MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 27tion of companies looking to leverage Facebook and other
social-media data for their own purposes. One person who
took a keen interest was scl’s Chris Wylie.
According to emails obtained by Mother Jones, Wylie
approached Stillwell and a colleague via a fellow faculty
member, a young Russian American professor named
Aleksandr Kogan, hoping to cut a deal in which the firm
would get access to Stillwell’s data.
Stillwell hadn’t heard of scl. But he agreed to a meeting.
When dates were circulated between the Cambridge aca-
demics and the scl representatives, the title wasn’t subtle:
“Panopticon meeting.” (Panopticon refers to a prison or
building constructed so that all parts of it are visible by a
single watchman but the surveilled can’t see who’s viewing
them.) In the end, Stillwell decided not to partner with scl.
Undeterred, scl instead hired Kogan, who went on to
create his own Facebook app, thisisyourdigitallife. As de-
tailed in a class-action suit against Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica, the app—which purported to be for academic re-
search—not only collected personality data on the 270,000
people who took the quiz, but also let Kogan vacuum up
Facebook user data on all their friends. The Washington Post
reported in late March that Facebook separately provided
Kogan with data on 57 billion friendships as part of his work
with two of the company’s data scientists between 2013
and 2015. Around the same time he was mining Facebook
data for scl, Kogan also forged a relationship with Saint
Petersburg State University, which hired him as an associ-
ate professor and provided him with research funding. He
denies this research had any connection to his work for scl.
According to Wylie, Kogan acquired more than 50 mil-
lion profiles. He says Kogan then passed that data to scl—
in apparent violation of Facebook’s terms of use—in order
to build its psychographic profiling methods. “Everyone
knew we were wading into a gray area,” Wylie later said. “It
was an instance of if you don’t ask questions, you won’t get
an answer you don’t like.” (Kogan denies any wrongdoing:
“My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat.”)
Nix now had his calling card. scl would break into
the $10 billion American political market by pitching
itself as a “cutting- edge” consultancy using “behavioral
microtargeting”—that is, influencing voters based not
on their demographics but on their personalities—and
sophisticated data modeling to win elections. His timing
couldn’t have been better.
- “MARKETING MATERIALS AREN’T GIVEN UNDER OATH”
One day in 2013, a knockabout Republican political con-
sultant named Mark Block and his colleague boarded a
flight from Los Angeles to New York. As the plane took off,
they got to talking with the man seated next to them, an
ex- military oicer who mentioned he worked as a subcon-
tractor for a company seeking US political clients. “They do
cyberwarfare for elections,” the subcontractor said. Block
dozed off as his colleague and her seatmate continued to
chat. When they landed, his colleague told him excitedly
that they needed to talk to a guy named Alexander Nix.
Not long after, they met with Nix in a conference room
in the Willard InterContinental hotel, a stone’s throw from
the White House. The meeting lasted more than six hours,
Block recalls, as Nix described how they could use person-
ality data and psychographics in American campaigns. “By
the time he was done, I’m going like, ‘Holy shit,’” Block told
me. “I had been aware of what Obama had done...But this
seemed to be light-years ahead.”
At a subsequent meeting Block attended, Nix was intro-
duced to Rebekah Mercer, who was quickly becoming one
of the biggest donors in Republican politics. Bekah, as she’s
known to friends, is the middle daughter of Robert Mercer,
a billionaire computer scientist who pioneered the use of
algorithms in investing at the Long Island-based hedge
fund Renaissance Technologies. Bekah is the political
animal of the Mercer family, and in the late 2000s and early
2010s she plowed $35 million from her family foundation
into conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation,
the Federalist Society, and the Heartland Institute. The
Mercers also invested a reported $10 million in Breitbart
News in 2011. They’ve donated millions to Republican can-
didates and super-pacs, from Mitt Romney and Herman
Cain to a congressional candidate in Oregon named Arthur
Robinson, who caught Robert Mercer’s attention with a
pseudoscientific newsletter in which he argued that small
doses of nuclear radiation have health benefits.
The Mercers had attended the semiannual donor re-
treats organized by Charles and David Koch and, accord-
ing to a source familiar with their political work, invested
in the Kochs’ data venture, Themis (named for the Greek
goddess of wisdom and order), which was supposed to
close the gap with Democrats in the data arms race. But
after Romney’s loss in 2012, the Mercers were fed up.
Bekah Mercer turned heads at a 2012 postmortem event
at the University Club in Manhattan when she excori-
ated the Romney campaign for its lackluster data op-
eration. According to people familiar with the Mercers’
thinking, Bekah and her father set out to find their own
data geniuses.
Over lunch in Manhattan, Bekah listened intently as Nix
gave his pitch. When he finished, she said, “I really want
you to tell this to my dad.” She gave him an address with
instructions to meet later that day. At the appointed time,
Nix and Block arrived at a grungy sports bar on the Hudson
River, north of the city. “We’re going like, ‘What the fuck?’”
Block says. Bekah texted to say she and her father would soon
arrive. Moments later, Sea Owl, the Mercer family’s 203-foot
superyacht, pulled up to the dock behind the sports bar.
Aboard the yacht, Nix took a seat next to Robert Mercer,
opened his Mac, and launched into his spiel again. Bekah
sat next to her father on the couch. Behind them stood
Steve Bannon, the investment banker turned Hollywood
producer and conservative activist who took over Breitbart
News after the death of Andrew Breitbart. Whatever Nix
told the Mercers that day in 2013, it worked: They agreed to
invest a reported $15 million in a new company that would
be the face of scl’s American political work. Bannon was