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

But I needed a job. A scrappy self-starter, I wasn’t afraid of doing things that might make me money, even if they weren’t my first choice. I’d pushed myself out of my comfort zone at an early age, volunteering on Howard Dean’s 2003 primary campaign bid for the presidency and then on John Kerry’s run when I was only fifteen years old. To support the unpaid work I was passionate about, throughout university in the UK, I’d taken odd jobs, such as training in wine as an in-house sommelier, and less glamorously waited tables—and when really stuck for money, I’d taken bartending and cleaning shifts to remove vomit from the floors of gritty local pubs.

Then, when I was beginning my MPhil/PhD studies in 2012, I leapt to more entrepreneurial endeavors. I started up an events company that put government officials and businesses in conversation with Libyans to discuss how to help stabilize that country in the wake of the Arab Spring. I had gone on to work on a part-time basis as director of operations for a UK trade and investment association that specialized in fostering relationships between the United Kingdom and nations, such as Ethiopia, where it was difficult to do business or easily engage in diplomacy.

Earlier in 2014, while I was still working on my doctorate, I had aspired to find a plum job with the Ready for Hillary (RFH) super PAC and with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign itself, working all the connections I had cultivated over the years in the DNC and, more recently, in Democrats Abroad in London. But none of my recent efforts to work with the Democrats or with liberal or humanitarian causes had led to opportunities that would truly pay the bills. All the (poorly paid) positions at the small RFH super PAC were already filled, and the Hillary campaign wasn’t up and running yet.

I’d then pursued a dream job working for my friend John Jones QC, a barrister at the Doughty Street Chambers and one of the world’s most prominent human rights attorneys. (On his team was the equally formidable Amal Clooney, née Alamuddin.)

John was an unparalleled champion of global civil liberties. He’d defended some of the world’s most controversial bad actors, from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, second son of Muammar Gaddafi, to Liberian president Charles Taylor. At tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and Cambodia, he’d confronted thorny issues such as counterterrorism, war crimes, and extraditions, and he did this in the service of upholding international human rights law. More recently, he had taken on the case of WikiLeaks founder (and the source of primary material for one of my master’s theses) Julian Assange, who was evading extradition to Sweden and had sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

John and I had become friends. We talked about and bonded over our admiration for the infamous whistleblower, and we joked about the rivalry between the prep schools we’d attended; he was British but had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, the rival school to my own, Phillips Academy Andover, both started in the late eighteenth century by two members of the Phillips family. I didn’t yet have my credentials as a barrister, but John had kindly seen in me keenness and the potential to do good work, and he’d been trying to find funding for a position he wanted me to fill in The Hague, where he aimed to open a new branch of Doughty Street called Doughty Street International.

But the money hadn’t come through yet. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have been the type of money commercial lawyers make. That was the world of human rights work. John and his small family sacrificed for their belief in the law, living much more modestly than other world-famous lawyers, as John did pro bono work most of the time. As much out of principle as practicality, he was a no-frills vegetarian who rode his bicycle everywhere.

While I had imagined a close-to-the-bone and ethically authentic life like John’s someday, that didn’t seem in the cards right now. Back home, my parents were on the verge of poverty, the culmination of events over a decade in the making.

For many years, my father’s family owned commercial real estate and a string of upscale health clubs and spas; my mother had been able to stay home to raise her children herself; and my younger sister, Natalie, and I had grown up in a privileged upper-middle-class household, enjoying a private school education, dance and music lessons, and family trips to Disney World and Caribbean beaches.

But when the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2008, my father’s family businesses suffered. A number of other problems occurred, and these, too, had been out of my parents’ control. Soon, we had no savings left. Years before, my mother had been an employee at Enron, and when that Houston house of cards collapsed in 2001, she lost all her retirement money.

My father was now jobless; my mother, who hadn’t worked in twenty-six years, had to retrain herself to reenter the workforce. In the meantime, my parents refinanced our family home and sold off their assets until, when the bank came calling, they had literally nothing at all but the belongings in our house.

During all this, something deeply troubling was happening to my father’s state of mind. He was strangely emotionless. When we tried to speak to him about what was going on, he wasn’t really all there. His eyes were eerily vacant. He spent his days in bed or in front of the television, and if anyone asked him how things were, he answered flatly, saying that things were fine. We assumed it was clinical depression, but he refused to seek therapy or take medication. He refused even to be seen by a doctor. We wanted to shake him, to wake him up, but we felt helpless to reach him.

By the time Alexander Nix called Chester to invite me in for a job interview at SCL, in October 2014, my mother had found a job as a flight attendant. She’d had to move to Ohio, where the airline was based, and she was living in hotels with her coworkers. Back home, my father was surviving on food stamps. My mother, who had grown up with limited resources on American military bases, never thought she’d go back to struggling. But here it was, staring us in the face.

As much as I had my reservations about SCL, I couldn’t afford to be picky. I would somehow try to balance finishing my PhD with working as a consultant. I needed a job that could help sustain me and my family. I was thinking not only of the present, but of the long term as well.

Alexander was landed gentry. In the eighteenth century, his family had its hand in the famed East India Company. He was married to a Norwegian shipping heiress.

Although I had been raised with plenty of privilege, there wasn’t anything left to draw on. I was now a poor student who had a habit of overdrawing my already meager bank account, with nothing in the way of savings. My home was a ramshackle flat in East London. I had plenty of work bona fides, but I knew if I wanted to run around with Alexander, I needed to spruce myself up.

I researched new developments in digital campaigning and data analysis. I brushed up on nonprofit marketing and campaigning techniques. Then I pressed my best suit, a hand-me-down from my mother’s Enron days.

When I arrived for my interview, Alexander was in the middle of an urgent phone call. He thrust into my hands an oversized, nearly sixty-page document and told me to read it while I waited. It was a mock-up for a new SCL brochure, and it was a veritable encyclopedia. I thumbed through it, knowing I’d get to the rest of it later, but I zeroed in on a section about how the company used “psyops” in defense and humanitarian campaigns.

I was familiar with the term, and it intrigued rather than troubled me. Short for “psychological operations,” which itself was a euphemism for “psychological warfare,” psyops can be used in war, but its applications for peacekeeping appealed to me. Influencing “hostile” audiences can sound terrifying, but psyops, for example, can be used to help shift young men in Islamic nations away from joining Al-Qaeda or to de-escalate conflict between tribal factions on Election Day.

I was still gobbling up the information in the brochure when Alexander invited me into his office. I expected the inner sanctum of a man who presented as so worldly to bear evidence of the universe in which he lived, but the room was little more than an unadorned glass box. There were no personal photos, no mementos. Its furnishings consisted of a desk, two chairs, a computer monitor, and a narrow shelf of books.

Alexander sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Why, he asked me, was I interested in working for the SCL Group?

I joked that he was the one who had asked me to come see him.

He laughed. But, really, he pressed, kindly.

I told him that I had just organized an enormous international health care conference with the British government, MENA Health, and I knew another was coming up soon, this one on security. As exciting as the work was, it had also been exhausting.

As I talked, he listened carefully, and as he spoke more about the company, I found it ever more interesting. At one point, I sneaked a glance at his bookshelf, and when he caught me doing it, he burst out laughing.

“That’s just my collection of fascist literature,” he said, and he waved a hand in the air dismissively. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I laughed, too. Clearly there was something on that shelf about which he was embarrassed, and it put me at ease to know that some of those conservative titles I noticed, and shunned, might not be quite his cup of tea, either.

We talked for a while longer, and when we came to my work in public health in East Africa, he jumped out of his chair and said, “I have some people here that you must meet.” He then took me into the larger office and introduced me to three women, each more interesting and vibrant than the next.

One had worked for over a decade in preventive diplomacy for the Commonwealth Secretariat, protecting people in Kenya and Somalia caught in tribal disputes by negotiating with warlords. Her name was Sabhita Raju. She had held my dream job and was now at SCL.

Another staff member had been the former director of operations for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and had been dedicated to saving lives for more than fifteen years. She was Ceris Bailes.

And the third had won awards from the United Nations for her work on the environment. Back home in her native Lithuania, she had worked for the liberal political party. Her name was Laura Hanning-Scarborough.

I liked all of them, and I was cheered to hear that they had strong backgrounds in humanitarian work and yet were employed at SCL. Clearly, there had been a good reason for each to choose it.

They seemed as interested in my work as I was in theirs. I shared with them my time in eastern South Africa, when I brought seventy-six volunteers out to Pienaar, a poverty-stricken township, to work for a charity called Tenteleni, tutoring children in math, science, and English. I also shared with them a lobbying project I had done at the European Parliament, when I had the privilege of briefing members on how to pressure European countries to include North Korea in their foreign policy priorities. And I expressed a deep interest in doing work in post-Ebola Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and Liberia.

They seemed excited about the possibility of my bringing these kinds of projects to SCL.

Shortly after the interview, Alexander called and made me an offer. I could work for the company as a consultant, just as I wished.

Wouldn’t it be great, he said, to have the logistics and expenses for my projects covered by the SCL Group? It employed smart, effective people; used cutting-edge technologies and methodologies; and had a supportive infrastructure—and, not to mention, it would offer me an opportunity to learn how to use data-driven communications in practical applications such as preventive diplomacy. I’d see up close and personal how it worked and where it needed improvement, and all that would enable me to write my dissertation and finish up my PhD.

And the job was niche work. I could use it as a springboard for fulfilling any number of dreams: becoming a diplomat, an international human rights activist, or even a political adviser like David Axelrod or Jim Messina.

It was tempting, but I still had reservations.

I had no desire to work for the Republicans. Cambridge Analytica had just signed the Ted Cruz campaign and Alexander had made it very clear that he was out to conquer the Republican Party in the United States.

Also, as much as I desperately needed the money, I didn’t want to commit to staying at Cambridge forever. I wanted to come on as a consultant at a good rate, but be able to move on when I wanted to.

Alexander must have read my mind. He told me my work at the company would only ever be under the SCL Group. No need to work on the American side, he said.

He offered me a part-time consultancy and what seemed at the time a decent wage, with the promise of more if I performed well.

“Let’s date before we get married, yuh?” he said. “So, what do you want to do?”

In my early grassroots work, I had been surrounded by others who looked like me and thought the way I did—young, progressive activists on a shoestring budget. I first encountered people unlike me when I began working in human rights. In that arena, I met members of Parliament, top thought leaders, and successful businesspeople across the globe. Some were wealthy, but all had power. I was face-to-face with those on “the other side,” and I was always ambivalent about how I felt about them and what it meant to engage with them.

I remember the moment I realized I had to find some way to marry my grassroots beliefs with an efficacy in the wider world. It was April 20, 2009. I was standing outside the United Nations building in Geneva. I was there with others to protest the appearance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran. He had been invited to give the opening keynote address at the Durban II World Conference Against Racism and Intolerance.

Ahmadinejad, a religious hardliner, had been in power for nearly four years, and in that time, he had breached civil liberties and violated human rights. Among other things, he had punished women appearing in public in what he called “improper hijab.” In his view, and under his rule, homosexuality simply didn’t “exist”; the HIV virus had been created by Westerners to disrupt developing nations like his; the State of Israel ought to be wiped off the map; and the Holocaust was a Zionist invention.

In short, he was a man I, and much of the educated world, had come to despise.

As I stood that day outside the UN building with members of an organization called UN Watch—as one man after another, ambassadors and princes, kings and businessmen, passed through its doors—I thought about these men: whether they agreed with him or not, they had the power and the clout to be in the room with Ahmadinejad, to hear him speak, and to engage with one another in dialogue about it.

I looked at the crowd of protesters of which I was a part. Many looked just like me—some were graduate students, young, in torn jeans and worn sneakers and rugged boots. I respected these people, I believed in what they did, and I believed in myself.

But that day, I put down my protest sign and slipped through the glass doors without anyone noticing I had entered. At the registration desk, I obtained a badge, the kind of pass students can get in order to use the library there: white with a blue stripe at the top, but almost identical to the badges diplomats wore on their lapels.

And wearing my finest hand-me-down power suit, adorned with that badge, I made my way to the auditorium without being questioned.