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Where Has It All Gone?

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Where Has It All Gone? Where has it all gone? Dominic Cummings boasted of sending Facebook messages to 7 million people. That’s a pretty valuable database! A great deal of US cash went into the creation of that database. SCL Group, SCL Elections, and Cambridge Analytica may have been liquidated as the companies involved with creating that database, thus preventing further examination of their computer files, but, what happened to the database? A lot of work went into identifying 7 million British electors with Facebook accounts. A lot of the work was done by a tiny Canadian company called Aggregate IQ, AIQ, as it is normally known. AIQ sold their ‘Intellectual Property Licence’ to SCL Elections Ltd, a British Company, later to become Cambridge Analytica, and therefore, in effect, sold their soul to Robert Mercer. AIQ played a pivotal role in what Vote Leave did with their ‘1½ billion digital ads sent to 7 million people’, and Dominic Cummings wasted no time in recording that on the Vote Leave website: There were two areas of work where AIQ focussed their work for SCL. They developed something known as Project Ripon - the Ripon Platform - a powerful suite of software which falls within AI - Artificial Intelligence. Ripon carries out invisible processing - using ‘behind the scenes’ algorithms, analysis, data matching, and profiling that involves people's personal information. The other area of work in which AIQ became involved was something SCL called ‘The Database of Truth’. It is a database system that integrates, obtains, and normalises data from disparate sources including starting with primary source data, such as the data held by the RNC (Republican National Committee) in the US. In UK terms we believe it started with the claims made by Brittany Kaiser in her evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. She described how the UKIP computer tower was carried into the Cambridge Analytica offices, in order to analyse direct from the hard drive, the data it contained - membership records, survey work, including a major survey on why people wanted to leave the EU or not, and other polling work carried out after the success of coming second in 120 UK Constituencies. She said: “… we were able to build personas out of that …” There is no evidence that CA ‘kept’ the data they downloaded from the analysis they carried out for Leave.EU, but since they were given free access, and later submitted an invoice for the work done, chances are that those data files ended up in something known as the ‘SCL Data Warehouse’. Not to retain a copy, and then dispose of it by moving it would have been too much of a temptation, given the nature of what UKIP had at that time. It would have been the perfect ‘primary data source’. CA signed an agreement with GSR - they entered into a commercial arrangement with a company called Global Science Research (GSR), owned by Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, specifically premised on the harvesting and processing of Facebook data, so that it could be matched to personality traits and voter rolls. Facebook have since revealed that 87 million Facebook accounts were harvested with more than 1 million of those being from Britain. Meantime, we know The Hon Thomas Borwick was contracted through his company Konta Ltd to work with the SCL Group, and we know Borwick purchased electoral registers for over 200 British local authorities through his company Voter Consultancy Ltd.. Borwick claimed he needed the registers for checking donations - but as that would have given him access to over 20m electors, why on earth did he need so much? Borwick subsequently became the Chief Technology Officer for Vote Leave, and it therefore makes it more likely that Borwick purchased those registers for Vote Leave, and those 20 million elector details all ended up in the SCL Data Warehouse! There have been a number of reports that CA purchased a large number of datasets. And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale. CA also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets - on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel - and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said a key source, “and the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.” The Facebook data which CA received from GSR came from personality surveys containing 120 questions, which profiled people along five discrete axes - the ‘five factors’ model, popularly called the ‘OCEAN’ model after one common breakdown of the factors: Openness to experience; Conscientiousness; Extraversion; Agreeableness and Neuroticism. It is therefore not surprising to find that the first digital ads which Vote Leave used were ‘fake competitions’. We know this because Facebook has released some of the digital ads used by Vote Leave through their association with AggregateIQ. And of course, any recipient who responded in any way would have been ‘harvested’ in order to update their Facebook profile in the database. Later in the campaign the ‘fake competition’ ads returned, but now with a different message added! So, there is a database out there containing the Facebook accounts of 7 million British voters, & which is, no doubt, being updated as we speak, with every ‘click’, ‘like’ and ‘share’ keyed by those Facebook users. Vote Leave built and/or copied that database to win the Referendum. Where is that database now? Who controls it? Who plans to use it? How will it be used in the future? It is such a valuable resource, those who financed it would be crazy to scrap it now. They have created a captive audience, & we have seen how ruthless they can be in using it. What Cambridge Analytica has taught us is that it is now possible to submit an identical, or several identical messages, into the purview, namely Facebook accounts, of millions of electors, simultaneously! Looking back at my first job in the Conservative Party, I was a Missioner - a paid canvasser, and I was given a daily target for physical contacts. Given that I was working in a rural area, where buses or trains were in short supply, and I didn’t have a car, shoe leather became very worn, very quickly. I frequently failed to meet my daily target! Now, AI can decide which electors to contact and which to leave alone; which electors to get which message; and which electors to get more messages, all at the press of a button. Targeted marketing has come a long way in the forty years since it began to develop with census data being matched with electoral registers on huge computer banks. Social media has quite literally revolutionised the art of canvassing and getting out the vote. And, if I’m permitted once more to look back at my own experiences - I took a group of Young Conservatives to the Nixon Presidential campaign of 1972. I spent much of my time in Washington, and I was invited to speak to a volunteer group at the RNC HQ in Pennsylvania Avenue, not too far from the White House. I was asked to describe how we got the vote out on polling day in the UK, known throughout the US as GOTV. I made the mistake of using the term familiar to me, to describe what we did. I told my audience we went ‘knocking up’. One young Republican coughed, and the whole room exploded. He explained and asked if I had had a good time! Now a series of ‘Apps’ to the mobile phones of 7 million electors is so much more instant! Knowing what messages Vote Leave spewed out to those electors they had identified as ‘vulnerable’, and ‘persuadable’, and even knowing how they did it, does not remove the fear of what might be done in future with the database they created. My chart below pulls together most of what is in this latest ‘report’ on the state of play of what happened in the Referendum campaign vote. The red arrows are indicators of what we absolutely know from reports, published evidence, and statements made. The grey arrows represent conclusions which arise from what we know, but for which we do not have confirmation. So, start with the UKIP logo, and work your way up the left-hand side. In the middle lurks the logo for the SCL Group, which we believe has been liquidated - could it now be known as ‘Emerdata Ltd’? Above that is the SCL data warehouse, and no one seems to know where the file servers used for the warehousing are now located. We know UKIP data was copied by Cambridge Analytica, and since CA has been liquidated, we have to assume it was moved to the ‘warehouse’, hence the grey arrow. We know CA obtained 87 million Facebook accounts from GSR, and it is almost certain that data went straight into the ‘warehouse’. Thomas Borwick used one of his own companies, Voter Consultancy Ltd. to purchase electoral registers for 200 local authorities whilst working for Vote Leave - did those end up in the ‘warehouse’? We don’t know for sure, but it looks likely, since there is no evidence that Vote Leave made any such similar purchases. AggregateIQ, working for Vote Leave was able to source 7 million elector records, according to Dominic Cummings! Now drop down to the right-hand side and Vote Leave.
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