Data firm ‘dug dirt’ on political opponents
BRITAIN: The chief executive of a British company at the centre of allegations of electoral interference boasted about using ‘‘beautiful Ukrainian girls’’ to entrap the political opponents of clients.
Alexander Nix was filmed saying that Cambridge Analytica would offer bribes to smear opponents as corrupt, and that it campaigned secretly in elections by operating through front companies or using subcontractors.
In one conversation seen in undercover footage, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Nix suggested that the company could ‘‘send some girls around to the candidate’s house’’, adding that Ukrainian girls ‘‘are very beautiful, I find that works very well’’.
In another conversation with a reporter, who posed as a fixer for a rich Sri Lankan hoping to get candidates elected, Nix said: ‘‘We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet.’’
The footage of Nix was aired on television hours after British Prime Minister Theresa May said she was ‘‘very concerned’’ by a whistleblower’s claims that Cambridge Analytica had obtained the Facebook data of 50 million Americans without their consent, and that Nix had lied to Parliament last month when he denied that his company used Facebook data.
The allegations came from Christopher Wylie, who said Cambridge Analytica used the data in breach of Facebook’s rules to build profiles of voters to target them.
The data was obtained for the company by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge academic with ties to Russia. Cambridge Analytica denies that the data was used.
It has also been claimed that Cambridge Analytica worked for the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum, although the company denies this.
Elizabeth Denham, the information commissioner, said yesterday she would seek a court warrant today to examine the company’s databases and servers after it failed to provide access by a deadline of 6pm yesterday. She said investigators needed to understand how data was processed or deleted by the company.
The undercover reporter for Channel 4 News also met Mark Turnbull, managing director of CA Political Global, and the company’s chief data officer, Alex Tayler.
Turnbull explained how the company’s business model was centred on using data from social media to understand and then exploit voters’ most ‘‘deep-seated underlying fears’’.
The executives claimed that the firm and its parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories, had worked in more than 200 elections around the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.
They said they worked with intelligence-gathering organisations that employed personnel with security services experience, including former operatives of MI5 and MI6, to find ‘‘all the skeletons’’ in an opponent’s closet.
They also indicated that they often worked incognito under front companies. ‘‘We’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows,’’ Nix said.
Last night Nix denied that his comments reflected reality, and said he had simply ‘‘humoured’’ the reporter out of ‘‘English politeness’’.
He claimed that he and his colleagues were simply sounding out the reporter and did not carry out these activities.
About NZ$41 billion was wiped off Facebook’s value yesterday as politicians and the United States demanded that the company come clean about the huge data leak. Shares closed at US$172.56 (NZ$238.29), a fall of 6.8 per cent from Friday.
May’s spokesman urged both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to co-operate with the information commissioner’s investigation.
‘‘It is essential that people can have confidence that their personal data will be protected and used in an appropriate way,’’ he said.
In the US, senators demanded that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, be questioned by the Senate judiciary committee.
A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said: ‘‘We entirely refute any allegation that Cambridge Analytica or any of its affiliates use entrapment, bribes, or ‘honey traps’ for any purpose whatsoever. Cambridge Analytica does not use untrue material for any purpose.’’
He added that the use of intelligence gathering, subcontractors and encrypted communications was legitimate.