Information & Ethics Committee on June 12th, 2018

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Advertising in the commercial world is very different from the sort of advertising that we're talking about, a manipulation of data that we're talking about here with regard to political activities. Mr. Wylie testified that he drew the line—although he'd been working for some years with all of you—when he became aware of the intent to affect voter's intentions and to suppress the vote by discouraging people from voting.

Did you become aware of that? At some point did you have any of the similar concerns that Mr. Wylie said motivated him to blow the whistle?

[Jeff Silvester]

I've never seen any evidence from any of our clients that they were attempting to suppress a vote of any type. We've certainly never run any advertising to try to suppress a vote or done any work to try to suppress a vote in any way. Our goal is to encourage people to vote. It just happens that we encourage them to vote for the client we're working for. I wouldn't even know what efforts to suppress a vote would look like.

Mr. Wylie may have seen some evidence of that in some of the work that he's done in the past. I don't know; he has not talked to me about that. That's not work that we would undertake.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

He was speaking in specific regard to the American campaigns, which the various corporate entities were involved in. He said that the intent there was to discourage black voters to vote, to discourage their participation in a democratic process.

If you were managing the advertising, would you not have seen something that might have triggered in your mind an attempt to suppress the voting by that particular demographic?

[Jeff Silvester]

If there was a campaign that was trying to advertise to a group and use that advertising to somehow suppress that vote, and they were using us as their advertiser, we would definitely see that. As I've said, we've never seen any evidence of that with any of the clients we've worked with.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Have you ever seen the technical briefing that Mr. Wylie gave to Dominic Cummings for the Vote Leave campaign, in which he basically pitches the capability of affecting voter attitudes?

[Jeff Silvester]

I've seen some portions of it as they've been posted here and there in different media articles, but I've not read the whole thing.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

One of the lines that I read back to Mr. Wylie that certainly concerns me if it were applied in a Canadian context was, “We can trigger the underlying dispositional motivators that drive each psychographic audience.” In other words, we can tap into how the voter sees the world and use our understanding of their personality to speak their language when crafting their arguments.

Doesn't that concern you somewhat if, basically, they're using this capability, this psychographic micro targeting, to change individual's minds by exploiting the vulnerabilities of their own personal prejudices, biases, and anxieties?

[Jeff Silvester]

What you've described there, and I haven't seen that document, sounds horrible and scary. The process of advertisers trying to influence people is what advertisers do.

If, for example, you're a car company, you might realize that for your particular car, it's males, perhaps, who buy it more often. You'll create advertising that will appeal to those males who might want to buy your car. Some car companies have done research to show that they need to raise their prices and make their vehicle look more exclusive than others; that's manipulation as well. To the point in terms of specific, individual, personalities, I don't know of a way online in which you can target an individual specifically for advertising. You have to target large groups.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Well, yes.

Again, Mr. Wylie says in this pitch document—it's effectively a pitch document—“People think they know their opinions better than they do and can often be lying to themselves.”

Essentially, he's saying that he has ways of using deep data points, very large numbers of individual data points, put into various demographic blocks to change their minds.

Do you believe that there's a line that should be drawn in terms of where political parties collect data, how far they can go in the sort of data they collect, how they can manipulate it, and how they can use it?

[Jeff Silvester]

Yes, and there are two questions there. To the first point, with respect to the psychographics and all of that sort of stuff—again, I'm not an expert on that—the work that Mr. Wylie did with SCL before he left ended up not working. The campaigns that used it reported in the press and other places that it didn't work. So insofar as, if he was doing the same thing as he did that time....

In fact, actually, at the DCMS committee, Mr. Kogan reported that, again, the testing on those results that he provided to SCL weren't accurate. If he was doing the exact same thing as he did before, then it didn't work. I know there are theoretical journals and papers that get into that, about how it's theoretically possible, but I'm not aware of any political organization that's done that successfully or any corporate organization that's done that successfully.

To your second point, though, is that something that political parties and indeed Parliament should be looking at? Yes. When you provide information to an organization, then you should know, when you're providing it, why you're providing it, what they're going to do with it, and what you can do to get that information back if you need to. Right now in Canada, and indeed on all of your websites, you collect information, but you....

Well, your website, Mr. Kent, does have a privacy statement, but typically we don't tell people on political sites what is going to happen with that information or how they can get it back.

One thing that I think would be really important for the committee to do, which I think Mr. Erskine-Smith talked about before, is to have very clear and easy-to-read statements on everyone's website, if they're collecting information, about what that information is being collected for, how it's going to be used, what it can be used for in the future, and how they can get it back.

I think that's an area where there is opportunity for change, because right now that's not the case. You can use implied consent, but it's certainly something that politicians, companies, organizations, or anyone, really, should have.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Far be it from me to cut you off while you're quoting me, but it's Mr. Angus's turn for seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Silvester. I want to say at the outset that what we're trying to do here is get at the facts. We have no axe to grind with AggregateIQ. Your evidence is as valuable to us as anyone else's.

I would say that we're very frustrated, because we felt last time that your colleague Mr. Massingham was not forthcoming at all. We have a number of questions. To me, the fact that he's not here raises serious concerns, because there are questions that I don't believe you can answer, based on the Slack messages we have from him.

Having said that, we will carry on. I want to go back to the conversation you and Chris Wylie had about the siloing of information between the Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns. He asked you if you siloed the information, and he said that you said you did not. Did you silo and keep those two campaigns separate?

[Jeff Silvester]

Yes. We always keep campaigns separate. We kept all the information separate from the two campaigns.

I did mention in my opening statement about the information that Facebook found about that one group. I'll provide all that information and the evidence to you just to demonstrate how that wasn't shared between the campaigns.

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

Okay, because I'm looking at some of the Google Drive documents. We see that the BeLeave folder on the drive includes several senior Vote Leave staff members, employees of AggregateIQ, the company secretary of BeLeave. AIQ said that this work was siloed, but we see from these Google Drive documents that BeLeave documents were very accessible to Vote Leave.

So how could it have been siloed?

[Jeff Silvester]

We keep all the information for our clients separate. What you're referring to is a drive that's owned by Vote Leave.

That's really a question for Vote Leave. I know that they made representations about that to the Electoral Commission, but I couldn't tell you what their process was or anything about that.

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

Chris Wylie repeated under oath that you told him that what you were doing was completely illegal and you knew it. He said that under oath. We asked you, and you said you sent him a text saying that you didn't understand how he misunderstood that.

[Jeff Silvester]

That's not the text that I sent. Mr. Wylie and I had a conversation in April of 2017, well after Brexit, where we did talk about what the media was saying about Vote Leave and BeLeave. I've never believed that what we were doing was illegal, so I can't imagine ever having said that to him. With respect—

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

He said it under oath,

[Jeff Silvester]

I understand that.

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

The last time you were here, I asked you. You said that you were surprised and sent him a text. Are you now saying that wasn't the text? We asked him, and he said he never received a text from you.

[Jeff Silvester]

I'll just finish that by saying that we had that meeting in April, and we had a number of conversations, meetings, and texts back and forth after that. I never brought up the issue with him at that point, because I didn't there was any issue, that he'd misunderstood, or that he had come to any conclusion different from what I had about our conversation.

I sent him a text just recently when I learned of his very public allegations about exactly what you're saying now. That would have been at the end of March or beginning of April of this year. I sent him the message then, and the message was essentially—I don't have it with me—to the effect of, “If you have a second, can we talk?” That was all I said.

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

Okay. He said he never received a text from you, so would you share your text with us? It seems pretty shocking to me that a colleague of yours says that you were very emphatic in saying that you knew that what you were doing was completely illegal, and you say you're just surprised by that.

Did you say that what you were doing was completely illegal? Did you know that what you were doing was illegal?

[Jeff Silvester]

I don't believe we've done anything illegal. With respect to having sent texts, the message I sent to him was via a program that we had been using to communicate called Signal. Signal deletes those messages after they're sent, so I don't have a record of that, but I know that I sent it, as I say, in and around the end of March or beginning of April.

To be completely clear, it was to a number that I'd last used to communicate with him back in September of 2017. As I mentioned at the DCMS committee, it's entirely possible that he's changed his number. I don't know.

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

He said he never got it. You might just have sent it to the wrong number. I mean, for tech people, you guys should be more on top of this, I would think, especially since your reputation is at stake.

I'm running out of time here, so I'm going to move on. I have a number of questions for your colleague who's not here, Mr. Massingham, based on the potential illegalities of your using the BeLeave campaign as a money laundering vehicle for Vote Leave. I want to look through some conversations. Maybe you can help us since he's not here.

Ten days before the campaign ended, Darren Grimes, a 22-year-old fashion student, wrote to your colleague and said they wanted him take on this campaign for them, and the next day, he sent a £400,000 order. That's a lot of money for a 22-year-old fashion student. Then Mr. Massingham responded to it at one point and said, “you're on track to spend 300k USD today.... ddi you need me to grab some money for you?”

Where would you guys be grabbing money from for your clients?

[Jeff Silvester]

The donation from Vote Leave to BeLeave came directly to us, and Mr. Grimes had expressed to Zack that he needed some of that money for some activities that they were undertaking. He was asking at one point for that money to be transferred back, but he inevitably resolved that issue and didn't require it.