Monterey Cell Tower Con Moves to Watsonville

Print edition, Monterey Herald; Sunday, May 13, 2018

Watsonville, CA residents just dodged a bullet. Or did they?

With no quorum at their May 8th meeting, the City Council could not vote on a new ordinance that eliminates public hearings and Planning Commission review of “small cell” towers next to homes, schools, and businesses in Watsonville.

The same law firm that tried to con Monterey into believing that

“recent state and federal laws and regulations have preempted the city’s authority over permitting wireless communication facilities” is at it again in Watsonville.

Sadly, with small cell applications waiting for the new ordinance to be approved, the mayor, city attorney, and assistant city clerk have already signed onto the resolution to make the process a simple administrative permit.

By not showing up, the council created a problem:

  • There is an FCC deadline on these pending cell towers applications.
  • By letting the shot clock run out on applications deemed complete, these towers become approved.

Watsonville, please wake up. Your rights are in the process of being destroyed by your own city government.

Palo Alto Planning Director Resigns

By Kevin Kelly | Bay Area News Group April 19, 2018 at 7:09 pm; Original article here.

Hillary Gitelman, planning and community environment director for the city of Palo Alto, is resigning from her post. Her last day is May 11. (City of Palo Alto). Jonathan Lait will serve as interim director starting May 14, when Hillary Gitelman leaves for private sector job.

Hillary Gitelman, who became Palo Alto’s planning and community environment director in late 2013, has accepted a new position with San Francisco-based Environmental Science Associates, according to a news release. Her last day with Palo Alto is May 11, and Assistant Director Jonathan Lait will step in as interim planning director.

Gitelman’s accomplishments include overseeing an update of the city’s comprehensive plan through 2030 and working with the City Council to establish an annual cap on office construction, new rules for accessory dwelling units and new housing impact fees.

“In Palo Alto, the Planning Department is at the center of many complex and demanding initiatives, and Hillary and her team of dedicated employees have shown great resilience and adaptation to meet the community’s high expectations,” City Manager James Keene said in the news release.

City publicist Claudia Keith said Gitelman’s departure is not expected to delay ongoing planning projects, such as the council’s housing work plan.

Gitelman recently drew the ire of the United Neighbors citizens group after she upheld an advisory board’s decision to allow Verizon to install 11 small-cell antennas atop utility poles in four residential neighborhoods.

Palo Alto Verizon sWTF Plan Appealed to City Council

By Kevin Kelly | kkelly@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group; Original Article here.
PUBLISHED: April 17, 2018 at 1:29 pm

Palo Alto Cluster One Appeals

  1. Appeal — Ap-18-2: Herc Kwan, 2490 Louis Rd. (27 pages)
  2. Appeal — Ap-18-3: Francesca Kautz, 3324 South Court (8 pages)
  3. Appeal — AP-18-4: Christopher Lynn, 2802 Louis Rd. (5 pages)
  4. Appeal — AP-18-5: Jeanne Fleming, 2070 Webster St. (20 pages)
  5. Appeal — AP-18-6: RK Partharathy, 3409 Kenneth Dr. (12 pages)
  6. Appeal — AP-18-7: Russell Targ, 1010 Harriett St. (46 pages)
  7. Appeal — AP-18-8: Amrutha Kattamuri, 3189 Berryessa St. (126 pages)

More information at http://mystreetmychoice.com/paloalto.html

May 9, 2018 CHE Webinar — Invisible Hazards: RF Microwave Radiation Hazards
and Steps Needed for Policy Changes

Grassroots groups fight utility’s plan to install 11 Close Proximity Microwave Radiation Antennas (CPMRA) too close to homes in four residential neighborhoods

A photo illustration shows, at right, what a new Verizon cell antenna mounted atop an existing utility pole would look like along Suzanne Drive in Palo Alto. (City of Palo Alto)

Verizon’s plan to install CPMRA antennas in Palo Alto neighborhoods has sparked an outcry from residents who consider the fixtures an eyesore and want them covered underground.

The first phase of the plan calls for 11 small antennas in four neighborhoods, part of a Verizon Wireless project to install 93 utility pole-mounted systems throughout Palo Alto to boost wireless service.

“The only reason Verizon doesn’t want to vault its equipment is that under-grounding it is more expensive than placing it on utility poles,” Annette Fazzino, widow of former Mayor Gary Fazzino, said in a statement by United Neighbors, a grassroots group which has filed appeals with the city against the Verizon project.

“But saving money is not Palo Alto’s responsibility. Palo Alto’s responsibility is to preserve the quality of life in our neighborhoods, and we see no reason why this company should get a pass on adhering to the same aesthetics ordinances that the rest of us abide by.”

United Neighbors said the cities of Bern, Switzerland, and Rancho Palos Verdes require all or most telecom equipment to be stored in underground vaults.

In a statement, Verizon said it has worked with the Palo Alto community for more than two years on its small-cell design. “The appeal will only further delay our ability to provide the necessary network improvements to keep our customers connected,” Verizon publicist Heidi Flato wrote by email.

Given the intensity of the outcry, city staff decided to hold a public hearing on the Verizon project at the May 21 City Council meeting instead of placing it on the consent calendar as would normally happen.

Ruling in favor of Verizon, the city’s Architectural Review Board last month recommended allowing the devices to stay above ground. Verizon maintains it would not be able to underground the equipment while still meeting the city’s noise ordinance and other rules. The board advises Hillary Gitelman, the city’s Planning and Community Environment director, on project designs.

In appeals filed over the board’s recommendation, members of United Neighbors stated that Gitelman has given Verizon “the go-ahead to install hundreds of pounds of equipment on the utility poles at each location.” The 11 antennas are planned for the Midtown, Palo Verde, St. Claire Gardens and South of Midtown neighborhoods.

“It is our view that Palo Alto should be a leader in ensuring that the equipment required to support this service is thoughtfully integrated into residential neighborhoods,” United Neighbors member Jeanne Fleming wrote in her appeal.

“This means hiding it, not — as the Director’s decision would allow — mounting cheap, oversized equipment next to people’s homes — equipment that, in the words of Architectural Review Board member Robert Gooyer (who voted against the plan) — is ‘butt ugly.’ ”

Brain Tumors Incidence of Glioblastoma Rise in England 1995–2015

3/21/18 — by Alasdair Philips, Denis L. Henshaw, Graham Lamburn, and Michael O’Carroll; Original paper here.

ABSTRACT

Objective

To investigate detailed trends in malignant brain tumor incidence over a recent time period.

Methods

UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) data covering 81,135 ICD10 C71 brain tumors diagnosed in England (1995–2015) were used to calculate incidence rates (ASR) per 100k person–years, age–standardised to the European Standard Population (ESP–2013).

Results

We report a sustained and highly statistically significant ASR rise in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) across all ages. The ASR for GBM more than doubled from 2.4 to 5.0, with annual case numbers rising from 983 to 2531. Overall, this rise is mostly hidden in the overall data by a reduced incidence of lower grade tumors.

Conclusions

The rise is of importance for clinical resources and brain tumor etiology. The rise cannot be fully accounted for by promotion of lower–grade tumors, random chance or improvement in diagnostic techniques as it affects specific areas of the brain and only one type of brain tumor. Despite the large variation in case numbers by age, the percentage rise is similar across the age groups which suggests widespread environmental or lifestyle factors may be responsible.

HIGHLIGHTS

  • A clear description of the changing pattern in incidence of brain tumor types
  • The study used extensive data from an official and recognized quality source
  • The study included histological and morphological information
  • The study identified a significant and concerning incidence time trend
  • Some evidence is provided to help guide future research into causal mechanism

Philips et al. Figure 2

Philips et al. Figure 6

Continue reading “Brain Tumors Incidence of Glioblastoma Rise in England 1995–2015”

Senator John McCain Rests His Case

May 3, 2018, by Ron Elving; Original article and audio file here

Anyone who has followed the saga of Senator John McCain or ever reacted with emotion to his words or actions will recognize the man speaking in this valedictory volume. The voice and manner are familiar enough that we can almost hear and see him on every page. It recalls his previous literary efforts (he has written seven books with longtime collaborator Mark Salter), but it also ventures deeper into our collective memories of McCain and his world — as we prepare to part with both.

John McCain Reads From ‘The Restless Wave’

The Restless Wave is a plain-spoken and often painful personal accounting; a résumé of a contentious career and a defense of controversial political decisions. It may inspire or enrage. But it is less an effort to provoke such conflicting responses than a paean to McCain’s idea of America.

McCain wants to celebrate the America he knew — or perhaps only imagined — in the full flower of its global pre-eminence. Call it heritage or call it myth, it is a concept of America that McCain clearly feels he personifies, and one he senses is passing even as he reaches the end of his own life.

At 81, McCain is battling the same kind of brain cancer that claimed his Senate friend and frequent antagonist Ted Kennedy. McCain knows the odds and even notes that he may not live to see this book published.

Continue reading “Senator John McCain Rests His Case”

Senator John McCain Appeals For Civility And Humility

May 1, 2018 by Domenico Montanaro; original article here.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is dealing with the effects of brain cancer, released an excerpt of his forthcoming memoir, The Restless Wave, that gives some of his philosophy on how to do it — and obliquely criticizes President Trump. The sometimes-cantankerous former presidential candidate and prisoner of war points out that he hasn’t at times lived up to his own standard, as he has “disagreed, sometimes too heatedly”, with all of the six presidents he has served alongside.

McCain writes, humility is key:

“the self-knowledge that you possess as much inherent dignity as anyone else, and not one bit more. Among its other virtues, humility makes for more productive politics. If it vanishes entirely, we will tear our society apart”

Continue reading “Senator John McCain Appeals For Civility And Humility”

New Networks Institute Files to Halt Proposed Verizon-NY Settlement

NNI and the IRREGULATORS Call for a Continuation of the Investigation

April 27, 2018 by Bruce Kushnick; Original article here.

What’s At Stake

  • Billions in Cross-Subsidies: from the regulated State Wireline Telecom Utility to unregulated private Wireless companies
  • Rampant customer overcharging
  • Failure to upgrade cities’ Wireline infrastructure from copper to fiber optics
  • Decades of questionable tax losses

Governor Cuomo is implicated in eliminating these investigations. Learn More about this proposed settlement or Read Our Filing.

Summary

On March 2, 2018, a settlement was proposed between Verizon New York (Verizon-NY), the state-telecommunications utility, and the NY Department of Public Service, (NYPSC), joined by Communications of America, (“CWA”), and Public Utility Law Project), (“PULP”) to end an investigation that started in 2016, but was part of a series of proceedings over the last 5 years at the New York State Public Services Commission (NYPSC). This investigation consisted of two parts:

Part 1: Verizon has left NY state’s copper-based Wireline state utility networks to deteriorate and there has been a lack of upgrades to broadband or even maintenance of these existing wires.

Part 2: There has been massive financial shell game between the regulated Verizon-NY and the unregulated Verizon subsidiaries, especially Verizon Wireless.

The settlement includes some basic fixes to the neglected infrastructure for Part 1, but Part 2 has been eliminated from this proposed settlement.

Over the last 8 years New Networks Institute and the IRREGULATORS have uncovered a massive financial accounting shell game where billions of dollars have been charged to local phone customers, making the state utility networks a cash cow to fund the other unregulated Verizon businesses, including the build-out of the Verizon Wireless network. These cross-subsidies cost customers thousands of dollars extra and diverted billions in construction budgets to roll out the Verizon Wireless networks instead of upgrading cities’ Wireline infrastructure, among other harms.

These issues need to not only be investigated but the cross-subsidies need to immediately end.

The proposed settlement

  • Fails to even acknowledge the years of investigations by the State
  • Address any of the primary problems

In addition, Governor Cuomo’s fingerprints are all over the elimination of the investigations to help his broadband plan and to give other gifts to his corporate friends. Tucked away in the NY State budget was some Telecom-written wireless legislation that aids in the removal of city regulations and any examination of what the phone companies want to do for a non-existent wireless service, so-called “5G”.

Why is this Critical Now?

Most people do not understand that there is still state telecommunications utility, like water or gas or electricity and most people believe that the utility is just the aging copper wires.  They have been misinformed.

Fiber-to-the-Premises, (“FTTP”) for FiOS, and the wires used for the cell sites for Verizon Wireless, as well the Business Data Services , are ALL part of the state utility infrastructure and have been paid for mainly by Wireline customers.

  1. Verizon et al. have been dismantling the state utilities slowly for the last decade with the plan to remove any remaining public utility regulations or obligations and to hand over the State Telecom Wireline infrastructure to Verizon Wireless, making this infrastructure private property (which will block and harm competitors)
  2. The construction expenses for new infrastructure will remain mostly in the State Telecom Utility, but the perks of being a utility will be available to Verizon Wireless. At the same time, the pricing for service will move to the Wireless dollars-per-gigabyte plan, in order to make more money.
  3. This manipulation constitutes fraud. As we exposed, using manipulated accounting, Verizon et al. have made local service ‘appear’ unprofitable, but this has been artificial. The state utility now pays the majority of expenses, including construction, or “corporate operations” expense for all of the subsidiaries using the wires. And this manipulation means that they had major losses and major tax benefits, got the State to raise rates multiple times, and yet Verizon says that they can’t afford to upgrade rural areas or finish or even maintain cities. .
  4. Loss of Control Over Your Services. If you use your cell phone, if it is from Verizon, it goes to a cell site then to a Verizon wire, most of which are part of the State Telecom Utility. At home, Verizon’s plan is that your ‘high-speed’ cable TV will also become Wireless. But, ironically, Wireless requires a fiber optic wire, which would also be part of the State Telecom Utility — which remains conveniently unidentified in this scheme.
  5. Further Loss of Competition. Competitors who use these network wires will pay through the nose or not be allowed access. Net Neutrality, privacy, and all other aspects of communications are also in the cross-hairs. Getting rid of Net Neutrality allows Verizon to make the company’s other subsidiaries the priority, and getting rid of privacy allows you to be tracked and your information to be sold — similar to the recent Facebook debacle.
  6. This Is a Nationwide Problem: This is not just a Verizon-NY problem. Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink holding companies control the state incumbent utilities, and they have used the same accounting and business practices. Verizon-NY just happens to be a fully documented model of the issues.
  7. The FCC has been captured and is helping Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink in every possible way with 15–25 interlocking proceedings, like Net Neutrality, privacy, or ‘shutting off the copper’ and preempting state laws to give the companies complete control.
  8. This is the End Game. There are too many moving parts to explain here, but once the State Telecom Utility is confiscated in each state, one company per state would then control not only the infrastructure, but the other critical services using this infrastructure. These monopoly companies get to control the price of all services, including Wireless, and broadband. They can control and manipulate the speed to maximize profit, and they control who gets upgraded.

Read Our Filing. We’re calling for a halt to this Verizon NY gift and continued and expanded investigations because it exposes all of the financial flows of money and the cross-subsidies between Verizon New York and the affiliates. If we don’t do it, all of these next-step bad public policy actions will get worse.

Read a Summary of our Report: “Verizon New York’s 2016 Financial Annual Report: “Follow the Money: Financial Analysis and Implications”.

Need More Details? CLICK for a two-page Fact Sheet to see a few more details of this manipulated accounting. Here’s a few:

  • Verizon-NY Didn’t Pay Most Taxes: Since 2010–2016, Verizon NY lost $15.7 billion and didn’t pay most taxes; instead Verizon had tax benefits of $7.2 billion.
  • The Utility Illegally Funded the Wireless Networks. From 2010 to 2012, alone, Verizon NY paid about $2.8 billion to build out the fiber optic wires used by Verizon Wireless — and that money was charged to local phone customers.
  • Local phone customers paid over $1000.00 extra, per line, in rate increases since 2005. Worse, local phone customers have been paying around $500 extra a year; the actual costs to offer the copper-based services should have been in steep decline, and prices should have followed.
  • Low income families, seniors, small businesses — rural areas — all paid thousands of dollars extra.
  • There is no cable competition and the Verizon cut a deal with the cable companies to bundle wireless and/or let them rent the wireless networks.

CLICK TO PLEASE FILE “LATE” COMMENTS TO ENDORSE OUR PLAN:

NOTE: There was a comments period at the New York State Public Service Commission (NYPSC) which ended April 16th, 2018 and you (and everyone else) missed it. Thousands of people, companies, cities and politicians participated and testified in the previous related proceedings, but for this decision, NY State failed to properly notify these people and organizations — anyone — about this proceeding.

WE REQUEST:

  • We request an extension of the current comment period until July 15th, 2018 to examine the Verizon NY 2017 Financial Annual Report, published May 31, 2018.
  • We are calling for a halt to the proposed settlement between Verizon, NY, the NYPSC and parties, which has eliminated all mention of the investigation of the financial cross-subsidies between Verizon NY and Verizon’s subsidiaries
  • We are calling for the NYPSC to continue to investigate the billions of dollars in cross-subsidies between Verizon NY and Verizon Wireless and the other Verizon subsidiaries — then fix this ongoing financial shell game.

About Us: The IRREGULATORS is an independent consortium of senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers who are former senior staffers from the FCC, state advocate and Attorneys General Office experts and lawyers, and former Telecom consultants. Members of the group have been working together, in different configurations, since 1999.

Click and visit our library of data, analysis, filings, etc. This is mostly dedicated to Verizon NY and the FCC’s current policies.

Sebastopol Planning Commission Apr 24 2018

The residents of Sebastopol showed up last night to ask the Planning Commission to set the priorities of the City Planning Department staff and the City Attorney when they work to update the existings, outdated Sebastopol Municipal Wireless code.

The Municipal Wireless code revision will be proceeding in parallel to the Planning Commission’s processing of an application by Epic Wireless to install two 4G/5G Close Proximity Microwave Radiation Antennas (CPMRA), one in a residential zone and the other in a commercial zone. It is unclear at this point if the code revision will affect the processing of the current application. You can learn more specifics about this application on the Sebastopol page of the My Street, My Choice! web site.

View Public Comments During the April 24, 2018 Sebastopol Planning Commission Meeting

  • 00:12:30–00:25:00 — Public Comments on Non-Agendized Items, Group A
  • 00:25:00–00:36:40 — Public Comments on Non-Agendized Items, Group B
  • 00:37:00–00:43:00 — Public Comments on Non-Agendized Items, Group C
  • 01:23:55–01:39:25 — Planning Director Presentation re: Wireless Municipal Code Update
  • 01:39:25–01:52:40 — Planning Commission Questions of Planning Director
  • 01:52:55–02:06:10 — Public Comments on Wireless Municipal Code Update, Group A
  • 02:06:10–02:13:10 — Public Comments on Wireless Municipal Code Update, Group B
  • 02:13:15–02:23:55 — Public Comments on Wireless Municipal Code Update, Group C

Continue reading “Sebastopol Planning Commission Apr 24 2018”

I Made the Psychological Warfare Tool for Cambridge Analytica

March 18, 2018 The Guardian article by Carole Cadwalladr; Original article here.
Part of The Guardian series: The Cambridge Analytica Files

Go right now. Watch the video of Christopher Wylie here; then read the article there or continue here.

In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defense and elections operations. Its defense arm was a contractor to the UK’s Ministry of Defense and the US’s Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumor, disinformation and fake news.

Start of article . . .

Christopher Wylie:

If you do not respect the agency of people, anything you do after that point is not conducive to democracy.

Paul-Olivier Dehaye:

it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows. Facebook has denied and denied and denied this. It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”

Cambridge Analytica: the Key Players

Alexander Nix, CEO

An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. From 2007 he took over the company’s elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investments from Robert and Rebekah Mercer.

Aleksandr Kogan, Data Miner

Aleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CA’s data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan.

Steve Bannon, Former Board Member

A former investment banker turned “alt-right” media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. In August 2016, he became Donald Trump’s campaign CEO. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the “populist, economic nationalist” agenda that would carry him into the White House. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. By August 2017, his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out.

Robert Mercer, Investor

Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60 million war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US taxes.

Rebekah Mercer, Investor

Rebekah Mercer has a math degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her father’s billions. The forty-something, the second of Mercer’s three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. The conservative mega‑donors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trump’s presidential campaign.


The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle. By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role.

At 24, Wylie came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign. Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology — “information operations” — then turn it on the US electorate.

It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realization. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The Great British Brexit Robbery”, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.

By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group,

“SCL Group provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide. For over 25 years, we have conducted behavioral change programs in over 60 countries & have been formally recognized for our work in defense & social change.”

. . . had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out.

Wylie: “It’s insane. The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May, it was revealed that the company had “reached out” to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. Then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election.

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

We broke Facebook,” he says. And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.

He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”

Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data.

The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on Feb 27, 2018, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix:

Rebecca Pow: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?”

Alexander Nix : “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that — at least in 2014 — that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested.

Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately. Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. It’s taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where it’s possible for him to finally come forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic — Robert Mueller’s in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after The Observer’s first article in this investigation.

It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind – to undo events that he set in motion. Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold .

There are many points where this story could begin.

One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible. Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party.

At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics. “Politics is like the mob, though,” he says. “You never really leave. I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree.”

Politics is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition. “He’s one of the brightest people you will ever meet,” a senior politician who’s known Wylie since he was 20 told me. “Sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes a curse.”

Meanwhile, at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, two psychologists, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, were experimenting with a way of studying personality – by quantifying it. Starting in 2007, Stillwell, while a student, had devised various apps for Facebook, one of which, a personality quiz called myPersonality, had gone viral.

Users were scored on “big five” personality traits:

  1. Openness
  2. Conscientiousness
  3. Extroversion]
  4. Agreeableness
  5. Neuroticism

. . . and in exchange, 40% of them consented to give him access to their Facebook profiles. Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook “likes” across millions of people.

The research was original, groundbreaking and had obvious possibilities. “They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the centre told me. “There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked ‘I hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.

“There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.”

The defense and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research. Boeing, a major US defence contractor, funded Kosinski’s PhD and DARPA, the US government’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski’s work.

But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the Lib Dems. It is fair to say that he didn’t have a clue what he was walking into. An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans?

“I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 19th century,” Wylie explains. “And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data.

“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”

Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems weren’t interested.

“I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI.”

Another Lib Dem connection introduced Wylie to a company called SCL Group, one of whose subsidiaries, SCL Elections, would go on to create Cambridge Analytica (an incorporated venture between SCL Elections and Robert Mercer, funded by the latter). For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same.

Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’” An example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans? Another example of the visual messages trialled by GSR’s online profiling test.

In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defense and elections operations. Its defense arm was a contractor to the UK’s Ministry of Defense and the US’s Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumor, disinformation and fake news. SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves.

Wylie holds a British Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa – a UK work visa given to just 200 people a year. He was working inside government (with the Lib Dems) as a political strategist with advanced data science skills. But no one, least of all him, could have predicted what came next. When he turned up at SCL’s offices in Mayfair, he had no clue that he was walking into the middle of a nexus of defense and intelligence projects, private contractors and cutting-edge cyberweaponry.

Christopher Wylie:

“The thing I think about all the time is, what if I’d taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this.”

A few months later, in autumn 2013, Wylie met Steve Bannon. At the time, he was editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which he had brought to Britain to support his friend Nigel Farage in his mission to take Britain out of the European Union. What was he like?

Christopher Wylie:

“Smart. Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel.”

Wylie meeting Bannon was the moment petrol was poured on a flickering flame. Wylie lives for ideas. He had a theory to prove. And at the time, this was a purely intellectual problem. Politics was like fashion, he told Bannon.

Christopher Wylie:

“[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”

But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group — the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.

I tell him that another former employee described the firm as “MI6 for hire”, and I’d never quite understood it.

Christopher Wylie:

“It’s like dirty MI6 because you’re not constrained. There’s no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It’s normal for a ‘market research company’ to amass data on domestic populations. And if you’re working in some country and there’s an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that’s just a bonus.”

When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though it’s one he can back up with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert for the US air force on a plane. “And the cyberwarfare guy is like, ‘Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare for elections.’”

It was Bannon who took this idea to the Mercers: Robert Mercer – the co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who used his billions to pursue a rightwing agenda, donating to Republican causes and supporting Republican candidates – and his daughter Rebekah.

Nix and Wylie flew to New York to meet the Mercers in Rebekah’s Manhattan apartment.

Christopher Wylie:

“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”

Your type?

“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole [Milo Yiannopoulos] thing.”

Robert Mercer was a pioneer in AI and machine translation. He helped invent algorithmic trading – which replaced hedge fund managers with computer programs – and he listened to Wylie’s pitch. It was for a new kind of political message-targeting based on an influential and groundbreaking 2014 paper researched at Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre, called: “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans”.

Christopher Wylie:

In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room. Whereas it’s the opposite way around with Mercer. He said very little, but he really listened. He wanted to understand the science. And he wanted proof that it worked.”

And to do that, Wylie needed data. How Cambridge Analytica acquired the data has been the subject of internal reviews at Cambridge University, of many news articles and much speculation and rumour.

When Nix was interviewed by MPs last month, Damian Collins asked Nix:

Collins: “Does any of your data come from Global Science Research company?”

Nix: “GSR?”

Collins: “Yes.”

Nix: “We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.”

Collins: “They have not supplied you with data or information?”

Nix: “No.”

Collins: “Your datasets are not based on information you have received from them?”

Nix: “No.”

Collins: “At all?”

Nix: “At all.”

The problem with Nix’s response to Collins is that Wylie has a copy of an executed contract, dated 4 June 2014, which confirms that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with a company called Global Science Research (GSR), owned by Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, specifically premised on the harvesting and processing of Facebook data, so that it could be matched to personality traits and voter rolls.

Wylie has receipts showing that Cambridge Analytica spent $7 million to amass this data, about $1 million of it with GSR. He has the bank records and wire transfers. Emails reveal Wylie first negotiated with Michal Kosinski, one of the co-authors of the original myPersonality research paper, to use the myPersonality database. But when negotiations broke down, another psychologist, Aleksandr Kogan, offered a solution that many of his colleagues considered unethical.

Kogan offered to replicate Kosinski and Stillwell’s research and cut them out of the deal. For Wylie it seemed a perfect solution. “Kosinski was asking for $500,000 for the IP but Kogan said he could replicate it and just harvest his own set of data.” (Kosinski says the fee was to fund further research.)

Kogan then set up GSR to do the work, and proposed to Wylie they use the data to set up an interdisciplinary institute working across the social sciences. “What happened to that idea,” I ask Wylie. “It never happened. I don’t know why. That’s one of the things that upsets me the most.”

It was Bannon’s interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie’s intellectual concept, but it was Robert Mercer’s millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just their personal data, but their friends’ personal data too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total — unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.

The email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn’t authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What’s more, under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.

Christopher Wylie:

“Facebook could see it was happening. Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.”

Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps. Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next – how it extracted psychological insights from the “seeders” and then built an algorithm to profile millions more.

For more than a year, the reporting around what Cambridge Analytica did or didn’t do for Trump has revolved around the question of “psychographics”, but Wylie points out:

Christopher Wylie:

“Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldn’t you use it in your biggest campaign ever?”

In December 2015, the Guardian’s Harry Davies published the first report about Cambridge Analytica acquiring Facebook data and using it to support Ted Cruz in his campaign to be the US Republican candidate. But it wasn’t until many months later that Facebook took action. And then, all they did was write a letter. In August 2016, shortly before the US election, and two years after the breach took place, Facebook’s lawyers wrote to Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and told him the data had been illicitly obtained and that “GSR was not authorised to share or sell it”. They said it must be deleted immediately.

Christopher Wylie:

“I already had. But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it. Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”

There were multiple copies of the data. It had been emailed in unencrypted files.

Cambridge Analytica rejected all allegations the Observer put to them.

Dr Kogan – who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan – is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn’t know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he’s received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”

Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. It was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with “consumers”. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques.

The first slide illustrates how a “rumour campaign” spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election – in which the company worked – by spreading the idea that the “election would be rigged”. The final slide, branded with Lukoil’s logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its “deliverables”: “psychographic messaging”. Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.

When I asked Bill Browder – an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals – what he made of it, he said:

Bill Browder:

“Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities.”

Last month, Nix told MPs on the parliamentary committee investigating fake news: “We have never worked with a Russian organisation in Russia or any other company. We do not have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.” There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption.

Cambridge Analytica is “Chris’s Frankenstein”, says a friend of his. “He created it. It’s his data Frankenmonster. And now he’s trying to put it right.” Only once has Wylie made the case of pointing out that he was 24 at the time. But he was. He thrilled to the intellectual possibilities of it. He didn’t think of the consequences. And I wonder how much he’s processed his own role or responsibility in it. Instead, he’s determined to go on the record and undo this thing he has created. The past few months have been like watching a tornado gathering force.

When Wylie turns the full force of his attention to something – his strategic brain, his attention to detail, his ability to plan 12 moves ahead – it is sometimes slightly terrifying to behold. Dealing with someone trained in information warfare has its own particular challenges, and his suite of extraordinary talents include the kind of high-level political skills that makes House of Cards look like The Great British Bake Off. And not everyone’s a fan. Any number of ex-colleagues — even the ones who love him — call him “Machiavellian”. Another described the screaming matches he and Nix would have.

“What do your parents make of your decision to come forward?” I ask him.

“They get it. My dad sent me a cartoon today, which had two characters hanging off a cliff, and the first one’s saying ‘Hang in there.’ And the other is like: ‘Fuck you.’”

Which are you?

“Probably both.”

What isn’t in doubt is what a long, fraught journey it has been to get to this stage. And how fearless he is.

After many months, I learn the terrible, dark back story that throws some light on his determination, and which he discusses candidly. At six, while at school, Wylie was abused by a mentally unstable person. The school tried to cover it up, blaming his parents, and a long court battle followed. Wylie’s childhood and school career never recovered. His parents – his father is a doctor and his mother is a psychiatrist – were wonderful, he says. “But they knew the trajectory of people who are put in that situation, so I think it was particularly difficult for them, because they had a deeper understanding of what that does to a person long term.”

He says he grew up listening to psychologists discuss him in the third person, and, aged 14, he successfully sued the British Columbia Ministry of Education and forced it to change its inclusion policies around bullying. What I observe now is how much he loves the law, lawyers, precision, order. I come to think of his pink hair as a false-flag operation. What he cannot tolerate is bullying.

Is What Cambridge Analytica Does Akin to Bullying?

Christopher Wylie:

I think it’s worse than bullying. Because people don’t necessarily know it’s being done to them. At least bullying respects the agency of people because they know. So it’s worse, because if you do not respect the agency of people, anything that you’re doing after that point is not conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy.”

Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says

it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows. Facebook has denied and denied and denied this. It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”

Facebook denies that the data transfer was a breach. In addition, a spokesperson said:

“Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it’s a serious abuse of our rules. Both Aleksandr Kogan as well as the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”

Millions of people’s personal information was stolen and used to target them in ways they wouldn’t have seen, and couldn’t have known about, by a mercenary outfit, Cambridge Analytica, who, Wylie says, “would work for anyone”. Who would pitch to Russian oil companies. It occurs to me to ask Wylie this one night.

The Guardian: Would Cambridge Analytica subvert elections abroad on behalf of foreign governments?

Wylie: “Yes.”

The Guardian: Nato or non-Nato?

Wylie: “Either. I mean they’re mercenaries. They’ll work for pretty much anyone who pays.”

It’s an incredible revelation. It also encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing – at a global scale, with added cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public — our intimate family connections, our “likes”, our crumbs of personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that’s expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically motivated billionaire. The Facebook data is out in the wild. And for all Wylie’s efforts, there’s no turning the clock back.

Tamsin Shaw, a philosophy professor at New York University, and the author of a recent New York Review of Books article on cyberwar and the Silicon Valley economy, told me that she’d pointed to the possibility of private contractors obtaining cyberweapons that had at least been in part funded by US defense. She calls Wylie’s disclosures “wild” and points out that “the whole Facebook project” has only been allowed to become as vast and powerful as it has because of the US national security establishment.

Tamsin Shaw:

“It’s a form of very deep but soft power that’s been seen as an asset for the US. Russia has been so explicit about this, paying for the ads in roubles and so on. It’s making this point, isn’t it? That Silicon Valley is a US national security asset that they’ve turned on itself.”

Or, more simply: blowback.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Face Class Action Lawsuit

The Guardian article by Owen Bowcott and Alex Hern April 10, 2018;Original article here.

British and US lawyers have launched a joint class action against Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and two other companies for allegedly misusing the personal data of more than 71 million people.The lawsuit claims the firms obtained users’ private information from the social media network to develop “political propaganda campaigns” in the UK and the US.

Facebook, it is said, may initially have been misled, but failed to act responsibly to protect the data of 1 million British users and 70.6 million people in America. The data, it is suggested, was first used in the British EU referendum and then in the US during the 2016 presidential election.

As well as Cambridge Analytica, the two firms named in the legal writ are SCL Group Limited and Global Science Research Limited (GSR). Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign and White House adviser, led Cambridge Analytica in 2014, when the data was collected and extracted, the legal papers state. The Cambridge University neuroscientist Aleksandr Kogan, a founding director of GSR, is also named.

Cambridge Analytica was set up in 2013 as an offshoot of SCL Group, which offered similar services to businesses and political parties. All the companies and Kogan have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

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