68 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY JUNE 2018
documents to the Observer revealing that
the firm briefed Lukoil, the Russian oil
company, on its behavioral microtarget-
ing strategies. In a recent interview with
cnn, Wylie drew a startling connection
between the firm’s work and the Russian
cyberattacks during the election. “I am con-
cerned that we made Russia aware of the
programs that we were working on,” he
said, “and that might have sparked an idea
that eventually led to some of the disin-
formation programs that we have seen.”
In addition to Nix, Democrats, accord-
ing to a House Intelligence Committee
memo, had hoped to call as witnesses Alex
Tayler, Cambridge Analytica’s chief data of-
ficer; Julian Wheatland, the chairman of
scl; and Rebekah Mercer. Instead, in early
March, committee Republicans hastily shut
down the probe, though Democrats have
vowed to continue investigating on their
own without subpoena power. On March
21, the committee’s ranking member, Rep.
Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), wrote to Aleksandr
Kogan seeking an interview and requesting
documents about his interactions with scl
and Cambridge Analytica. Chris Wylie has
agreed to meet with committee Democrats.
The firm also remains a subject of interest
to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mueller
last fall requested the emails of any Cam-
bridge employee who worked on the Trump
campaign. Nix’s unguarded comments to
Channel 4 may be of interest. He said the
firm relied on an encrypted email system
that deleted messages two hours after they
were read. “So then there’s no evidence,
there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing.”
Yet another avenue of interest for inves-
tigators is Cambridge’s possible role in a
second 2016 election that featured covert
Russian meddling—the British referen-
dum to leave the European Union, known
as Brexit. In 2016, Cambridge seemed to
break its informal rule of forgoing UK po-
litical work when it unveiled a partnership
with Leave.EU, the more extreme of the
pro-Brexit campaigns, only to backtrack
and deny any involvement in Brexit.
In February, as part of a broader inquiry
into fake news, members of the British
Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and
Sport Committee grilled Nix for more
than two hours. He unconvincingly
blamed the announcement of the Leave
.EU partnership on “a slightly overzealous
PR consultant.” He claimed that he and
his staff had “never worked with a Rus-
sian organization in Russia or any othercountry.” And he denied that his firm used
Facebook data. After the latest round of
revelations, Damian Collins, a conserva-
tive member of Parliament who chairs
the committee, said Nix had “deliberately
misled” his panel “by giving false state-
ments” and vowed to further investigate.
The blowback from the Cambridge An-
alytica scandals also hit Facebook, which
faced a torrent of criticism for its lax han-
dling of users’ data. The company’s stock
price tumbled by 7 percent, losing more
than $50 billion in value, and the Federal
Trade Commission reportedly launched
an investigation into its data practices.
The hashtag #DeleteFacebook trended on
Twitter. Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg
fin ally broke his silence, issuing a state-
ment admitting to a “breach of trust” be-
tween Facebook and its users.
Yet, critics wondered, just how many
times had their trust been breached?
Cambridge Analytica was hardly alone
in hoovering up user data. And how ex-
actly were Cambridge Analytica’s psycho-
graphic techniques different from Face-
book’s core business model—tapping into
the vast amounts of data it collects on its
users to guide hypertargeted advertising,
be it for shoe companies or political cam-
paigns or dubious fake news sites.
By most accounts, Cambridge Analyti-
ca’s main feat of political persuasion was
convincing a group of Republican donors,
candidates, and organizations to hand
over millions of dollars. (A company called
Emerdata that lists Nix as a director recently
added Rebekah Mercer and another Mercer
daughter to its board, suggesting that Nix
hasn’t fallen out with all his gop patrons.)
But Cambridge’s controversial foray into
US politics spawned larger questions about
how our social-media habits can be turned
against us, and how companies such as Face-
book hold more power over our lives—the
ability to shape public conversation, even
political outcomes—than many people are
comfortable with. Whether or not Cam-
bridge Analytica survives, data about our
personality types, our predilections, our
hopes and fears—information we unwit-
tingly divulge via status updates, tweets,
likes, and photos—will increasingly be used
to target us as voters and consumers, for
good and ill, and often without our knowl-
edge. These tactics will facilitate the spread
of fake news and disinformation and make
it easier for foreign interests to intervene
in our elections—whether they are Russian
trolls or British chancers. Qwere untrue. They were just “playing along”
with “ludicrous hypothetical scenarios” pro-
posed by a prospective client. His company,
meanwhile, claimed that it did not “use or
hold data from Facebook profiles.” By the
end of the day, Cambridge Analytica had
suspended Nix pending an investigation,
and he had offered to resign if it would spare
the company. “Alexander was always en-
tertaining,” a former colleague told me.
“In the end, he will always hang himself.”
The revelations about Cambridge An-
alytica’s alleged political tricks and shady
data mining added to a growing list of
problems the company was already facing.
A few months earlier, in December, Nix
had appeared before the House Intelli-
gence Committee—though not in person.
The panel’s Republicans, who ran the com-
mittee’s Russia probe with an eye toward
minimizing any political damage to the
president, arranged for Nix to beam in by
video link. One topic of discussion was
Nix’s outreach to WikiLeaks. His testimony
remains secret, though he subsequently
acknowledged approaching Assange in an
effort to get his hands on “information that
could be incredibly relevant to the outcome
of the US election.” (In the Channel 4 un-
dercover footage, Nix mocked the Intelli-
gence Committee and said the Republican
members asked him only three questions.
“Five minutes—done,” he said, adding,
“They’re politicians; they’re not technical.
They don’t understand how it works.”)
The committee’s Democrats had taken
a keen interest in Trump’s data operation
and Cambridge Analytica’s role in particu-
lar. Michael Bahar, a former general coun-
sel on the committee who worked on the
investigation before entering private prac-
tice, told me that one line of inquiry ex-
plored whether Cambridge Analytica had
deployed its targeting tactics to more effec-
tively spread Russian disinformation, and
whether it had been enlisted to use data
and analytics stolen from the Democratic
National Committee by Russian-directed
hackers. “Maybe [hacked information] was
actually given to a campaign to help with
the microtargeting,” Bahar says. “That’s
why I think the role of Cambridge Analyt-
ica...needs to be looked at very carefully.”
Scrutiny will likely intensify given revel-
ations that Cambridge’s Russian connec-
tions predated the 2016 election. Wylie,
the former Cambridge employee, providedCLOAK AND DATA
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