{"id":621,"date":"2018-03-17T20:12:05","date_gmt":"2018-03-18T00:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=621"},"modified":"2018-03-17T20:12:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-18T00:12:05","slug":"how-trump-consultants-exploited-the-facebook-data-of-millions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=621","title":{"rendered":"How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By\u00a0MATTHEW ROSENBERG<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>NICHOLAS CONFESSORE<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>CAROLE CADWALLADR<\/span><\/span>
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Christopher Wylie, who helped found the data firm Cambridge Analytica and worked there until 2014, has described the company as an \u201carsenal of weapons\u201d in a culture war.<\/span>Credit<\/span>Andrew Testa for The New York Times<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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LONDON \u2014 As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.<\/p>\n

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from\u00a0Robert Mercer<\/a>, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.<\/p>\n

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network\u2019s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump\u2019s campaign in 2016.<\/p>\n

An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica\u2019s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm \u2014 and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics \u2014 under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

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Both Congress and the British Parliament have questioned Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, about the firm\u2019s activities.<\/span>\u00a0Credit<\/span>Bryan Bedder\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: \u201cRules don\u2019t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it\u2019s all fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want to fight a culture war in America,\u201d he added. \u201cCambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.

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Details of Cambridge\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>acquisition<\/a>\u00a0and use of Facebook\u00a0<\/span>data<\/a>\u00a0have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off\u00a0<\/span>a furious debate<\/a>\u00a0about the merits of the firm\u2019s so-called psychographic modeling techniques.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed \u2014 and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm\u2019s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.<\/p>\n

Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.<\/p>\n

During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company\u00a0posted a statement<\/a>\u00a0expressing alarm and promising to take action.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a scam \u2014 and a fraud,\u201d Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. \u201cWe will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all \u2014 and take action against all offending parties,\u201d Mr. Grewal said.<\/p>\n

Alexander Nix, the chief executive of\u00a0Cambridge Analytica<\/a>, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Mr. Kogan for violating Facebook\u2019s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago.<\/p>\n

In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators into allegations that it performed illegal work on the \u201cBrexit\u201d campaign. The country has strict privacy laws, and its information commissioner\u00a0announced on Saturday\u00a0<\/a>that she was looking into whether the Facebook data was \u201cillegally acquired and used.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the United States, Mr. Mercer\u2019s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.<\/p>\n

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The conservative donor Robert Mercer invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica, where his daughter Rebekah is a board member.<\/span>\u00a0Credit<\/span>Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Congressional investigators have questioned Mr. Nix about the company\u2019s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department\u2019s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has\u00a0demanded<\/a>\u00a0the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.<\/p>\n

While the substance of Mr. Mueller\u2019s interest is a closely guarded secret, documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm\u2019s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine. And the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange,\u00a0disclosed in October<\/a>\u00a0that Mr. Nix had reached out to him during the campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump\u2019s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users\u2019 identities, friend networks and \u201clikes.\u201d Only a tiny fraction of the users had agreed to release their information to a third party.<\/p>\n

\u201cProtecting people\u2019s information is at the heart of everything we do,\u201d Mr. Grewal said. \u201cNo systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he added, \u201cit\u2019s a serious abuse of our rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading Voters\u2019 Minds<\/h4>\n

The Bordeaux flowed freely as Mr. Nix and several colleagues sat down for dinner at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan in late 2013, Mr. Wylie recalled in an interview. They had much to celebrate.<\/p>\n

Mr. Nix, a brash salesman, led the small elections division at SCL Group, a political and defense contractor. He had spent much of the year trying to break into the lucrative new world of political data, recruiting Mr. Wylie, then a 24-year-old political operative with ties to veterans of President Obama\u2019s campaigns. Mr. Wylie was interested in using inherent psychological traits to affect voters\u2019 behavior and had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists, some of them affiliated with Cambridge University.<\/p>\n

The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.<\/p>\n

Then a chance meeting bought Mr. Nix into contact with Mr. Bannon, the Breitbart News firebrand who would later become a Trump campaign and White House adviser, and with Mr. Mercer,\u00a0one of the richest men on earth<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America\u2019s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. Mr. Bannon and the Mercers declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Mr. Mercer agreed to help finance a $1.5 million pilot project to poll voters and test psychographic messaging in Virginia\u2019s gubernatorial race in November 2013, where the Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, ran against Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fund-raiser. Though Mr. Cuccinelli lost, Mr. Mercer committed to moving forward.<\/p>\n

The Mercers wanted results quickly, and more business beckoned. In early 2014, the investor Toby Neugebauer and other wealthy conservatives were preparing to put tens of millions of dollars behind a presidential campaign for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, work that Mr. Nix was eager to win.<\/p>\n

When Mr. Wylie\u2019s colleagues failed to produce a memo explaining their work to Mr. Neugebauer, Mr. Nix castigated them over email.<\/p>\n

\u201cITS 2 PAGES!! 4 hours work max (or an hour each). What have you all been doing??\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Mr. Wylie\u2019s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.<\/p>\n