive leap forward in making contact with electors, to give support to your campaign and to go and vote on polling day. So, where did the data come from? Who collected it, and processed it to the level needed for AggregateIQ to ‘aim’ 1.5 billion digital ads at those 7 million electors, most probably all in the space of 3 days? VoteLeave was not a campaign group representing a single Party, so unlike Leave.EU which grew out of UKIP, it did not begin with a database of membership and research. VoteLeave could have purchased/rented details from the electoral register via companies like Experian. But, there is nothing showing in their declared accounts which would support that. Similarly, VoteLeave could have rented lists from a range of other companies such as SCL Group or Cambridge Analytica. But, here again there is nothing in their declared accounts which would support that.

Did AggregateIQ use their position in which their Intellectual Property was owned by SCL Group, which placed them in a position where they could easily access the data Cambridge Analytica had harvested and stored in the SCL Data Warehouse? 7 million people is 15% of the total UK electorate at the time of the EU Referendum. If, as I suspect it was focussed on the 120 constituencies in which UKIP achieved a second place in the 2015 General Election, then it raises immediate suspicions that the work Cambridge Analytica did with Leave.EU was simply to extract the UKIP data. But …. It still does not answer the fundamental question. How did AggregateIQ access that database of the profiles of 7 million UK electors, in so short a time span?? And then, there is a further important question. What was contained in the 1,500,000,000 digital ads claimed by Dominic Cummings? What did they say to the unsuspecting electors who were receiving them every hour in a sustained bombardment, and which was enough to persuade to vote Leave?

ROGER BOADEN 05/05/2018