Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie testified before British lawmakers on Tuesday and said President Trump's election helped him realize he needed to speak.
“As a citizen, one has a duty to report unlawful activity,” he said, when asked by the U.K. Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee why he came forward. “I wouldn’t say it’s just because of Donald Trump, but Donald Trump makes it click in your head that it has a much wider impact.”
(...)
Wylie became a central figure in the scandal involving the data firm last week when he told the U.K.’s Observer newspaper and the New York Times that Cambridge Analytica allegedly used personal information of up to 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge through a third-party quiz app.
Wylie, who left the company in 2014, said that he was concerned about the data’s possible misuse in the 2016 US election and that it might have been used to target specific voters with campaign ads.
“I don’t think that military-style information operations is conducive to any democratic process,” he told the lawmakers on the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee who are investigating the proliferation of fake news on social media.
(...)
“One of the reasons why I’m speaking out is because I think that it’s really concerning that no one has really investigated Cambridge Analytica and its role in the 2016 election,” Wylie told ABC News.
Cambridge Analytica continues to deny any wrongdoing and issued a statement saying, in part, Wylie "has misrepresented himself and the company to the committee, and previously to the news media.”
Wylie also revealed in his testimony Tuesday that "Canadian company AggregateIQ worked on software called Ripon which was used to identify Republican voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election."
“There’s now tangible proof in the public domain that AIQ actually built Ripon, which is the software that utilised the algorithms from the Facebook data,” Wylie told the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
AggregateIQ told Reuters on March 24 that it had never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica nor ever entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica.
It said it works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements and had never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity.
Cambridge Analytica said on Tuesday that it had not shared any of the Facebook profile data procured by a Cambridge academic with AggregateIQ. It said it had not had any communication with AggregateIQ since December 2015.
But Gizmodo reports it has the internal files that prove Wylie is telling the truth.
Discovered by a security researcher last week, the files confirm that AggregateIQ, a British Columbia-based data firm, developed the technology Cambridge Analytica sold to clients for millions of dollars during the 2016 US presidential election. Hundreds if not thousands of pages of code, as well as detailed notes signed by AggregateIQ staff, wholly substantiate recent reports that Cambridge Analytica’s software platform was not its own creation.
What’s more, the files reveal that AggregateIQ—also known as “AIQ”—is the developer behind campaign apps created for Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, as well as a Ukrainian steel magnate named Serhiy Taruta, head the country’s newly formed Osnova party.
Other records show the firm once pitched an app to Breitbart News, the far-right website funded by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer—Cambridge Analytica’s principal investor—and are currently contracted by WPA Intelligence, a US-based consultancy founded by Republican pollster Chris Wilson, who was director of digital strategy for Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The files were unearthed last week by Chris Vickery, research director at UpGuard, a California-based cyber risk firm. On Sunday night, after Gizmodo reached out to Jeff Silvester, co-founder of AIQ, the files were quickly taken offline.
AIQ is bound by an non-disclosure agreement the company signed in 2014 to take on former client SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, according to a source with direct knowledge of the contract.
Former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie testifies about data use scandal in UK (ABC News)
Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Christopher Wylie Westminster Testimony (C-SPAN)
Whistleblower says Canadian company worked on software to find Republican voters (Reuters)
AggregateIQ Created Cambridge Analytica's Election Software, and Here’s the Proof (Gizmodo)