Information & Ethics Committee on April 24th, 2018

[Jeff Silvester]

I don't know that I have any because any communication was done by phone, but I'll see what I can find.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay. Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Erskine-Smith.

Next up, for seven minutes, we have Mr. Kent.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to both of you for attending today.

According to Christopher Wylie's narrative, AIQ wouldn't exist but for him, because of his connections with you through the Liberal Party of Canada, work you had done in the past. He suggested that AIQ be set up to enable people to work for Cambridge Analytica who didn't want to move to the U.K. Is that an accurate characterization of the relationship?

[Jeff Silvester]

No. Zack and I set up AggregateIQ. As Zack mentioned in his opening statement, he had registered the domain as part of his personal work in 2011, and Zack and I had been talking about how we could work together for a long time. Mr. Wylie certainly introduced us to SCL but we had never heard of Cambridge Analytica at that time, and indeed hadn't for a long time after that. So, no, Mr. Wylie did not set up AggregateIQ.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Last week Mr. Vickery testified before this committee and said he's not sure of the precise relationship between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica and SCL, but his direct quote was, “The walls of the separation...are very porous.” Again, would you agree with that characterization?

[Jeff Silvester]

No, not at all.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

This comes back to Mr. Wylie's narrative. He said that he helped get AIQ up and running to help SCL, essentially a Canadian entity for people who wanted to work on SCL projects who didn't want to move to London. Facebook suspended AggregateIQ for its connections with Cambridge Analytica and the possibility that it might have some of the data that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained.

From your answers this morning do you believe that Facebook, in its suspension of AIQ, acted improperly or without justification?

[Jeff Silvester]

Facebook is its own company. I can't speak to why they choose to do things. But I know they are investigating, and we've contacted them and offered to co-operate as best we can. I'm looking forward to their completing their investigation, and again continuing as good customers of Facebook.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Now, when Mr. Vickery stumbled upon the subdomain GitLab at AIQ, he said he didn't use any of the log-ins or access facilities that he might have. He says there is no evidence that the exposed code or private data was taken, but he also says there is no evidence that it wasn't taken.

Do you yourself have any evidence one way or the other?

[Jeff Silvester]

We indeed can see that the security researcher did gain a copy of that data, but upon learning of that, we launched a full investigation and notified the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia. That investigation is continuing.

We are committed to going through every line and every record to make sure that no such access occurred.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Why was that subdomain, this big repository of data, left unprotected? Why was it left open?

[Jeff Silvester]

To clarify, it's not a data repository but rather a code repository.

That it was exposed, of course, was an issue. It should not have been. We're still investigating to see exactly how that change occurred to allow it to be accessed. As I said, we're going to work with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia to work through that process.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

It wasn't left open deliberately?

[Jeff Silvester]

Oh, no; not at all.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

I mean, a skeptical person, a suspicious person, might say that while your company might not have improperly used information or manipulated information or mined information, by leaving it open and by leaving all of the access codes and log-ins available, others could have freely misused that information.

[Jeff Silvester]

The information that was in there, in terms of access—much of it was dummy codes. A couple were not, but as soon as we learned of the access, we secured all of those servers and changed all of the codes. We have no records of any access to anything else other than the code repository.

As I said, we're going to work carefully through this process, following best practices and the guidelines from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Again, one knows that those who work in the digital world have original senses of humour, but one of the page grabs from that subdomain has a file called Ephemeral with a subtitle saying, “Because there is no such thing as THE TRUTH”. This was attached to the U.S. election projects, I understand, that AggregateIQ was working on. Is that correct?

[Jeff Silvester]

That is work that we're doing for a client in the U.S. The names and comments are just things that our developers write in there from time to time.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

While you said today that you weren't handling improperly harvested Facebook data, did you work with the Amazon platform Mechanical Turk in your massaging of data that perhaps had been processed from Facebook through that Amazon site?

[Jeff Silvester]

I wouldn't say we massage data, and I don't recall ever....

No, we've never worked with Mechanical Turk.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

So you've never worked with Mechanical Turk?

[Jeff Silvester]

No.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

You have one minute, Mr. Kent.