March 31: Democracy is a fragile undertaking. Plus other letters to the editor

Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published March 31, 2018
Updated March 29, 2018

A fragile undertaking

If there is any truth to the testimony given this week to British parliamentary committee hearings by Christopher Wylie, it seems that the ethical IQ of the Vancouver company which allegedly contracted to use machine-based methods to influence elections in the U.S., U.K., Africa and the Caribbean is likely approaching the digital values of either zero or one (Whistle-Blower Alleges AggregateIQ Involved In Dirty-Tricks Campaigns Worldwide, March 28).

This brain trust allegedly received about half of the Brexit campaign Vote Leave/BeLeave budget, to the tune of some $8-million, to do its evil work. The threat made against Mr. Wylie by Black Cube, another "intelligence" firm, has all the hallmarks of a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) suit, designed purely for the purpose of intimidation.

Thank God for real people with the courage of Mr. Wylie, in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. If democracy, a fragile undertaking at best, is not to be quickly destroyed by the genuine stupidity of artificial intelligence, these heroic individuals need our full support.

Alban Goddard Hill, Belleville, Ont.

............
Is influencing and manipulating elections really something new? It's just the tools of manipulation that have changed. It's the medium, not the message.

Douglas Cornish, Ottawa
............

My parents survived the invasion and occupation of Belgium. Stories of their survival filled my childhood with an appreciation for daredevil adventure, but also a strong sense of suspicious caution. It was the latter that caused me to get over my Facebook addiction when Donald Trump got elected. There had been whispers about Facebook and privacy, and anyway, the dangers to personal information from a would-be dictator are well known in my favourite fiction!

Withdrawal wasn't nearly as painful as I had expected. Mind you, Facebook doesn't let you quit easily. After jumping through many frustrating hoops, I removed all personal data, then simply abandoned my page in disgust and never opened it again.

It could be that nefarious forces have taken over the page and are using it to their own ends.

So be it, I'm outa there.

Claudette Claereboudt, Regina

............
Canadians would do well to distinguish between the roles of whistle-blowers and informants. It is a point frequently confused to democracy's detriment (It's Time To Start Paying Whistle-Blowers For Tips, March 28).

An informant preys on people or situations where they have an information or power advantage in order to reap a financial or other benefit from a sponsor. A whistle-blower brings forward information about situations where they have valuable insight about something hidden or overlooked that is detrimental to individuals, organizations, or society. There may or may not be any benefit to them and costs are often great.

Informants exploit and whistle-blowers enlighten. Informants are prized by autocrats; whistle-blowers are not. Informants are paid one way or another. Who plays an important role in fostering healthy democratic institutions?

Paying whistle-blowers does work. However, care is needed to avoid encouraging behaviour that undermines rather than strengthens democracy.

Alison Durkin, Toronto
*********************************

The Globe and Mail

AggregateIQ's answers "completely disingenuous", British committee chair tells Canadian MPs

Bill Curry
Parliamentary reporter
Ottawa

Updated May 3, 2018

PETER NICHOLLS/Reuters

The head of a British parliamentary inquiry says the two Canadians in charge of Victoria-based AggregateIQ were "completely disingenuous" when they claimed to be co-operating with investigators looking into the misuse of Facebook data for political campaigns.

In a show of co-operation between members of Parliament in Ottawa and Britain, Canada's access to information, privacy and ethics committee heard video testimony Thursday from Damian Collins, the Conservative Party MP who chairs a Parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom that is also studying issues related to Facebook data and misinformation campaigns on the social media platform.
Both committees are specifically looking at how the improperly obtained Facebook data of an estimated 87 million customers was used by the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which is a division of the SCL Group of companies.

Victoria's AggregateIQ is referenced in SCL records as "SCL Canada". The firm performed advertising work for the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum. AggregateIQ officials say they performed contract work for SCL, but that they are a completely separate company and never worked with the Facebook data in question.

The web of interconnected companies was further complicated this week with the news that SCL Elections Ltd. and its subsidiary – Cambridge Analytica – are closing all operations and filing for bankruptcy.

That development was discussed during Thursday’s hearings, including the fact that several former SCL and Cambridge Analytica executives have since formed a new company called Emerdata that is registered at the same London address as SCL.

Mr. Collins told Canadian MPs that it appears SCL and its affiliates are designed in a way that makes it difficult to track their activities and sources of funding.
“It’s like the hydra of Greek mythology, a sort of multiheaded beast, and when you cut one head off, another one springs up,” he said.

Canadian MPs were left frustrated last month after hearing for the first time from AggregateIQ’s top two officials – chief executive officer Zackary Massingham and chief operating officer Jeff Silvester. Mr. Massingham appeared reluctant to talk, leaving Mr. Silvester to answer most of the questions from MPs. Mr. Silvester then held a news conference following the April 24 meeting, but Mr. Massingham did not attend.

On that day, Mr. Silvester suggested he was confused by allegations AggregateIQ was not co-operating with an investigation by Britain’s Information Commissioner, noting that he had sent a reply to written questions.
Mr. Collins said he watched that Canadian hearing and said AggregateIQ’s testimony was “completely disingenuous.” He agreed with the idea that Mr. Massingham should be called back before the Canadian committee. AggregateIQ officials are also expected to testify before the United Kingdom’s House of Commons committee on digital, culture, media and sport, which Mr. Collins chairs.

“It’s quite clear from the [British] information commissioner that they may have responded to letters but they’re not co-operating with her investigation and are still not, and I think it was misleading of them to try to insinuate to your committee that they were,” he said.

Mr. Collins said the investigations in Britain by the information commissioner and the Electoral Commission will produce findings on the actions of individuals involved in specific activities, but lawmakers around the world must also focus on the broader question of protecting elections from fake news and misinformation from countries such as Russia.

“For the Russian state, it seems their modus operandi is to create discord,” he told MPs. “I think they’ve recognized that you can use these tools, particularly on social media, to support these campaigns and also to polarize political debate and opinion as well. And the consequence of that, really, has been in many countries – particularly in Europe – the collapse of the centre in politics. People have been pushed increasingly to the margins and political debate and discourse [is] increasingly aggressive. And I think we have to recognize this as a major threat to democracy.”

**************************

B.C. firm was used to violate U.K. election spending laws ahead of Brexit, whistle-blowers say

Mark MacKinnonand Colin Freeze
London and Toronto

Published March 25, 2018
Updated March 26, 2018

The whistle-blower at the centre of an international furor over misused Facebook data is now also alleging that the 2016 Brexit vote was tainted when U.K. campaign funds were wrongly routed to a Canadian consultancy he helped start.

Canadian political consultant Christopher Wylie made these allegations in an exclusive sit-down interview with The Globe and Mail in London on Sunday, just hours after a second whistle-blower emerged on the front pages of the London Observer.

Shahmir Sanni, a former volunteer for Vote Leave campaign, said he had first-hand knowledge about the alleged wrongdoing in the Brexit campaign. He said a B.C. firm was paid £625,000 ($1.14-million) as British campaign entities sought to circumvent limits on their spending.

Prior to these new allegations, Victoria-based AggregateIQ had already been under pressure. For months, government regulators have been pursuing probes to determine the Canadian consultancy’s role in shaping the Brexit vote. They also wanted to know about the firm’s links to a similar U.K. consultancy, Cambridge Analytica.

Now, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are piling on and urging that the Canadian consultants involved −many of them former federal Liberal Party volunteers − give answers in public. “I will be asking Parliament to call representatives from the Canadian firm AggregateIQ to explain their connections to Cambridge Analytica and the Leave Campaign,” NDP MP Charlie Angus tweeted on Sunday.

But the Victoria consultancy said it is not to be blamed for matters related to the Brexit vote. “AggregateIQ is a digital advertising, web and software development company based in Canada,” co-founder Jeff Silvester said in an email.

He added that his company has “never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity.”

What’s not in dispute is that Mr. Wylie and Mr. Silvester know each other well. A decade ago, Mr. Silvester was a mentor to a teenaged Mr. Wylie in federal Liberal Party circles. Back then they volunteered for the same B.C. MP. They were also part of a group of young Turks in the party who tried to sell its old guard on the notion that better access to data can drive electoral outcomes.

Considering this history while sitting in his lawyer’s office in London, Mr. Wylie told The Globe “it deeply pains” him to turn against a former friend. Known worldwide as a whistle-blower now, he was poised and genial − but his knee bounced like a piston throughout the hour-long interview.

He now argued that the founders of AggregateIQ have a moral obligation to reveal what they know to authorities. “If they have nothing to hide, they should come here and talk to authorities,” Mr. Wylie said. He added that “Brexit is not just an election. If crimes were committed by various parties in Vote Leave, and if AggregateIQ facilitated cheating in a referendum, that is a really big deal because this is a permanent, irrevocable change in the constitution of the country.”

It had been a week since Mr. Wylie emerged as front-page news globally. The previous weekend he announced himself to the world by dropping another bombshell in the Observer about how he worked with Steve Bannon, a former Donald Trump aide, as part of a plan to surreptitiously acquire and misuse the data of tens of millions Facebook users.

But 2013 and 2014 were very busy years for Mr. Wylie. He had gone to the London School of Economics before joining a London consultancy known as the SCL Group. Then he met Mr. Bannon as a prospective client, with whom he says he personally worked to spin out the Cambridge Analytica unit that was later implicated in the misuse of Facebook data.

It was in this time, Mr. Wylie said, that he also urged former friends in Canada to join him. He prevailed on people with whom he spent his formative years in Ottawa, as a Liberal researcher, and in Victoria, as a Liberal volunteer.

“I reached out to people I had worked with in the past on projects, who I had a lot of respect for, who I knew were talented − a lot of those people were in Canada. So the first-generation team at Cambridge Analytica was filled with Canadians.”

Mr. Wylie said he especially wanted to work with Mr. Silvester and his business partner, Zack Massingham. Both had young families, and neither was willing to move to England, so a new company was created.
“The compromise was they could stay in Canada, they could set up a company, but that company would in large part, trade or operate or fill the role of quote-unquote SCL Canada,” Mr. Wylie said.

He said that was an unofficial brand only, which mostly surfaced in internal correspondence − it was otherwise known as Aggregate IQ. (AggregateIQ said in its statement “it has never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL.”)

Mr. Wylie now says this unit did work as far afield as Nigeria and Trinidad and Tobago. And both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica were engaged by the Ted Cruz campaign team in the 2016 Republican primaries.

U.K. campaign finance records show that AggregateIQ got millions of pounds from distinct groups pushing for Britain to leave the European Union.

On Sunday, a second whistle-blower alleged some of this was an end run around campaign finance laws.

A former volunteer, Mr. Sanni, told the Observer he was a 22-year-old working for one pro-Brexit faction, known as Vote Leave, when he was encouraged to spin out an ostensibly distinct entity, known as BeLeave. But the latter entity was a powerless shell, he told the Observer. He provided the newspaper documents speaking to a specific £625,000 transfer from one entity to the other. “We had no control over it,” he said.

The money made its way to AggregateIQ, which had already gotten money from other pro-Brexit factions.
According to the New York Times, Mr. Wylie, as he was making his allegations about Cambridge Analytica, encouraged Mr. Sanni to go public with his claims about Vote Leave and BeLeave as well.

Together, these specific allegations by Mr. Wylie and Mr. Sanni lend considerable clarity to money movements already under investigation by government regulators in Canada and Britain.

But such probes have run into jurisdictional roadblocks. On Friday, The Globe asked acting B.C. Information Commissioner Drew McArthur whether he understood the corporate relationship between AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. “I don’t know specifics around that as of yet,” he said, adding that he has not yet interviewed anyone under oath.

As he ended the interview, Mr. Wylie was scornful of the attention the Canadian media has focused on his past Liberal Party ties, particularly a 2016 contract with the Liberal Caucus Research Bureau that saw him paid $100,000.

He said there was nothing scandalous or particularly interesting about it, given how he had left the world of Cambridge Analytica by then. “Frankly, the Canadian press is trying to find a scandal where one doesn’t exist,” he said.

But he alleged AggregateIQ was part of a Brexit scandal. “Up until 2016, this company [AggregateIQ] they were tied at the hip with Cambridge Analytica,” he said.

With reports from Mike Hager and Paul Waldie

*******************************

Whistle-blower alleges AggregateIQ involved in dirty-tricks campaigns worldwide
Paul Waldie
London
Published March 27, 2018 Updated March 27, 2018

The Canadian whistle-blower who helped launch AggregateIQ has levelled a scathing attack on the B.C.-based technology company, accusing it of participating in dirty-tricks campaigns spanning the globe, from spreading violent anti-Muslim videos in Nigeria to hacking data in St. Kitts and intervening in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote.

Christopher Wylie, who was instrumental in setting up AggregateIQ Data Services Ltd. (AIQ) as well as political strategists Cambridge Analytica, told a British House of Commons committee on Tuesday that AIQ developed a key software program that he alleges was used to misuse Facebook data during the campaign won by Donald Trump.

“You have to remember that this is a company that has gone around the world and undermined democratic institutions in all kinds of countries,” Mr. Wylie alleged in front of members of Parliament on the digital, culture, media and sport committee, which is conducting a probe into the rise of fake news. “[AIQ] could care less as to whether or not their work is compliant [with the law]. They like to win.”

Mr. Wylie highlighted AIQ’s alleged role in the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria, saying the company distributed violent content on social media to discredit Muhammadu Buhari, who was running against then-president Goodluck Jonathan. The videos included “content where people were being dismembered, where people were having their throats cut and bled to death in a ditch,” Mr. Wylie told the committee. Other videos showed people being burned alive and still more had “incredibly anti-Islamic and threatening messages, portraying Muslims as violent.” Despite the ads, Mr. Buhari won the election.

Mr. Wylie also alleged the company used hacked computer information in an election in St. Kitts and engaged in questionable data-harvesting practices in Trinidad. And he alleged that AIQ participated in a scheme to help the Vote Leave campaign in Britain exceed spending limits during the Brexit referendum in 2016.

“This is a company that has worked with hacked material. This is a company that will send out videos of people being murdered to intimidate voters. This is a company that goes out and tries to illicitly acquire live internet-browsing data of everyone in an entire country,” he told the committee. “So I think a lot of questions should be asked about the role of AggregateIQ in [the Brexit referendum] and whether they were indeed actually compliant with the law here beyond just spending infractions.”

AIQ has denied any wrongdoing. In a statement, the company said that it “works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates.” The company added that it “has never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity. All work AggregateIQ does for each client is kept separate from every other client.” It added that “Chris Wylie has never been employed by AggregateIQ.”

Mr. Wylie, 28, helped create Cambridge Analytica in 2013 shortly after joining another British company called SCL Group. Cambridge Analytica devoted much of its work to U.S. political campaigns and it was funded largely by Robert Mercer, a U.S. billionaire with ties to Steve Bannon, who helped run Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Wylie said he recruited two friends from Victoria to join SCL in 2013: Jeff Silvester and Zack Massingham. They all knew each other from their days volunteering with the Liberal Party in B.C. When Mr. Silvester and Mr. Massingham said they couldn’t move to Britain, Mr. Wylie said SCL agreed to set them up as a kind of SCL “franchise” in Victoria.

Mr. Silvester and Mr. Massingham called their company AggregateIQ, but Mr. Wylie alleges it was essentially an arm of SCL and, later, Cambridge Analytica. AIQ workers were listed in the SCL staff directory and the Victoria company derived almost all of its revenue from Cambridge Analytica projects, which centred around developing sophisticated programs to target political ads on social media, Mr Wylie said. He alleged AIQ was kept as a separate entity in part as a way to hide any paper trail leading back to Cambridge Analytica or SCL.

In Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by a wealthy local businessman to help Mr. Goodluck. Mr. Wylie alleged Cambridge Analytica hired Black Cube, an Israeli business-intelligence firm, to hack into computers in order to get medical records and e-mails belonging to Mr. Buhari. AIQ was handed hacked information and violent videos to use in social-media advertising, he added.

Black Cube has denied the allegations. In a statement released to Israeli media on Tuesday, the company said: “Whilst we are flattered that we are seemingly being connected with every international incident that occurs, we will state that Chris Wylie’s testimony is a flagrant lie.” The firm added that it will “launch a massive defamation suit against any entity that we will find involved, including Christopher Wylie, SCL or Cambridge Analytica, for any pound they still have or don’t have.”

Mr. Wylie testified that AIQ was also instrumental in developing the Ripon software that Cambridge Analytica used to target Republican voters in the 2016 U.S. election. The software was a critical tool to help Cambridge Analytica sort data from 50 million Facebook users that the company had acquired as part of a project with Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor who obtained the social-media information through an online app he’d developed. “It was AggregateIQ that built the software,” Mr. Wylie said. He gave members of Parliament on the committee copies of the Ripon development contract and licensing agreements between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica.

AIQ has come under investigation in Britain over its role in the Vote Leave campaign. Roughly 40 per cent of Vote Leave’s £6.8-million ($12.4-million) budget went to AIQ for social-media advertising. The company received an additional £625,000 ($1.14-million) from another campaign group called BeLeave.
Lawyers representing Mr. Wylie and other whistle-blowers have alleged that Vote Leave and BeLeave were essentially a joint operation and that by funnelling money through BeLeave to AIQ, Vote Leave officials illegally skirted campaign-spending laws. Vote Leave had a high-profile campaign team that included several current cabinet ministers such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, as well as two senior advisers to Prime Minister Theresa May. They have all denied the allegations, which Mr. Johnson has called “ludicrous.”

Mr. Wylie said AIQ’s work for Vote Leave was effective and he noted that the “conversion rates” on its social-media ads were up to 7 per cent in some cases. Those rates refer to the number of times someone not only sees the ad but also performs some kind of action such as donating money or signing up to volunteer. The typical conversion rate is around 2 per cent, he said. After the referendum campaign, Mr. Wylie said he met Mr. Silvester to talk about AIQ’s success. Mr. Silvester and others at AIQ “were very, very pleased with themselves at how that project went,” he said.
Committee chair Damian Collins, a Conservative MP, said he was shocked by the allegations made against AIQ. Mr. Wylie’s testimony “paints AggregateIQ, in particular, in a very poor light not just because of that data hack, but also because of their work in other parts of the world.”

He added that the committee has yet to decide whether to ask AIQ officials to testify.

Enter supporting content here

Eastern Lake Ontario Environmental Research Group