Claims by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower used for new electoral investigation into Brexit
Julie Hyland, WSWS, Apr 3 2018
Lawyers acting on behalf of whistleblowers have called for the Electoral Commission to investigate if Vote Leave broke spending rules in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Vote Leave was the official representative of those advocating withdrawal. Its leading members included Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Now foreign secretary and environment minister, respectively, they are the lead proponents of a “hard-Brexit” policy in Theresa May’s Conservative government. The Electoral Commission has already conducted two investigations into claims of Vote Leave wrongdoing and cleared the group. Under pressure from anti-Brexit groups, including the Good Law Project, it has opened a third investigation. The latest accusations are based on statements by former Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie and Shahmir Sanni, a volunteer with the pro-Brexit student group BeLeave. Tamsin Allen, from legal firm Bindmans, said:
There is a strong suspicion that the campaigns were very closely linked and coordinated, in which case it may be that Vote Leave spent huge sums unlawfully and its declaration of expenses is incorrect.
The allegation is that Vote Leave circumvented electoral spending limits by donating £625k to BeLeave, which is said to be essentially part of the same campaign group. If this can be established, it would take Vote Leave spending over the £7m legal limit. Allen said there was ground to accuse Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings, “of having conspired to break the law,” due to discussions he had with BeLeave about its activities. It is also argued that Vote Leave and BeLeave shared the same office and retained the services of Canadian-based Aggregate IQ (AIQ), which is accused of being part of efforts by Cambridge Analytica to harvest Facebook profiles with the aim of influencing both the Pindo election and the Brexit referendum the same year. Allen said there are also “grounds to investigate” Vote Leave’s national organiser, Stephen Parkinson, and Vote Leave’s head of outreach, Cleo Watson, who are both now advisers to the government. Vote Leave has rejected any wrongdoing, with Cummings stating that he will file formal complaints to the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office against spending by the Remain campaign. Last week Wylie, a Canadian citizen, gave evidence before Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Ostensibly set up in Jan 2017 to investigate “fake news,” its real purpose is to manufacture a pretext for Pindo & British imperialism’s provocations against Russia, while censoring and closing down alternative media sources that would expose its plans. Wylie began work in London for SCL Group 2013, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. He says that as research director he helped establish Cambridge Analytica with funds from Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Donald Trump supporter. He left Cambridge Analytica in 2014 and told the select committee he felt “shock” and “horror” at Trump’s win in 2016. Soon after Trump’s inauguration, he began working with the Guardian and Observer newspapers on exposures of Cambridge Analytica’s data-gathering programme that included harvesting the Facebook profiles of 50 million people. Wylie told the select committee that such activities may have altered the outcome of both the Pindo presidential election and the Brexit referendum. Wylie said:
When AIQ claims that it is a separate entity from SCL and Cambridge Analytica, those are just weasel words. AIQ is a proxy money-laundering vehicle. Cummings just went round and found places he could launder money through to give it to AIQ so they could overspend, and that is my genuinely held belief. An AIQ employee told me that the relationship between Vote Leave and BeLeave was totally illegal, because you are not allowed to coordinate between different campaigns and not declare it. I don’t feel confident in the result.
Wylie presented no evidence to back up his claims. Asked directly if he could supply any, he replied:
Not in the form of documentation.
Challenged as to whether £625k could really have decided the outcome of the referendum, Wylie argued that just 600k people decided the referendum between Leave and Remain, and it was “incredibly reasonable” to say it had. Wylie has been denounced as a charlatan and a liar. Cambridge Analytica denied the allegations and said that Wylie had been a “part-time contractor” who left the organisation in 2014 and would not have knowledge of the company’s workings beyond that date. It was also pointed out that, while Wylie says his accusations are motivated by objections to data harvesting techniques, the whistleblower had offered to supply his own services to Vote Leave in Jan 2016 for the referendum but was turned down. Simultaneous with Wylie’s statements, BeLeave whistleblower Shahmir Sanni told the Observer that he had passed information to the Electoral Commission that lead figures in the Vote Leave campaign violated referendum spending rules and attempted to destroy the evidence. Sanni, formerly secretary of BeLeave and now employed by the right-wing TaxPayers’ Alliance campaign group, alleges that the £625,000 donation Vote Leave made to BeLeave was not a genuine donation and that it was channelled to AIQ as part of a coordinated operation. He also alleges leading Vote Leave personnel including Cummings tried to destroy evidence of this coordination by removing themselves from the Google Drive both campaign groups shared. Cummings said this was “factually wrong and libellous.” Wylie also claimed that Facebook was aware of the large-scale harvesting of users’ data. His allegations were used by the select committee to repeat its demand that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answer the charges in person. The serious questions raised about the vast amounts of data at the unchecked disposal of Google, Facebook and Twitter are being used to bring the corporate giants into even closer alignment with the demands of the Pindo & British intelligence agencies for sweeping Internet censorship measures. At the forefront of this campaign are the Guardian, Observer and Blairite Labour right in Britain, in alignment with the Demagog Party in Pindostan and the NYT. As Wylie finished his testimony, it was reported that Zuckerberg had finally agreed to demands by leading Demagogs to testify before Congress.
Palantir Technologies: A “CIA-backed start-up”
Julie Hyland, WSWS, Apr 3 2018
Statements by whistleblower Christopher Wylie to the parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on alleged activities by Cambridge Analytica were given wide coverage in the British media, especially the Guardian. Allegations that Cambridge Analytica, which backed Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election, received Facebook data collected without users’ consent raise serious democratic issues. The campaign against it, however, has nothing to do with redressing these concerns. This is made clear by the far more damaging allegation made by Wylie to the select committee that has largely been passed over to date. The WSWS has reported on the real pedigree of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the behavioural research and strategic communication company, SCL. Asked by the parliamentary select committee if there were other data companies operating similarly to Cambridge Analytica, Wylie specifically cited the data analysis giant Palantir Technologies, saying:
We actually had several meetings with Palantir. There were senior Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data. That was not an official contract between Palantir and CA, but there were Palantir staff who would come into the office and work on the data. And we would go and meet with Palantir staff at Palantir.
To the extent that his statement received coverage, it is due to the fact that Palantir was founded by another pro-Trump oligarch, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and a member of Facebook’s board of directors. But as with other social media corporations, the relations between Palantir and the deep state have largely been passed over in silence. They are so close that in Jul 2017, the Guardian described Palantir as a “CIA-backed start-up.” The CIA’s venture capital branch, In-Q-Tel, was one of the first investors in the company when it was launched by Thiel in 2004. This was one year after the illegal invasion of Iraq, and Palantir played a major role in the so-called “counter-terror” strategies employed by the Pentagon to occupy the country and quash opposition. Palantir’s clients include a disproportionate number of US military, state and intelligence agencies. They include the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, DIA and NCTC, through to various police departments. In 2013, Forbes listed Palantir’s advisers as including Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet. Palantir was instrumental in the mass illegal spying activities undertaken by NSA’s global surveillance network, PRISM. Palantir’s data-gathering services were also retained by Britain’s GCHQ and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
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