Targeted: My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump, Brexit and Facebook Broke Democracy

19 Of Truth and Consequences

20 The Road to Redemption

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Publisher

Prologue (#ulink_1ee8d916-c6ca-5fbf-acab-6674e18bf070)

There’s nothing like a car ride with federal agents to make you question your life choices. That was exactly where I found myself the morning of July 18, 2018, winding through the streets of Washington, DC, heading toward an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

My trip that morning consisted of riding in two cars, actually—the first took me to a coffee shop that the Department of Justice had randomly selected. This had been the driver’s instructions when I initially slid into the backseat: they had chosen a place unexpectedly, without planning it out or telling anyone beforehand. Then, once we were on our way, he was to radio in our destination. At the coffee shop, the second driver was waiting. Like the first driver, he was wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, but there was a second man with him as well. From the second car—outfitted like the first with tinted windows—I watched as the city’s gleaming monuments, bright and sudden and very white, flashed by us like camera bulbs.

When I was settled in the backseat between my two attorneys, it was hard not to consider just how I’d ended up here, on my way to talk to federal prosecutors about my role with the now-infamous political communications firm, Cambridge Analytica. How a situation that I’d entered with the best of intentions for me and my family had ended up so horribly and irrevocably twisted. How in the process of wanting to learn how to use data for good, and while helping my parents through a difficult financial moment, I’d ended up compromising my political and personal values. How a mixture of naïveté and ambition had landed me squarely and disturbingly on the wrong side of history.

A little more than three and a half years earlier, I’d joined Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the SCL Group—specifically, their humanitarian division, SCL Social—working on projects under the company’s CEO, a man named Alexander Nix. In the years since that leap of faith, nothing had gone as I’d envisioned it. As a lifelong Democrat and devoted activist who had worked for years in support of progressive causes, I had started my work with Cambridge Analytica under the pretense that I would be separate from the company’s Republican client base and outreach. It didn’t take long, though, to find myself gradually pulled away from my principles by the difficulty of securing funding for humanitarian projects and the allure of success on the other side. At Cambridge Analytica there was the promise of real money for the first time in my career, and a way to buy into the vision that I was helping to build a revolutionary political communications company from the ground up.

In the process, I had been exposed to the vast sweep of Cambridge’s efforts, both to acquire data on as many U.S. citizens as possible and to leverage that data to influence Americans’ voting behavior. I’d also come to see how Facebook’s negligent privacy policies and the federal government’s total lack of oversight about personal data had enabled all of Cambridge’s efforts. But, most of all, I understood how Cambridge had taken advantage of all these forces to help elect Donald Trump.

As the car drove, my lawyers and I sat quietly, each of us preparing for what was to come. We all knew I would share any part of my story in full; the question now was what everyone else wanted to know. Mostly people seemed to want answers, both professional and personal, about how this could happen. There was a variety of reasons why I’d allowed my values to become so warped—from my family’s financial situation to the fallacy that Hillary would win regardless of my efforts or those of the company I worked for. But each of those was only part of the story. Perhaps the truest reason of all was the fact that somewhere along the way I’d lost my compass, and then myself. I’d entered this job believing I was a professional who knew how cynical and messy the business of politics was, only to learn time and again how naïve I’d been.

And now, it was on me to make it right.

The car drifted smoothly through the streets of the capital and I began to sense that we were closing in on our destination. I had been warned by the special counsel’s team not to be afraid or surprised if, upon arriving at the secure building where I was to be questioned, throngs of press awaited me. The location, it was said, was no longer secure. Reporters had caught on that the site was being used for the interviewing of witnesses.

A reporter, the driver said, was hiding behind a mailbox. He recognized her from CNN. He had seen her loitering around the building for eight hours at a time. In heels, he said. “What they wouldn’t do!” He exclaimed.

As we neared the place and turned a corner into a garage in the back, the driver told me to turn my face away from the windows, even though they were tinted. In preparation for my conversation with the special counsel, I had been told to clear my day. Completely. I had been told that no one knew how long I would testify or for how long I would then be cross-examined. However long it would be, I was ready. After all, my presence there had been my own doing.

A year earlier, I’d made the decision to come forward, to shine a light in the dark places that I had come to know and to become a whistleblower. I did this because, as I’d come face-to-face with the realities of what Cambridge Analytica had done, I saw all too clearly just how misguided I’d been. I did this because it was the only way to try to make up for what I’d been a part of. But, for more than any other reason, I did this because telling my story to anyone who would listen was the only way we could learn, and hopefully prepare for, what comes next. That was my mission now—to raise the alarm about how Cambridge Analytica had operated and about the dangers that Big Data posed, so that next time voters on both sides would understand the full stakes of the data wars that our democracy is up against.

The driver took us deeper and deeper into the garage, circling, circling farther down.

Why so deep? I wondered. But of course, I already knew: Privacy is a hard thing to come by these days.

1 (#ulink_c8b7eda3-b7ee-534c-8d57-97756f365d47)

A Late Lunch (#ulink_c8b7eda3-b7ee-534c-8d57-97756f365d47)

EARLY 2014

The first time I saw Alexander Nix, it was through a thick pane of glass, which is perhaps the best way to view a man like him.

I had shown up late for a business lunch that had been hastily arranged by my close friend Chester Freeman, who was acting, as he often did, as my guardian angel. I was there to meet with three associates of Chester’s, two men I knew and one I didn’t, all of whom were looking for talent at the intersection of politics and social media. I counted this area as part of my political expertise, having worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign; though I was still busy researching my dissertation for my PhD, I was also on the market for a well-paying job. I had kept the fact secret from nearly everyone except Chester, but I was in urgent need of a stable source of income, to take care of myself and help out my family back in Chicago. This lunch was a way for me to obtain a potentially short-term and lucrative consultancy, and I was grateful to Chester for the well-timed assist.

By the time I arrived, however, lunch was nearly over. I’d had appointments that morning, and though I’d hustled to get there, I was late, and I found Chester and the two friends of his I already knew huddled together in the cold outside the Mayfair sushi restaurant, smoking post-meal cigarettes in view of the neighborhood’s Georgian mansions, stately hotels, and expensive shops. The two men were from a country in Central Asia, and like Chester, they, too, were passing through London on business. They had reached out to him for help in connecting with someone who could aid them with digital communications (email and social media campaigns) in an important upcoming election in their country. Though I knew neither of them well, both were powerful men I’d met before and liked, and by gathering us there for the lunch, Chester intended only to do all of us a favor.

Now, in welcome, he rolled me my own cigarette and leaned in to light it for me. Chester, his two friends, and I caught up with one another, chatting brightly and shielding ourselves from the rising wind. As Chester stood there in the afternoon light, ruddy cheeked and happy, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his journey. He’d recently been appointed as a diplomat for business and trade relations by the prime minister of a small island nation, but back when I’d first met him, at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, he’d been an idealistic, shaggy-haired nineteen-year-old wearing a blue dashiki. The convention had been in Denver that year, and Chester and I had both been standing in a long line outside Broncos Stadium, waiting to see Hillary Clinton endorse Barack Obama as the party’s nominee, when we bumped into each other and started talking.

We had come a long way since then, and each of us now had a hodgepodge of political experience under our proverbial belts. He and I had long shared the dream of “growing up” to do international political work and diplomacy, and recently he’d proudly sent me a picture of the certificate he received upon his diplomatic appointment. And while the Chester who now stood before me outside the restaurant looked the part of a newly minted diplomat, I still recognized him as the genius chatterbox friend I’d known from the beginning, as close to me as a brother.

As we smoked, Chester apologized to me for the last-minute, cobbled-together lunch. And by way of acknowledging what a motley crew he’d assembled there, he gestured to the plate glass window, through which I glimpsed the third person he’d invited—the man, still seated inside, who would change my life and, later, the world.

The fellow appeared to be an average, cut-from-the-cloth Mayfair business type, cell phone held tightly to his ear, but as Chester explained, he was not just any businessman. His name was Alexander Nix and he was the CEO of a British-based elections company. The company, Chester went on, was called the SCL Group, short for Strategic Communications Laboratories, which struck me as the sort of name a board of directors would give a glorified advertising firm it wanted to sound vaguely scientific. In point of fact, Chester said, SCL was a wildly successful company. Over a span of twenty-five years, it had procured defense contracts worldwide and run elections in countries across the globe. Its basic function, he said, was putting into power presidents and prime ministers and, in many cases, ensuring that they stayed there. Most recently, the SCL Group had been working on the reelection campaign of the prime minister for whom Chester now worked, which was how I presumed Chester had come to know this Nix character.

It took me a moment to digest it all. Chester’s intention in putting us all together that afternoon was certainly a tangle of potentially conflicting interests. I was there to pitch my services to the two friends, but it now seemed clear that the elections CEO was there to do so as well. And it occurred to me that in addition to my lateness, my youth and lack of experience no doubt meant that, instead, the CEO would likely already have secured the business I wished to have with Chester’s two friends.

I peered through the window at the man. I saw him now as someone more than average. With his phone still to his ear, he suddenly looked terribly serious and consummately professional. Clearly, I was outclassed and outdone. I was disappointed, but I tried hard not to let it show.

“I thought you might like to meet him,” Chester offered. “You know,” he went on, “he’s a good connection and all that,” meaning, perhaps, future paying work. “Or,” Chester suggested, alternatively, “at least interesting fodder for your dissertation.”

I nodded. He was probably right. As disappointed as I might be about what I presumed was already a lost business opportunity, I was academically curious. What did the CEO of such a company actually do? I’d never heard of an elections company.

From my time with Obama and from my recent volunteer work in London with the Democratic Party expat organization Democrats Abroad and with the super PAC Ready for Hillary, my own experience was that campaign managers ran campaigns, working in their own country with, of course, the support of a small but elite group of highly paid experts and an army of underpaid staff, volunteers, and unpaid interns, as I had been. After the 2008 Obama campaign, I’d certainly come across a few people who later became professional campaign consultants, such as David Axelrod, who had been chief strategist for Obama and had gone on to advise the British Labour Party; and Jim Messina, once called “the most powerful person in Washington that you haven’t heard of,”

who had helmed Obama’s 2012 campaign, had become Obama’s White House chief of staff, and would go on to advise foreign leaders ranging from David Cameron to Theresa May. Still, it had never occurred to me that there existed entire companies dedicated to the goal of getting people elected to political office abroad.

I regarded the figure through the restaurant’s plate glass window with equal parts curiosity and puzzlement. Chester was right. I might not get any work at the moment, but maybe I would in the future. And I certainly could use the afternoon as research.

The restaurant was pleasant enough, brightly lit from above, with pale wooden floors and cream-colored walls along which Japanese artwork had been tidily hung. Approaching the table, I surveyed the man whom I had been watching from outside. He’d finished his phone call, and Chester made the introductions.

At closer range now, I could see that Nix wasn’t your typical Mayfair business type after all. He was what the British call “posh.” Immaculate and traditional, he was dressed in a dark, bespoke navy suit and a woven silk tie knotted at the neck of a starched button-down—pure Savile Row, right down to his shoes, which had been shined to a blinding polish. He had beside him a well-worn-in leather briefcase with an old-fashioned brass lock; it looked like it could have been his grandfather’s. Though I was a full-blooded American, I had lived in the United Kingdom ever since I graduated from high school, and I knew a member of the British upper crust when I saw one.

Alexander Nix, though, was what I’d call upper-upper crust. He was handsome in a British boarding school sort of way—Eton, as it turned out—and he was trim, with a sharp, arrow-like chin and the slightly bony build of someone who doesn’t spend any time at the gym. His eyes were a striking, opaque bright blue, and his complexion was smooth and unwrinkled, as though he’d never known a moment of worry in his life. In other words, it was the face of utter privilege. And as he stood before me in that West End London restaurant, I could easily have imagined him helmeted astride a galloping polo pony with a custom-made wooden mallet in hand.

I tried to guess his age. If he were as successful as Chester had claimed, he was likely older than I was by at least a decade, and his posture, equal parts upright and confident, yet somehow also relaxed, suggested an early middle-aged life, one that was aristocratic with a pinch of meritocracy thrown in. He looked as though he’d come into the world with a pretty good leg up, but that he’d used those legs, if Chester was right, in order to stand on his own two feet.

Nix greeted me warmly, as if I were an old friend, shaking my hand with vigor. As we took our seats at a large table tucked away from most of the others in the restaurant, he quickly, though not impolitely, turned his attention to Chester’s other two friends and effortlessly picked up the thread of what must have been the conversation they were having before I arrived.

With little revving up, Nix entered full-pitch mode. I recognized what that was because I knew how to do it myself. In order to support myself through all my studies, I’d taught myself how to pitch clients for consulting work, although I could see how skilled Nix was at it. I had neither half his charm nor his experience, and I certainly didn’t have his polish. His delivery was as bright as the shine on his expensive shoes.

I listened as he laid out the long history of the company for which he worked. The SCL Group had been established in 1993. Since then, it had run more than two hundred elections and had carried out defense, political, and humanitarian projects in some fifty countries worldwide; when Nix listed them, it sounded like the roster of countries on a United Nations subcommittee: Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Latvia, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, and more. Nix himself had been with SCL for eleven years at that point.

The sheer accumulation of experience and the volume of his work was astonishing to me, and humbling. I couldn’t help but note that I was six years old the year of SCL’s founding, and in the period of time when I was in kindergarten, grade school, and high school, Nix had been part of building a small but powerful empire. While next to those of my peers, my résumé looked pretty good—I’d done a great deal of international work while living abroad and since my time interning on the Obama campaign—but I couldn’t compete with Nix.

“So, we’re in America now,” Nix was saying, with barely contained enthusiasm.

Just recently, SCL had established a nascent presence there, and Nix’s short-term aim was to run as many of the upcoming American midterms in November 2014 as he could, and then go on and corner the elections business in the United States as a whole, including a presidential campaign if he could get his hands on it.

It was an audacious thing to say. But he had already secured the midterm campaigns of some notable candidates and causes. He’d signed the likes of a congressman from Arkansas by the name of Tom Cotton, a wunderkind Harvard grad and Iraq War veteran who was running for a seat in the Senate. He’d signed the entire slate of GOP candidates across all the races in the state of North Carolina. And he’d snagged the business of a powerful and deep-pocketed political action committee, or super PAC, belonging to UN ambassador John Bolton, a controversial figure on the right with whom I was all too familiar.

I had lived in the United Kingdom for years, but I knew at least some of the American neoconservative standouts such as Bolton. He was the kind of figure it was hard to ignore: a hawkish lightning rod who, along with a host of other neocons, had recently been revealed to be the brains and cash behind a shadowy organization called Groundswell, the intention of which, among other things, was to undermine the Obama presidency and hype the Hillary Clinton Benghazi controversy,