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

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

In this explosive memoir, a political consultant and technology whistleblower reveals the disturbing truth about the multi-billion-dollar data industry, revealing to the public how companies are getting richer using our personal information and exposing how Cambridge Analytica exploited weaknesses in privacy laws to help elect Donald Trump. When Brittany Kaiser joined Cambridge Analytica – the UK-based political consulting firm funded by conservative billionaire and Donald Trump patron Robert Mercer – she was an idealistic young professional working on her fourth degree in human rights law and international relations. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kaiser’s goal was to utilize data for humanitarian purposes, most notably to prevent genocide and human rights abuses. But her experience inside Cambridge Analytica opened her eyes to the tremendous risks that this unregulated industry poses to privacy and democracy. Targeted is Kaiser’s eyewitness chronicle of the dramatic and disturbing story of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica. She reveals to the public how Facebook’s lax policies and lack of sufficient national laws allowed voters to be manipulated in both Britain and the United States, where personal data was weaponised to spread fake news and racist messaging during the Brexit vote and the 2016 election. But the damage isn’t done Kaiser warns; the 2020 election can be compromised as well if we continue to do nothing. In the aftermath of the U. S. election, as she became aware of the horrifying reality of what Cambridge Analytica had done in support of Donald Trump, Kaiser made the difficult choice to expose the truth. Risking her career, relationships, and personal safety, she told authorities about the data industry’s unethical business practices, eventually testifying before Parliament. Packed with never-before-publicly-told stories, Targeted goes inside the secretive meetings with Trump campaign personnel and details the promises Cambridge Analytica made to win. Throughout, Kaiser makes the case for regulation, arguing that legal oversight of the data industry is not only justifiable but essential to ensuring the long-term safety of our democracy.

Copyright (#ulink_b26d00c5-377a-5d1c-a4e0-570bd7949b66)

The names of some characters have been changed to protect their privacy.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Brittany Kaiser 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photograph © Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

All photographs courtesy of the author unless marked otherwise

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Brittany Kaiser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008363895

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008363918

Version 2019-10-16

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that footnotes and endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

Dedication (#ulink_d238c328-0ab7-51c8-9ec6-3aaac5c329ea)

To the Truth:

May it set us all free.

Contents

Cover (#uc600d0dd-9df7-5cd6-8298-d5abc1d75904)

Title Page (#u2af7a5e2-ee7d-5858-9b42-d67d75dc6316)

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1 A Late Lunch

2 Crossing Over

3 Power in Nigeria

4 Davos

5 Terms and Conditions

6 Meetings and Reunions

7 The Face of Brexit

8 Facebook

9 Persuasion

10 Under the Influence

11 Brexit Brittany

12 Straitjacket

13 Postmortem

14 Bombs

15 Quake

16 Breakup

17 Inquiry

18 Restart

19 Of Truth and Consequences

20 The Road to Redemption

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Publisher

Prologue (#ulink_1ee8d916-c6ca-5fbf-acab-6674e18bf070)

There’s nothing like a car ride with federal agents to make you question your life choices. That was exactly where I found myself the morning of July 18, 2018, winding through the streets of Washington, DC, heading toward an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

My trip that morning consisted of riding in two cars, actually—the first took me to a coffee shop that the Department of Justice had randomly selected. This had been the driver’s instructions when I initially slid into the backseat: they had chosen a place unexpectedly, without planning it out or telling anyone beforehand. Then, once we were on our way, he was to radio in our destination. At the coffee shop, the second driver was waiting. Like the first driver, he was wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, but there was a second man with him as well. From the second car—outfitted like the first with tinted windows—I watched as the city’s gleaming monuments, bright and sudden and very white, flashed by us like camera bulbs.

When I was settled in the backseat between my two attorneys, it was hard not to consider just how I’d ended up here, on my way to talk to federal prosecutors about my role with the now-infamous political communications firm, Cambridge Analytica. How a situation that I’d entered with the best of intentions for me and my family had ended up so horribly and irrevocably twisted. How in the process of wanting to learn how to use data for good, and while helping my parents through a difficult financial moment, I’d ended up compromising my political and personal values. How a mixture of naïveté and ambition had landed me squarely and disturbingly on the wrong side of history.

A little more than three and a half years earlier, I’d joined Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the SCL Group—specifically, their humanitarian division, SCL Social—working on projects under the company’s CEO, a man named Alexander Nix. In the years since that leap of faith, nothing had gone as I’d envisioned it. As a lifelong Democrat and devoted activist who had worked for years in support of progressive causes, I had started my work with Cambridge Analytica under the pretense that I would be separate from the company’s Republican client base and outreach. It didn’t take long, though, to find myself gradually pulled away from my principles by the difficulty of securing funding for humanitarian projects and the allure of success on the other side. At Cambridge Analytica there was the promise of real money for the first time in my career, and a way to buy into the vision that I was helping to build a revolutionary political communications company from the ground up.

In the process, I had been exposed to the vast sweep of Cambridge’s efforts, both to acquire data on as many U.S. citizens as possible and to leverage that data to influence Americans’ voting behavior. I’d also come to see how Facebook’s negligent privacy policies and the federal government’s total lack of oversight about personal data had enabled all of Cambridge’s efforts. But, most of all, I understood how Cambridge had taken advantage of all these forces to help elect Donald Trump.

As the car drove, my lawyers and I sat quietly, each of us preparing for what was to come. We all knew I would share any part of my story in full; the question now was what everyone else wanted to know. Mostly people seemed to want answers, both professional and personal, about how this could happen. There was a variety of reasons why I’d allowed my values to become so warped—from my family’s financial situation to the fallacy that Hillary would win regardless of my efforts or those of the company I worked for. But each of those was only part of the story. Perhaps the truest reason of all was the fact that somewhere along the way I’d lost my compass, and then myself. I’d entered this job believing I was a professional who knew how cynical and messy the business of politics was, only to learn time and again how naïve I’d been.

And now, it was on me to make it right.

The car drifted smoothly through the streets of the capital and I began to sense that we were closing in on our destination. I had been warned by the special counsel’s team not to be afraid or surprised if, upon arriving at the secure building where I was to be questioned, throngs of press awaited me. The location, it was said, was no longer secure. Reporters had caught on that the site was being used for the interviewing of witnesses.

A reporter, the driver said, was hiding behind a mailbox. He recognized her from CNN. He had seen her loitering around the building for eight hours at a time. In heels, he said. “What they wouldn’t do!” He exclaimed.

As we neared the place and turned a corner into a garage in the back, the driver told me to turn my face away from the windows, even though they were tinted. In preparation for my conversation with the special counsel, I had been told to clear my day. Completely. I had been told that no one knew how long I would testify or for how long I would then be cross-examined. However long it would be, I was ready. After all, my presence there had been my own doing.

A year earlier, I’d made the decision to come forward, to shine a light in the dark places that I had come to know and to become a whistleblower. I did this because, as I’d come face-to-face with the realities of what Cambridge Analytica had done, I saw all too clearly just how misguided I’d been. I did this because it was the only way to try to make up for what I’d been a part of. But, for more than any other reason, I did this because telling my story to anyone who would listen was the only way we could learn, and hopefully prepare for, what comes next. That was my mission now—to raise the alarm about how Cambridge Analytica had operated and about the dangers that Big Data posed, so that next time voters on both sides would understand the full stakes of the data wars that our democracy is up against.

The driver took us deeper and deeper into the garage, circling, circling farther down.

Why so deep? I wondered. But of course, I already knew: Privacy is a hard thing to come by these days.