Information & Ethics Committee on May 29th, 2018

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

To achieve what you said, “trigger the underlying dispositional motivators that drive each psychographic audience”, you need much more than a name, an address, a phone number, and an email. You need what you go into, in quite specific depth, additional information on personality, on personality vulnerabilities and so forth to be able to, as you say, drive a voter to where they may not know they want to go. Is that not correct? Isn't that what—

[Christopher Wylie]

I wouldn't necessarily agree with your characterization of it. It is very well known in behavioural research that people often do not have insight into some of their own behaviours: for example, if you ask people how much they smoke, how much they drink, how many vegetables they eat, you'd typically get responses that do not reflect the actual behaviour. Depending on the context of the work you're doing, sometimes it's important to find other indicators that are more reflective of the behaviours you're interested in.

For example, in voting a lot of times people will say they're unsure as to how they're going to vote. That doesn't mean they won't have a consistent voting behaviour; it just means that at the time they haven't thought about it and they're not necessarily going to give you a helpful answer. If you can find other indicators of that, that's all that means. There's nothing nefarious about it.

I can guarantee that every party in Canada does modelling projects that look for indicators in voting behaviour.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

But they don't—

[Christopher Wylie]

The Liberal Party does that; the Conservative Party does that; the NDP does that.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

They don't gather data of the sort improperly harvested from Facebook, which show prejudices, biases, vulnerabilities, which were, obviously, used by AIQ in the Vote Leave campaign, the Brexit campaign, and reportedly in American elections.

[Christopher Wylie]

Sure.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

The question is, if the data that's acquired is beyond the name, the email, the phone number, the basic voter ID that all parties, you're quite right, do, which we use to get out the vote.... I don't go looking, and certainly I don't believe my party goes looking, for the vulnerabilities of the voters in my constituency to try to change their opinion or to try to change their voting intention because of the vulnerabilities that may be indicated by improper harvesting of data elsewhere.

[Christopher Wylie]

Sure. Nor does the LRB and nor does the Liberal Party, at least at the time that I was there.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

It seems that contrary to your statement that it's uncomfortable to consider our democracy may have been corrupted, you don't believe that psychographic micro-targeting corrupts our democratic electoral process?

[Christopher Wylie]

It's if used properly. Again, this is why I keep stressing that just because data or psychology is involved does not mean that innately there is something nefarious is going on. There is a problem around the world, in Canada also, with voter disengagement. Fewer and fewer people turn out to vote. This is because there's a new media environment that is distracting and people are disconnected with politics, and oftentimes it is very helpful to understand, again, underlying motivators for people so that you can improve turnout, you can improve voter engagement, and you can speak to people in a way that motivates them and wants them to participate. That is a use case that is not nefarious; it is a positive use case because you are looking to increase turnout and increase participation in your democracy. Just because data is used or just because psychology is used does not mean that you are going to seek out misappropriated data; it does not mean that you are out to manipulate or coerce or somehow trick or suppress voters. It just means that you are looking for information to help you engage those people.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Certainly your technical briefing would seem to be, if not nefarious, suggesting unethical manipulation of voter intention.

[Christopher Wylie]

I disagree, and that briefing was sent to the Information Commissioner's office and The Electoral Commission. I proactively gave it to them and there is nothing in there that is illegal or goes outside the boundaries of the law.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

It's a fine line.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Next up, for seven minutes, is Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Wylie, I'm very interested in your analysis of the role of SCL that worked with Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ on some of these international projects that, I believe, you referred to as a form of new neo-colonialism. Would you say that that's the correct term that you used or did I get that wrong?

[Christopher Wylie]

I've had several conversations now with representatives of governments in different countries. One of the things that has become very apparent is that you might have a country that gained independence and the former colonizer left, but corporate interests didn't. What I mean by neo-colonialism is, rather than state action or government action to control via a governor the affairs of a particular country, you have large multinational companies or wealthy individuals from, oftentimes, the former colonizer coming in and seeking to interfere with the elections in a way such that resources, for example, can continue to be extracted in a way that is conducive for business interests in that former colonizer. What I meant by that is that colonialism still happens in a lot of these places, it just doesn't look like the form that it did 100 years ago.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Right. I think this is fascinating because I'm looking at the work of SCL, Cambridge Analytica, AIQ in Nigeria, Trinidad and elsewhere, and it's like some kind of Frederick Forsyth novel with cyber-geeks.

I just want to go through a bit of this. In the Nigeria campaign, there was the question of the murder video that was to incite ethnic hatred that was brought forward by a Cambridge Analytica operator that was supposedly given to AIQ. In Trinidad and Tobago there are allegations that illegal data was collected and harvested; there was the deanonymizing of emails—is that correct?—and AIQ was involved with that?

[Christopher Wylie]

It was clickstream data of Internet browsing history.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

AIQ worked with Cambridge Analytica for SCL on those projects?

[Christopher Wylie]

Yes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

You had stated that this is a company that has gone around the world and undermined democratic elections in all kinds of countries and that they could care less as to whether their work is compliant, because they like to win. Is that correct—on SCL and the culture that came out of Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ?

[Christopher Wylie]

That was the impression I got when I was there.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

The Canadian government paid SCL to run psychological operations in Latvia, and said that—

[Christopher Wylie]

At the NATO StratCom centre.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

It was promoted by Canadian Ambassador Alain Hauser and the Latvian secretary of defence that they would use the SCL team of experts in target audience analysis. Would that be similar to what they could have done in Brexit, this target audience analysis? Can you explain that?