In January 2016, I decided to accept an offer to consult for the Liberal Caucus Research Bureau (LRB), based at the Canadian Parliament. Justin Trudeau had just formed a new government after leading the Liberal Party to a huge victory in the October 2015 federal election. One of the planks of the Trudeau election platform was reinstating the census, which had been abolished by the previous Conservative government, and reinvigorating Canadian social programs with more data-informed policy making. Just after his victory, I was asked by some of my former Liberal colleagues if I was interested in working on Trudeau’s new research and insight team, with a focus on technology and innovation.
After several exceptionally frustrating years, first with the Liberal Democrats in the U.K.’s coalition government and then with Cambridge Analytica, I was desperate to find something to do where I knew I would be contributing something good to the world. It would mean that I would have to return to Canada, but I negotiated an arrangement whereby I would not have to stay in Ottawa, save for important meetings. Having been away from Canada for over five years, I did not have that many friends in the country, but I was reeling from the trauma of everything that had happened, so I thought some calmer downtime back home would help me recover.
When I first arrived in Ottawa for my preliminary meetings and induction, I was flooded with memories of my younger years at Parliament, trying to get VAN set up. This place had been the setting of my formative adventures working for the leader of the opposition, and now I was back to close a chapter of my life that had started when I was a teenager. Ottawa was the same dull city I had left years before, but, coming from London, it was now even more acutely monotonous. In true Canadian fashion, Ottawa was like an even blander version of Washington, D.C.—the Diet Coke of capital cities.
The home of the government’s political research unit, at 131 Queen Street, was no less bland than the rest of Ottawa, with a vibe somewhere between space station and purgatory. Navigating the building’s windowless halls and undecorated beige rooms, I soaked in its bureaucratic aesthetic, occasionally passing reception desks with little blue ENGLISH/FRANÇAIS signs, reminding passersby that in Canada we also parlons français. My job description promised steady boredom—basic technical setup, polling advice, social media monitoring, some simple machine learning work and research on innovation policy. Nothing spectacular and, ironically, nothing very innovative came out of it, but I was okay with that, as I wasn’t obligated to actually stay in Ottawa. I could quickly flee the LRB office in Ottawa and work on projects around Canada, which would keep me sane.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, had announced a referendum on the country’s future—whether it would continue to be a member of the European Union or strike out on its own. Ever since the U.K. joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1972, Euroskeptics had been agitating for withdrawal. Initially, the left wing led the movement, with many Labour politicians and trade unionists agreeing that a bloc-style pact would harm their socialist dreams. But most of their countrymen welcomed the arrangement. When a referendum in 1975 asked the British public if they wanted to stay within the European Economic Community, the vote was 67 percent in favor.
By the time the EEC became the European Union, the left and the right were largely in agreement on the benefits of membership. But in the early 1990s, the right-wing U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) emerged out of a growing resistance to European priorities. In 1997, Nigel Farage, a former commodities trader and founding UKIP member, ousted the leader of the party. Farage became leader in 2006, and under his leadership, UKIP began stoking virulent anti-immigration sentiment among working-class whites and tapping into nostalgia for Britain’s imperial past in wealthy white communities. The world had been transformed by the September 11 attacks, the rise of Islamophobia, and the conflicts of the Bush and Blair years. As the fate of black and brown refugees developed into a European crisis, Cameron moved to appease nationalist sentiment to retain right-wing voters. The Conservative Party drew up a plan for a referendum, to be held before the end of 2017. The date was set for June 23, 2016.
REFERENDUMS IN BRITAIN ARE largely publicly financed, where each side of the ballot question receives equal amounts of public funding after the U.K.’s Electoral Commission designates one campaign group on each side to become the official campaign. British electoral law also sets strict spending limits, applied equally to both sides, to ensure that one side is not unfairly advantaged by more money than the other. In effect, these are Britain’s electoral equivalent of Olympic anti-doping rules that ensure a fair race. Having more resources means being able to reach a disproportionate number of voters with one’s messaging, so the resources are regulated to maintain a fair election. Other groups are still allowed to campaign, but they do not receive public funding and they may not coordinate their campaigns without declaring the spending against the official limit.
Politicians and campaigners had until April 13, 2016, to win designation as the official campaign for Leave or Remain. Vote Leave and Leave.EU were among the main Leave campaigns. Britain Stronger in Europe was the official campaign for Remain from the start, with specialist initiatives such as “Scientists for EU” and “Conservatives In” also campaigning to remain in the union. Vote Leave consisted largely of Conservatives, with a handful of Euroskeptic progressives. The other pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, was focused almost entirely on immigration, with many of its campaigners peddling racist tropes and far-right talking points in order to rile up the public. Each group had its own targets and ideological strategies, and, according to British law, they could not work together in any fashion. Eventually, Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe were granted official campaign status by the Electoral Commission. But the two main Leave groups set themselves up to push different buttons among potential supporters—a tactic that was spectacularly effective in generating votes.
College-educated city dwellers, accustomed to living among immigrants and working in businesses that benefit from their skilled labor, rejected right-wing fearmongering and generally supported Remain. Lower-income Britons and those who lived in rural areas or old industrial heartlands were much more likely to support Leave. National sovereignty has always been a core part of British identity, and the Leave campaign argued that EU membership was undermining that sovereignty. Remain supporters countered by pointing to economic, trade, and national security benefits in the status quo.
Vote Leave was led in public by the campaign’s lead spokesperson, Boris Johnson, a pompous man who was once mayor of London and was always a Conservative favorite, with some of the highest approval ratings among Conservative voters, and Michael Gove, who could be characterized as Johnson’s opposite. Lacking Johnson’s pomposity, Gove was more measured and was a favorite among the free-market-type libertarians in the U.K. Their slogan, “Vote Leave, Take Back Control,” was laughed at by Remain camps, but it was not really about the EU itself. It was meant to appeal to voters who otherwise felt their lives were not in their control—their lack of job prospects or an education meant that their lives, more than anyone else’s, were more susceptible to the winds of a bad economy and a British society that systemically ignores them. Vote Leave had been co-founded in 2015 by Dominic Cummings, one of Westminster’s most infamous political strategists, and Matthew Elliott, founder of several right-wing lobbying groups in the U.K. Some in the Vote Leave office disagreed on politics, but they were united under Cummings’s leadership behind the scenes.
While Vote Leave operated from the seventh floor of Westminster Tower, on the banks of the River Thames, directly across from Parliament, Leave.EU was based more than a hundred miles away, in Lysander House, Bristol, overlooking a busy roundabout. The group shared an office building with Eldon Insurance, a firm run by millionaire Arron Banks, who also happened to be the co-founder and main funder of Leave.EU. The campaign launched during the summer of 2015 and teamed up with Cambridge Analytica in October of the year. The Euroskeptic Nigel Farage, a prominent right-wing politician, became the figurehead for Leave.EU. After Steve Bannon introduced Banks and Farage to the American billionaire Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica signed on to the Brexit campaign to service Leave.EU with its algorithms and digital targeting. It was announced that Brittany Kaiser would become Leave.EU’s new director of operations, with Kaiser and Banks launching Leave.EU together at a press conference.
Shortly before returning to Canada, I had drinks with a few of the people I’d gotten to know during my time in British politics. One of those was a special adviser to then–Home Secretary Theresa May, a gay Conservative named Stephen Parkinson. He was a Tory, but something I had learned over the years in politics is that it’s usually easier to be friends with people outside of your own party, because they aren’t in direct competition for your job and are less likely to try to screw you over personally. Parkinson told me he had just taken a leave of absence from the Home Office to work for Vote Leave—a newly created campaign group for Brexit. I wasn’t surprised that Parkinson was working on it, and I told him I knew a few other people who might be interested in joining his campaign.
One was a young student at the University of Brighton named Darren Grimes. I had originally met Grimes through the Liberal Democrats, but he had become disenchanted when the party began to implode in the internal leadership race that followed its decimation in the 2015 elections. When Grimes decided to leave the Lib Dems, he asked me for an introduction to the Tories, so I introduced him to Parkinson. You’ve probably never heard of Grimes, but he would later become an accidental central player in Vote Leave’s victory in the Brexit referendum.
Parkinson and I met several times before I left London, because he wanted to get my thoughts on data analytics. He did not say this at the time, but he knew about Cambridge Analytica and clocked how valuable such targeting tools would be for the Brexit campaign. He said that he wanted to introduce me to someone. “His name is Dom Cummings.” I flinched at the name.
Dom Cummings—not a porn name, though it would be a good one—had made a reputation at the Department for Education in the coalition government as a Machiavellian operator and a very difficult character. Cameron, the prime minister at the time, would later suggest that Cummings was a “career psychopath.” In keeping with his notoriety, Cummings went on to become the mastermind behind the largest breach of campaign finance law in British history, using some of the technologies developed at Cambridge Analytica to tilt the Brexit vote toward Leave. But I didn’t learn any of this until it was too late: at the time, he was just an abrasive, ambitious Conservative staffer who enjoyed irritating the shit out of everyone in the British political system.
Parkinson, Cummings, and I all sat down in a barren room in the future headquarters of Vote Leave to talk about voter targeting. The entire floor was being renovated and was covered in plastic sheeting, but, sitting along Albert Embankment, it had spectacular views of the Palace of Westminster, directly across the Thames. My first impression of Cummings was that he looked disheveled, as if he’d just climbed onto a lifeboat after the Titanic sank. Cummings has a very large head, and his hair tends to go all over the place, with wispy strands haphazardly crossing his balding pate. He looked a bit dazed, or maybe a bit blazed, like he was either stuck trying to solve a puzzle or had just dragged an epic joint—I could never quite tell.
To his credit, Cummings is one of the few smart people I have encountered working in the Augean stable of mediocrity that is British politics. What I liked about meeting Cummings was that we didn’t talk about what people in politics usually obsess about. Cummings understood that more people are busy watching the Kardashians or Pornhub than following the political scandal du jour on BBC Newsnight. Instead, Cummings wanted to talk about identity, about psychology, about history, and, indeed, about AI. And then he mentioned Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund set up by Robert Mercer. Cummings had obviously read up on Cambridge Analytica, and he asked a lot of questions about how the firm worked. He was interested in creating what he called “the Palantir of politics”—a term I shuddered at after hearing it used so often by Nix. I just rolled my eyes, thinking, Here we go again.
Vote Leave did not even have the electoral register yet, so I told Cummings that I was extremely skeptical that he could develop data sets anywhere close to those used by Cambridge Analytica. And I continued to tell him that Steve Bannon was close with Nigel Farage, so the chances were high that Cambridge Analytica was already working with their rival pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU. Shortly after the meeting, Leave.EU officially announced its partnership with Cambridge Analytica, apparently spoiling Cummings’s plan. After the meeting, Parkinson invited Gettleson and me to come work for Vote Leave. As I had already accepted a project working for Justin Trudeau, I declined. But Gettleson, after initially flirting with the idea of joining me in Canada, decided to stay in London and work for Vote Leave, because he was not in a place for another dramatic change in his life like moving to a new country. As a courtesy, I nonetheless sent Cummings an email outlining how he could probably attempt a pilot of a few thousand voter surveys, but I estimated that that was about all they could accomplish in the exceptionally tight time frame of the referendum—well, at least all they could do legally.
Just before I left for Ottawa, another friend of mine in London named Shahmir Sanni asked if I could help him find an internship. He and I had first connected on nights out in London, and we kept in touch over Facebook, frequently trading thoughts and opinions on politics, fashion, art, hot boys, and culture. Sanni had just finished university and was interested in politics, but he had no connections and needed an introduction. I asked him where he wanted to join, but he said party was not a concern; he was most interested in gaining experience. When I asked contacts in both the Remain and Leave campaigns about internships, only one responded: Stephen Parkinson. Parkinson asked who I wanted to introduce, so I texted him Sanni’s Instagram profile. Parkinson, clearly enamored with Sanni’s well-curated photos, texted back just two words: “YES PLEASE!!!!!” And that’s how Sanni—who would eventually become one of two Brexit whistleblowers—signed on to the Vote Leave campaign.
Pro-Brexit leaders knew that they weren’t going to win the vote by speaking only to traditional right-wing Brexiteers, so Vote Leave made it a priority to bring in a more diverse coalition of support. In British politics, referendum campaigns are unique in that they tend to make a concerted effort to be as cross-party as possible, because issues, not parties, are on the ballot. No one “wins power” at the end of a referendum; only the idea wins, and the government of the day has a choice whether or not to implement the result. Cummings and Parkinson understood that the key to a Brexit victory was to identify Labour and Lib Dem voters, as well as those who didn’t normally vote, and persuade them to either vote Leave or stay neutral. It was for this reason that the pro-Brexit side was extremely eager to recruit Lib Dems, Greens, Labour, LGBTQ, immigrants—as many traditionally non-Conservative voters as possible. Sanni was the perfect man to help with that mission.
One of the most compelling progressive arguments for Brexit was pretty simple. It was that the European Union tended to favor European—i.e., white—immigrants over those from the Commonwealth nations, who were predominantly people of color. Under EU rules, migrants to Britain from countries like France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Austria did not need a visa to work and live in Britain. But migrants from, say, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, or Jamaica were required to undergo extensive screening and difficult immigration procedures. Yet for hundreds of years, Britain had built its vast empire predominantly by using the labor of people of color throughout the Commonwealth, conquering their lands, taking their resources, and leaving them to struggle at home while the great cities of Britain flourished in the wealth created from abroad. In both world wars, when British freedom was threatened by other European nations, the citizens of the Commonwealth were called to arms to fight for Britain. Few, if any, major war films have been made to honor their sacrifice, but many of the great British victories were in fact won with the spilled blood of Commonwealth soldiers from India, the Caribbean, and Africa. Then, decades later, when Europe looked more economically promising than the fledgling countries emerging out of colonial rule, Britain turned its back on these nations, closed off its borders, and implemented tough new immigration rules for Commonwealth citizens. At the same time, Britain began opening up nearly unrestricted immigration to European citizens, who were overwhelmingly white.
It was out of this sense of deep unfairness that many people of color—people like Sanni’s friends and family, who were from Pakistan—had no affinity for the EU: They knew what it felt like to have to endure a Kafkaesque immigration system requiring them to prove every ounce of their worth. They knew what it felt like to live in a country that had exploited their ancestors to build itself up but now sent Home Office trucks roving through the neighborhoods of Indian and Pakistani communities, emblazoned with warnings like HERE ILLEGALLY? GO HOME OR FACE ARREST. TEXT HOME TO 78070. Meanwhile, a German or Italian, whose grandfather may very well have taken deadly aim on those battalions of Indians and Nigerians that Britain called into battle, could enter Britain with no questions asked, and then get busy applying for jobs.
As the Remain campaign paraded around its “pro-immigration” messages to defend the EU, what many people of color saw was the tacit whiteness of that very message—that it really meant rights for some immigrants. For people like Sanni, Brexit was a story of marginalization and of Britain’s unaddressed legacy of colonialism—an attempt to right the wrong of denying immigrants and people of color access to the very country that had plundered them for centuries. And it was by identifying this bubbling resentment that the pro-Brexit movement managed to create a counterintuitive alliance between some sections of immigrant communities and cohorts of jingoist Brexiteers who wanted them all to “go home.”
PARKINSON GAVE SANNI AN unpaid internship. He started in the spring of 2016 as a volunteer. Because the outreach team was so small, his duties quickly multiplied. Much of his work was focused on minority and queer communities. He would visit impoverished neighborhoods to ask residents how they were planning to vote and why.
On Sanni’s first day at the office, he noticed a dandy in a green blazer and pink pants: Mark Gettleson, in his full homosexual plumage. Right away, Sanni and Gettleson started joking about being the odd men out in this sea of conservative white men. Gettleson had joined Vote Leave as a consultant in the spring of 2016, impressing the staff with his wit, intelligence, and intuitive understanding of British liberals. He immediately began setting up the websites for several of the outreach groups, many of which he branded and named himself—Green Leaves, Out and Proud, and others. When Darren Grimes, the twenty-two-year-old fashion student I knew from the Lib Dems, joined the team, he and Gettleson started conceptualizing a progressive arm of Vote Leave, to be called BeLeave.
I was in Canada by then, but we all kept in touch via Facebook. In the course of designing the branding for BeLeave, Grimes sent me his idea sheet via Messenger. Even though I was preoccupied with setting up projects for the new Liberal government in Ottawa, I wanted to give him a hand after the rough time he’d had with the Lib Dems. One of his challenges was in choosing the right colors. The official color for Vote Leave was red, so they needed something different. I said, “Why not use the Pantone colors of the year?”—which in 2016 happened to be Serenity blue and Rose Quartz pink. Darren did a mock-up, and I messaged back, “It looks so gay and millennial. Not fascist at all.”
BeLeave attempted to appeal to the softer side of the pro-Brexit vote by focusing on issues such as parity in treatment for immigrants, ending what they termed “passport discrimination” between EU and non-EU citizens, the unfair impact protectionist EU policies had on African farmers, and environmental protections. After Parkinson asked Sanni to shift his attention from minority outreach to BeLeave, he and Grimes—a pair of interns in their early twenties—essentially ran the initiative, with occasional input from the senior staff at Vote Leave. With the hardcore anti-immigration votes already in the bag, the Leave side needed to secure only a small percentage of more liberal-minded voters to win. Data was the key to targeting those voters.
Vote Leave didn’t have the data it needed, though, and the one company that could provide it, Cambridge Analytica, was not an option because it was already working with Leave.EU. If Vote Leave worked with Cambridge Analytica, it would run afoul of laws restricting coordination between the campaigns. What they did, I learned later, was hire a firm whose origins intersected with my early days at SCL, when I was just starting to put together a technical team.
This was back in August 2013, when I was looking for people who could help. I recalled my time at the LPC and the mentorship of Jeff Silvester, who had taken an interest in me while I was still in school. Silvester, a computer software engineer by training, had developed a solid understanding of enterprise data systems long before he started advocating for a new data strategy at the LPC. A big guy with a beard—he reminded me of Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation—Silvester was unfailingly considerate and thoughtful, but he also had the dry and cynical sense of humor of someone who had spent years in politics. He lived outside of Victoria, British Columbia, and on weekends he helped mentor young people as leader of a local Boy Scout troop. My first few months working with Silvester as an intern involved helping him on casework for refugee and political asylum claims, and he showed me how you can really make a difference in people’s lives. He was one of the most honorable people I knew.
Shortly after joining SCL, I wrote to Silvester, describing the firm’s portfolio—not just psychological warfare projects for NATO, but efforts to fight HIV in Africa. He quickly replied: “You need a Canadian office!” When the Trinidad project came up, he got his wish. SCL needed someone to help build and manage data infrastructure, and Silvester had exactly the right background. Silvester poached another Canadian political operative, Zack Massingham, a veteran of the rough world of B.C. provincial politics, to lead project management for the new company, which he called AIQ. The company was registered in Canada and was legally called AggregateIQ, but it signed an intellectual property agreement that granted SCL the rights to its work. SCL and, later, Cambridge Analytica frequently took advantage of a network of offshore companies registered under different names. Similar to the strategies employed by tax avoidance schemes, this network of companies around the world helped Cambridge Analytica bypass the scrutiny of electoral or data privacy regulators.
AIQ’s headquarters was a brick building on Pandora Avenue, only a block from the ocean in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. SCL and CA employees loved to visit the office—it was scenic, breezy, and relaxed compared with the frenetic pace of London. As AIQ grew, the firm recruited a fantastic and diverse team of engineers to work on SCL projects.
AIQ’s Trinidad contract with SCL included building infrastructure for Facebook data harvesting, clickstream data, ISP logs, and the reconciliation of IPs and user agents to home addresses, which would help de-anonymize Internet browsing data. As SCL grew into Cambridge Analytica, AIQ became an indispensable part of the back-end technical engineering team. Once it was decided that CA’s models would have to be loaded into a platform that could launch social and digital ad targeting, AIQ was tasked with constructing Ripon, CA’s ad-targeting platform. After Kogan harvested the Facebook data, it was passed on to AIQ for loading into the Ripon platform, which allowed a user to segment universes of voters according to hundreds of different psychometric and behavioral factors. During the 2016 U.S. primaries, AIQ staff members would travel south to Texas to build out infrastructure for Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign.
When Brittany Kaiser and Sam Patten joined Cambridge Analytica and took over the Nigeria project, AIQ was brought on to distribute CA’s voter suppression and intimidation propaganda. After uploading videos of women being burned alive and men choking on their own blood as they had their throats cut, AIQ sought to target the content at regions and voter profiles that CA gave them. In 2015, when I found out that Silvester was working on this project, it felt truly bizarre: My onetime mentor was not at all the sort of person who would blithely disseminate videos of torture victims. Years later, I would meet up with Silvester and ask him about Nigeria. Unless you count uncomfortable laughter, he showed no remorse. Somehow he had made peace with the mayhem his company had spewed out into the world as a Cambridge Analytica contractor.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF June 16, 2016, a pro-Remain Labour MP named Jo Cox was walking to the library in the small town of Birstall, West Yorkshire. She was heading to her fortnightly “surgery,” a British tradition wherein MPs regularly host open meetings with constituents who need help with casework or want to raise an issue. But when Cox was just steps from the library door, a man wearing a baseball cap walked toward her, raised a sawed-off shotgun, shouted “Britain first!” and shot her point-blank. The man then dragged the forty-one-year-old Cox between two parked cars and began stabbing her, flailing his knife at shocked onlookers who tried to stop him. He continued to yell “Britain first! This is for Britain!” throughout the attack, which finally ended when he reloaded his gun and shot Cox in the head. Cox, the mother of two young children, lay dying on the pavement.
The assassination of Jo Cox sent waves of genuine shock throughout Britain, where gun violence is far less common than in the United States. Fellow MPs gathered for a vigil on Parliament Square, where flowers left by mourners formed a makeshift memorial. It soon emerged that the killer was a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer, which only served to heighten the emotional tension between Leave and Remain supporters. In an attempt to calm the storm, and in tribute to Cox, the Leave and Remain campaigns agreed to stop all campaign activities for three days, an extraordinary decision with only a week remaining until the vote. However, AIQ secretly continued deploying digital advertisements for Vote Leave, knowing that the British media would not be able to tell whether they were continuing online ads. It seemed that, after distributing videos in Nigeria of people being tortured and killed, a bit of extra digital campaigning during a period of public mourning for a murdered MP was not beneath them.
By this time, the political climate in Britain had become extremely toxic. Threats were being sent to both Remain- and Leave-supporting MPs (mostly to the Remain side), there was a disproportionate increase in race-based violence, and social media was blowing up every day. No one was passive or nonchalant about what was going on in British politics anymore. People were awake and people were angry. Very angry.
A lot of the messaging from the Leave side during this time was targeted toward “metropolitan elites,” as the politicians called them, as well as people of color and European migrants. Vote Leave eschewed responsibility, but it was apparent that they had left the race-baiting to Leave.EU, which gladly (and proudly) took up the cause. A few days before Jo Cox was murdered, Leave.EU’s Farage unveiled a campaign poster showing a caravan of brown-skinned migrants beneath the words BREAKING POINT. The move drew comparisons to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s showing lines of Jewish people flooding into Europe.
As I sat in Canada watching the drama unfold, I told myself that Vote Leave was not the same as Leave.EU, as many of my friends were working for Vote Leave. Farage’s campaign is the racist one using Cambridge Analytica, I thought. Vote Leave couldn’t possibly be pandering to that kind of rhetoric. I was wrong.
By the final weeks of the campaign, Vote Leave had spent nearly all of its allotted £7 million. British law barred it from accepting any more funds or collaborating with other campaigns, but Cummings wanted to keep spending and decided to find another way. AIQ had been receiving the bulk of Vote Leave’s ad spending, and Cummings was extremely impressed with the power of AIQ’s digital targeting capabilities. AIQ was able to target, engage, and enrage specific voters. Many of AIQ’s targets were infrequent voters, so even though public polls had Remain ahead, this meant AIQ was engaging new niches of the electorate who were systemically excluded from traditional campaigning and by polling firms. But AIQ realized that if it was to sustain its momentum, it would need more money than Vote Leave was legally allowed to spend—and it needed it fast. So attention turned to the BeLeave project. Until that point, BeLeave had been a totally organic operation run by a couple of interns in the Vote Leave office. There were no paid ads, and all the creative content was being developed by Sanni and Grimes in their spare time. Vote Leave would provide guidance and money for certain things, but only very small amounts—£100 here and there.
Around the same time, Parkinson began inviting Sanni to stay after hours with him in his house because he knew that Sanni was based in Birmingham, U.K., and the two began a relationship. For Sanni, who was twenty-two and not yet out about his sexuality to his family, this was all very new and confusing. He did not know how to deal with this intimate situation he now found himself in with his boss. But he was in awe of receiving so much attention and guidance from a senior political adviser who worked at the top echelons of the British government. Parkinson would take Sanni out and tell him how pleased he was with his work, and that if he kept it up there might be a future career in it for him. Sanni agreed to keep the affair secret.
Voters were noticing BeLeave’s work too. Some of the content that Sanni and Grimes had created went viral and even outperformed Vote Leave’s paid ads. BeLeave’s graphics focused on progressive issues such as the “tampon tax,” arguing that if Britons were out of the EU, they would not need twenty-seven other member states to agree to get rid of what was so obviously a misogynistic tax. It seemed that there was a clear market for BeLeave’s progressive, woke, and social-justice-oriented brand of Euroskepticism. Weeks before the June 23 referendum, Cleo Watson, who was head of outreach in Vote Leave, set up a meeting for Grimes and Sanni with a potential donor. The pair met the donor in the Vote Leave headquarters and made a proposal outlining how effective their posts were—their organic outreach was in some cases surpassing the impact of Vote Leave’s paid ads.
Grimes had sent me this presentation, asking my advice on how to optimize targeting online for Facebook and what his budget should be. I messaged him back, providing guidance on what metrics they should use and how they should pitch. It was a good presentation, but the donor ultimately decided against putting in any money. After the donor pulled out, one of Vote Leave’s senior directors approached the two young interns and told them that they had found a new way to get them money for BeLeave—but they would have to sign some paperwork first. After meeting with Vote Leave’s lawyers, Sanni and Grimes were instructed to set up as a separate campaign, open a bank account, and write a formal constitution. The Vote Leave lawyers drafted the new campaign’s articles of association and handed the interns paperwork to sign. What Sanni and Grimes did not realize was that it was not lawful for BeLeave to spend any more money because it was working so closely with Vote Leave. By saying that the BeLeave campaign was separate and could spend its own budget Vote Leave was putting these young interns at risk for any illegal campaign spending undertaken by this “separate” campaign. But the two interns were not told any of this, and they continued as before, working at the Vote Leave headquarters, attending Vote Leave events, and helping with leafleting.
The next week, Grimes and Sanni were told that the money Vote Leave promised them was finally coming through—and it was going to be more than they had asked for. In fact, it was going to be hundreds of thousands of pounds more. Vote Leave began organizing the transfer of £700,000 to BeLeave, in what would be the single largest expenditure of Vote Leave’s entire campaign. But Grimes and Sanni had to first agree to one condition. The problem for Vote Leave was that if the two were to receive the money as an “independent” campaign, they would be legally entitled to spend it however they liked. So Vote Leave told the two interns they would never actually see any of the money in their new bank account. Rather, Vote Leave would transfer the money to AIQ directly, and Grimes and Sanni would simply have to sign off on a set of AIQ invoices. Disappointed, Sanni asked if he could at least have his travel and food costs covered by some of these funds (he was treasurer and secretary), but he was told by his Vote Leave supervisor that that would not be possible. Grimes and Sanni had no idea that what they’d just agreed to was completely illegal. They had trusted the lawyers and advisers of Vote Leave, who consistently told them everything was in order.
What made that deception even worse was that Vote Leave’s lawyers put these interns’ names on the BeLeave documents, making Grimes personally liable for the legal fallout that eventually came. This was not an uncommon strategy in some of the dirtier schools of British campaigning, particularly among the Tories, who have been caught several times using the scheme: Senior campaign advisers not wanting to take on the personal risk of breaking election laws would find someone inexperienced, often an eager young volunteer, and nominate them as the campaign’s “agent,” which would make that person legally liable for the campaign. That way, if and when wrongdoing was uncovered, a fall guy was in place and the true perpetrators could walk off scot-free, continuing to enjoy their proximity to power while leaving behind the betrayed volunteers and broken lives.
FINALLY, THE DAY OF the referendum arrived. On June 23, torrential rains continued to batter the south of England, and Londoners hurrying to vote ended up facing horrendous delays, with train stations closing and the tube shutting down in the evening due to flooding. Most of the Vote Leave team, including Grimes and Sanni, spent the day going to key Leave seats to get out the vote. Dover was the gateway to Europe for the U.K. by sea and by train, and the final stop for Britons before they entered the English Channel. The volunteers spent many hours in Dover knocking on doors in heavy, torrential rain. The front page of the right-wing tabloid The Sun had a single bold and familiar headline: BELEAVE IN BRITAIN.
I had no idea AIQ was involved in the Leave campaign until the night of the vote, when Parkinson texted me a photo of himself with Massingham inside the Vote Leave headquarters—grinning in front of fogged-up windows with the outline of Parliament lingering behind them. Weirdly, even though I had seen and spoken to Silvester several times since returning to Canada, he never once mentioned AIQ’s connection to the Leave campaigns. After the spending returns were released, it was revealed that AIQ had received 40 percent of Vote Leave’s budget—and hundreds of thousands of pounds more from the other pro-Brexit campaigns, including BeLeave.
Now I understood that this was how Cummings had gotten around the fact that Cambridge Analytica was already working with Leave.EU—he just used one of CA’s subsidiaries, based in a different country, with a name that no one knew. AIQ had Cambridge Analytica’s infrastructure, handled all of its data, and could perform all the same functions, but without the label. (Vote Leave denies that it had access to Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data.) Nobody had wanted to tell me because everyone knew that I had left Cambridge Analytica on such bad terms, as had many others. Silvester and Massingham chose to stay quiet because this was their biggest gig in politics. Silvester was perfectly comfortable talking about the shady work they had done in Africa or the Caribbean, but not about Brexit.
As someone who had worked on targeted campaigns, I knew that most of the content that the media was talking about was not what individuals and groups were actually seeing during the referendum. Almost instantly, I realized something deeply sinister was happening in Britain. Even so, 72 percent of voters cast ballots. For hours, the vote was too close to call, but in the end, Leave emerged victorious with 51.89 percent of the vote. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Vote Leave had appointed Thomas Borwick to become the chief technology officer of the campaign. Before joining Vote Leave, Borwick had worked with Alexander Nix and SCL running a number of data-harvesting projects in island nations across the Caribbean. (However, there is nothing to suggest that Borwick participated in any of SCL’s unlawful work in the region.) After the referendum, Borwick revealed that Vote Leave and AIQ had together disseminated more than a hundred different ads with 1,433 different messages to their target voters in the weeks leading up to the referendum. Cummings later revealed that these ads were viewed more than 169 million times, but only targeted at a narrow segment of a few million voters, which resulted in their newsfeeds being dominated by Vote Leave messaging.
The people of the United Kingdom were the targets of a scaled information operation deployed by AIQ, and the problem with Remain was that they completely failed to understand what they were up against. As Cambridge Analytica identified, provoking anger and indignation reduced the need for full rational explanations and would put voters into a more indiscriminately punitive mindset. CA found that not only did this anger immunize target voters to the notion that the economy would suffer, but some people would support the economy suffering if it meant that out-groups like metropolitan liberals or immigrants would suffer in the process—that, in effect, their vote would be used as a form of punishment.
This approach proved effective against Remain’s “Project Fear” messaging, which tried to focus voters on the potentially catastrophic economic risks of exiting the European Union. In short, it is far harder to make angry people fearful. The “affect bias” arising out of anger mediates people’s estimation of negative outcomes, which is why angry people are more inclined to engage in risky behavior—the same is true whether they are voting or starting a bar fight. If you have ever been in a bar fight, you know that literally the worst way imaginable to make your opponent think twice about a rash move is to yell threats at him. It only eggs him on.
Remain’s focus on the economy also neglected to stop and ask people what they thought the economy was in the first place. Cambridge Analytica identified that many people in non-urban regions or in lower socioeconomic strata often externalized the notion of “the economy” to something that only the wealthy and metropolitan participated in. “The economy” was not their job in a local store; it was something that bankers did. This is also what made certain groups comfortable with economic risks and even trade wars, since, in their minds, that chaos would be unleashed upon the people who worked in “the economy.” And the more forceful the economic argument they heard, the more confident they would become that what they were “actually” hearing was the fears of a cowering elite worried about losing its wealth. This made them feel powerful, and it would become a power they wanted to wield.
After Leave won, a wave of shock and consternation swept Britain and the world. David Cameron gave a somber statement in front of 10 Downing Street, saying he would step down as prime minister by October. Both the euro and the British pound plummeted in value, and global stock markets nosedived. A petition began circulating, asking for a second referendum, and within seventy-two hours of the election, more than three and a half million people had signed it. In the United States, the response was mostly surprise and confusion. As pundits tried to parse what Brexit would mean for Americans, President Obama adopted the Keep Calm and Carry On approach, assuring everyone that “one thing that will not change is the special relationship that exists between our two nations.”
Donald Trump, then the presumptive Republican nominee, happened to be in Scotland at the time, visiting his Trump Turnberry golf resort. He called the Leave victory “a great thing,” saying that the voters had taken back their country.
“People want to take their country back, they want to have independence,” Trump said. “People are angry, all over the world…They’re angry over borders, they’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over, nobody even knows who they are. They’re angry about many, many things.”
The world did not know it yet, but Brexit was a crime scene. Britain was the first victim of an operation Bannon had set in motion years before. The so-called “patriots” of the Brexit movement, with their loud calls to rescue British law and sovereignty from the grips of the faceless European Union, decided to win a vote by mocking those very laws. And to do so, they deployed a web of companies associated with Cambridge Analytica in foreign jurisdictions, away from the scrutiny of the agencies charged with protecting the integrity of our democracies. Foreshadowing what was to come in America, a clear pattern emerged during the Brexit debacle, where previously unknown foreign entities began exerting influence on domestic elections by deploying large data sets of unexplained origins. And with social media companies not performing any checks on the advertising campaigns spreading throughout their platforms, there was no one standing guard to stop hostile entities seeking to sow chaos and disrupt our democracies.