Thank you to the chair, the vice-chair, and the committee members for the opportunity to give evidence today. I have followed the work of this committee as it relates to Cambridge Analytica fairly closely, especially as it has intersected with investigations in the United Kingdom and the United States. I have been impressed with the committee's unwavering efforts to fact-find and truth-tell as it has probed the company entangled in the transnational election and data crimes investigations of 2016: AggregateIQ, an exclusive vendor of SCL Elections Limited, which is the registered data controller of Cambridge Analytica in the United Kingdom.
Kindly allow me to offer a brief chronology of my personal effort to win full disclosure of an SCL Elections voter profile generated from the 2016 presidential election cycle, under the U.K. Data Protection Act of 1998, in the courts and through enforcement actions of the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office.
In January 2017, I filed a subject access request at cambridgeanalytica.org to request my voter file, after being advised this was possible. I was instructed to pay SCL Elections Limited a £10 fee and provide copies of government ID and a utility bill to validate residency.
In March 2017, I received an attempt from [email protected] to be compliant with the U.K. Data Protection Act of 1998, which included a letter signed by SCL Group chief operating officer Julian Wheatland, and an Excel spreadsheet with voter registration data and an ideological model consisting of 10 political topics ranked with partisanship and participation predictions. I expected to receive much more data, as Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica's CEO, had frequently boasted of collecting up to 5,000 data points for each U.S. voter.
In July 2017, I filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office under section 7 of the U.K. Data Protection Act that SCL Elections Limited had refused to answer any questions or respond to any concerns regarding the data provided.
In October 2017, I launched a crowdfunding campaign to file a claim in the High Court of Justice against SCL Elections and related companies.
In February 2018, I gave evidence to the U.K. House of Commons select committee on digital, culture, media and sport when it convened hearings in Washington, D.C.
In March 2018, I filed and served SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica with a section 7 Data Protection Act claim demanding full disclosure of my voter profile providing expert witness statements that evaluated how the provided data could not possibly be complete.
In May 2018, the Information Commissioner's Office issued an enforcement notice to SCL Elections Limited, to comply with its order to fully disclose my voter data file, under criminal penalty.
In June 2018, while giving evidence to the LIBE committee in the European Parliament, on the dais with the information commissioner and deputy information commissioners present, SCL Elections failed to respond to the enforcement order as the deadline expired, as we were sitting there in Brussels.
In December 2018, I instructed an insolvency barrister to challenge the administrators attempting to liquidate most of the SCL Group companies, and I won a court order to get disclosure of the complete administrators' filings, which they refused to share with us.
In January 2019, the ICO prosecuted SCL Elections for failing to respond to its enforcement order to disclose my data. Despite publishing an intent to plead not guilty in its public filings, the joint administrators entered a surprise plea of guilty, then paying court fines and costs. It was reported at this trial that the ICO finally received passwords to servers seized from Cambridge Analytica/SCL under criminal warrant in March 2018. According to court-ordered disclosures I obtained in December 2018, the ICO was seeking these passwords potentially as early as May 2018.
In March 2019, the high court in the U.K. will hear our challenge to the joint administrator's proposal to liquidate the SCL Group companies. Evidence will be presented that highlights concerns that the administrators and directors have misled the court on critical matters. In addition, the high court is notified of evidence discovered by Chris Vickery, another panellist today, that indicated how former Cambridge Analytica and SCL employees had been building new companies while accessing databases of CA/SCL that remain in the cloud.
We will continue to pursue complete disclosure of my data file and won't give up until fully vindicated. Both the ICO and the DCMS committee have repeatedly expressed the clear understanding that because U.S. voter data was processed in the U.K. by SCL, the Data Protection Act applies and the ICO has jurisdiction.
The quest to repatriate my voter file from the U.K. teaches us so much about the fundamental data rights that the United States and Canada have not yet assigned and protected for their citizens. We can now clearly understand how the right of access underpins the essence of data protection as a key to sustaining democracy in the 21st century.
We can also better understand how data protection and data privacy policy interconnects with other legal frameworks, such as international treaties, bankruptcy, insolvency law, election law, campaign finance, and even antitrust.
I look forward to being able to answer the committee's questions about my journey in reclaiming my Cambridge Analytica data and what it might portend for the future of our digital democracy.
Thank you.