Information & Ethics committee  I can't speak to the intentions of AIQ, so I don't know why that misconfiguration was there. It seems like it was a pretty careless—which is one word you could use—oversight, to have their entire code base and systems exposed to the public. If not intentional, it certainly was ex

Information & Ethics committee  I've used GitHub, as most people in tech have used GitHub, but this particular subdomain that you're referring to, I have not accessed before, no.

Information & Ethics committee  I am vaguely familiar with the names, actually through Chris Vickery, because those weren't necessarily the names that SCL would use to refer to the products. It's hard for me to answer specifically, because I am familiar with the general set-up. For example, for the “database of

Information & Ethics committee  I can't speak to the specific intentions of AIQ and why they put certain things there, but there was a systemic culture in the group of companies that we've been speaking about that completely disregarded the importance of truth in an election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica regular

Information & Ethics committee  I can't give you a precise figure, but I recall seeing results that ranged from 2% to 7% in terms of uplift, which is not insignificant. If parties actually focused more on online engagement, they could actually increase turnout overall, but it's the job of all parties to do that

Information & Ethics committee  Pollsters have a hard time predicting, because they don't actually do forecasting. All they do is report the results of 1,000 people and what they said. Very little analysis actually goes into it in terms of creating forecasting algorithms or anything prospective. That's one of t

Information & Ethics committee  The first thing—and this is a really straightforward example that I was speaking about before—is that, in the same way that you require transparency for donations and spending, you should require transparency for the use of information and advertising. When a party puts out an ad

Information & Ethics committee  Facebook limits the custom audience to 1,000—

Information & Ethics committee  —but you could have 1,000 custom audiences of 1,000 to make up a million, and you have 1,000 different messages to a million people. The point that I was going to make was that rather than say targeting is outright a bad thing and we shouldn't have it, there are really positive

Information & Ethics committee  It's because young people, for example, are highly mobile, and the address on the electoral register is not necessarily where they live. They don't necessarily listen to the radio, and there is something to be said for sending messages to voters that contain a policy or issue tha

Information & Ethics committee  Is it in relation to Cambridge Analytica or just generally?

Information & Ethics committee  There may be, but I'm also aware that there are currently investigations going on, in which imparting that information in a political forum may interfere with a particular investigation. If you'd like to discuss that in a non-public forum then perhaps we could have a discussion.

Information & Ethics committee  The first thing I would say is that I am not on a crusade against Facebook. I think there's a lot of really amazing things that Facebook does. The only thing I would say is that although a lot of attention has been put on Facebook, there are other social media companies that coll

Information & Ethics committee  At the NATO StratCom centre.

Information & Ethics committee  Target audience analysis, or TAA, is the starting point for information operations in a military context. It's something SCL specialized in. If you take a step back for a moment and look at information operations as a military endeavour, it's part of what's called multi-dimension