Information & Ethics Committee on May 29th, 2018

[Christopher Wylie]

Well, Steve Bannon had to approve all of the projects that the company engaged in. As the vice-president, he was in charge of managing the operations on a day-to-day basis, albeit in the United States. Any new clients or new projects or new stream of work, particularly if it incurred a cost, would have to be approved by him. He was aware—

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Baylis.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Go ahead and finish up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Go ahead and finish your answer.

[Christopher Wylie]

He was aware of the work that was going on. He was aware of Dr. Kogan's work, and he approved the financing of it. To highlight the scale of it, the company spent close to $1 million in the first three months of that project, so that had to be approved by Steve Bannon and the Mercers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Wylie.

Next up for five minutes is Monsieur Gourde.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Wylie, when you designed the architecture for the technology, did you start with a blank slate, or did you model it on some other piece of technology that existed in the world?

[Christopher Wylie]

When I first got engaged by the SCL Group in the summer of 2013, they were looking at modernizing a lot of their activities and work, particularly as they related to what was happening in the defence community, which was an expansion of research into the proliferation of ideas online and social media, because that was fast becoming one of the primary recruitment tools of extremist organizations and terrorist organizations. The company had a deficit in technical expertise, and it wanted to expand that, so when I came on board, it was in part to look at the operations of the company and figure out how it could modernize its tactics and use technology to improve that.

When I started, you could call it a blank slate in the sense that the technological infrastructure was not yet there. It was not a blank slate in the sense that the company had several decades of experience working in information operations around the world, so part of the role, at least initially when I was invited to join the company, was to look at existing tactics and techniques in information operations and see how we could import that into cyberspace.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Mr. Wylie, how does a piece of military technology transform into a tool for election campaigns in a democratic jurisdiction? Did you receive orders from third parties? You didn't do it simply for fun. You no doubt saw the market potential, in terms of people willing to pay for this kind of technology.

[Christopher Wylie]

To be clear, when I was first engaged by SCL, I became research director for multiple companies, so it wasn't just the elections division that I was working on. Looking at the research we were doing originally, it wasn't necessarily just for elections. There would have been military applications for it, and at the time, military work was the bread and butter of the company. It was around that time that Alexander Nix met up with Steve Bannon and began that process of engaging with Bannon and the Mercers to essentially port that over into an electoral context in the United States.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Did political parties contact your company looking for the help your technology could provide, or, conversely, did your company reach out to political parties to let them know it had something that could help them seek out potential voters?

[Christopher Wylie]

Alexander Nix usually handled the relationships with clients, or perspective clients. I do know that he went out and met with several prospective clients mostly in Africa or the Caribbean, some in South America and in Asia, about some of the work that was being done. I wasn't necessarily present in those meetings, so I can't speak to that.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

You're confirming, then, that your company specialized in reaching out to people in different countries to help them with election campaigns. Your technology was specifically developed for a global market of democratic influence, was it not?

[Christopher Wylie]

Yes. Part of the work that the company did was to go into other countries and work in election campaigns, particularly in emerging democracies. The way that the company often made money was not necessarily from working in elections, but rather using the relationships that it built in those campaigns later for government projects.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Next up, we have Ms. Vandenbeld.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you for being here to answer our questions.

I'd like to go to something you told the U.S. Senate judiciary committee, about where you really drew the line. You said that one of the things that caused you to blow the whistle on this was because they were starting to engage in voter suppression, particularly targeting people based on their race. Could you explain what it is exactly? When you're talking about voter suppression, what is it they were proposing or did do?

[Christopher Wylie]

To be clear, I didn't work on voter suppression projects. I was made aware of them while I was there.

My understanding of what the company was intending to do—I believe at the instigation of Steve Bannon and some of his colleagues in different packs—was to create lists of predominantly African American voters and then look at what types of messaging would disengage them from politics further, which would then reduce the likelihood that they would vote.

There are different definitions of voter suppression. The most egregious form would be to actually go and try to deregister people from voting, by what's called vote caging. That's not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is finding things that will make politics so unappetizing or confusing to a subset of voters that they become less inclined to actually vote or engage with the democratic process.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

This is based on these psychosocial behavioural profiles that are gathered from, as you mentioned, not just Facebook, but potentially private companies and different sources, like browsing histories and things like that. Is there this aggregate of data that is being collected that is allowing this kind of this work?

[Christopher Wylie]

Yes. The data would be sourced from multiple origins. Some of it was commercial, some of it was electoral, and some of it was social or online.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

One of the things you told us was that the intellectual property of AggregateIQ, a lot of this data that's being collected and aggregated, is actually exclusively owned by SCL. There's a data-sharing arrangement. When Mr. Vickery was testifying before the committee, he said a similar thing. He said that he found on the servers of AIQ data where the code base looked like it was exactly the same, which again suggests that SCL and AggregateIQ were sharing their data completely. However, when we had Mr. Silvester here, he said that all they had access to was potentially some ranking scores that came from the U.S. that might have come from an SCL server somewhere.

You're saying that what Mr. Silvester told us is not accurate, but that in fact, there was a much closer arrangement between SCL and AIQ.

[Christopher Wylie]

In order for the technologies AIQ was developing to work, what they built was the interface between databases and online platforms that you could put advertising on. They were that sort of middle ground. You need to have access to the data in order to pull lists, in order to send it and to create a custom audience.

You can't build a targeting platform that doesn't have access to data, because then what are you targeting on, right? One of the things I provided to the DCMS committee here in Britain is an email from AIQ that specifically references searching the SCL databases on the Ripon project.

I don't know how else you can query a database if you don't have access to the database. I do not know how you can perform targeting if you don't have access to the database. Frankly, I'm surprised and really disappointed that Jeff Silvester and Zack Massingham have decided to try to obfuscate or hide what happened. You'll have to ask them why it is that they are taking this line, but in my view, that's just not true. What value would they offer, then, if they did not use any of the data?

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

That's my next question. When people are engaging SCL, Cambridge Analytica, or AggregateIQ, particularly for elections, what are they buying?

What we were led to believe through AggregateIQ is that it's like Burma-Shave: you just put a little thing on Facebook, and they were just the ones that put on the ads, based on some demographic data on Facebook. If somebody waves at you on the street, it's the same thing as putting on a light; they were just gathering that, and that was all they were doing, but 600,000 pounds for a single contract just so someone can go and target some people on Facebook, which most people or any volunteer could probably do...?

You're suggesting that what they were really buying was access to this aggregated database, this psychosocial profiling, this vast amount of data that was collected. That's what people were buying into.

[Christopher Wylie]

I appreciate your very Canadian political term of “Burma-Shave”. I haven't heard that in a long time.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Christopher Wylie]

The thing that I find farcical is the line that all AggregateIQ does is just click some demographic on Facebook Ads Manager and that's it. The problem I have with that is, I'm like, well, what is the value of your company then? All you're doing is something an intern could do, right?

If you know that you want to target women between 25 and 30, you can tell your intern to go and do that. I don't understand why you would need.... It would be a lot cheaper, also, because you wouldn't have to be paying for all the consultancy fees. To me, that's just farcical as an explanation, unless they are grossly incompetent or.... I don't know if Vote Leave was just that stupid, but having met Dom Cummings, I don't think he is, so I find that really hard to believe.

One of the things that Facebook has gone out and confirmed is that a lot of these different campaigns were using the same custom audiences for targeting. I don't understand that explanation, and I can't speak for them, but for me, I don't buy it.