Mindfuck Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Verbena Limited

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9781984854636

  International edition ISBN 9780593229149

  Ebook ISBN 9781984854643

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover photograph: Emma Innocenti/Getty Images

  v5.4

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  On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées.

  (One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.)

  —VICTOR HUGO

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Genesis

  Chapter 2: Lessons in Failure

  Chapter 3: We Fight Terror in Prada

  Chapter 4: Steve from America

  Chapter 5: Cambridge Analytica

  Chapter 6: Trojan Horses

  Chapter 7: The Dark Triad

  Chapter 8: From Russia with Likes

  Chapter 9: Crimes Against Democracy

  Chapter 10: The Apprentice

  Chapter 11: Coming Out

  Chapter 12: Revelations

  Epilogue: On Regulation: A Note to Legislators

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  GENESIS

  -

  With each step, my new shoes dig into my heels. I clutch a dark-blue binder, filled with documents organized by colored tabs. Awestruck by where I’ve found myself, and apprehensive of where I’m heading, I focus on the sounds of our footsteps. An aide reminds us to move quickly so we won’t be seen. We walk past uniformed guards, into an atrium, and turn down a corridor. The aide pushes open a door and we rush down some stairs and into a hallway that looks exactly like the last one—marble floors, high ceilings, wooden doors with the occasional American flag. There are seven of us, and our footsteps echo through the hall. We are close; then I’m caught. A congressman spots me and waves hello. Back again already? A handful of journalists wanders out of a press conference. They clock my electric pink hair and know who I am.

  Two cameramen run in front of me and start filming, walking backward as they do. A scrum forms, the questions start coming—Mr. Wylie, a question from NBC! A question from CNN! Why are you here?—and one of my lawyers reminds me to keep my mouth shut. The aide points me to an elevator, warning the journalists to keep their distance, and we pile in. The cameras keep snapping as the doors close.

  I’m jammed in the back of the elevator, surrounded by people in suits. We start to descend, dropping deep underground. Everyone stays quiet on the way down. My mind is swimming with all of the prep work I’ve done with my lawyers—what U.S. laws were broken and by whom, what rights I do and don’t have as a non-citizen visiting America, how to calmly respond to accusations, what happens if I am arrested afterward. I have no idea what to expect. No one does.

  We come to a stop and the elevator doors glide open. There’s nothing down here except another door, with a large red sign that reads RESTRICTED AREA in white lettering. NO PUBLIC OR MEDIA ACCESS. We’re three floors beneath the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C.

  Beyond the door, the floors are covered in a plush maroon carpet. Uniformed guards confiscate our phones and other electronics, placing them on a numbered shelf behind the desk, one to a person, and giving us each a numbered ticket. They tell us we can have only pencils and paper beyond this point. And on the way out, they warn us, our papers could be confiscated if it’s determined that we’ve taken notes on anything of a sensitive nature.

  Two guards push open a massive steel door. One of them gestures us through, and one by one we step into a long hallway dimly illuminated by fluorescent lights. The walls are paneled in dark wood, and the corridor is lined with long rows of American flags on stands. It smells like an old building, stale and musty, with hints of cleaning fluid. The guards lead us down the hall, turning left and continuing to yet another door. Above, a wooden seal emblazoned with a giant eagle, arrows clutched in its talons, stares down at us. We have arrived at our destination: the Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—the same room where classified congressional briefings are held.

  Inside, hit by the glare of fluorescent lights, my eyes need time to adjust. The space is thoroughly nondescript, with blank beige walls and a conference table surrounded by chairs. It could be any room in any of the numerous bland federal buildings scattered across Washington, but I’m struck by the silence of the SCIF. It is soundproof, built with multilayer walls that make it impervious to surveillance. The architecture is said to be blast-proof. This is a secure space, a place for America’s secrets.

  Once we’ve taken our seats, the members of Congress begin filing in. Aides place tabulated binders on the table in front of each committee member—the Democrats’ ranking member, California congressman Adam Schiff, sits directly across from me, and to his left sits Congresswoman Terri Sewell, with Eric Swalwell and Joaquin Castro clustered together at the far end. I’m flanked by my lawyers and my friend Shahmir Sanni, a fellow whistleblower. We give the Republicans a few minutes to show up. They never do.

  It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum. As the former director of research, I’ve brought with me evidence of how Facebook’s data was weaponized by the firm, and how the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states. Schiff leads the questioning. A former federal prosecutor, he is sharp and precise with his lines of inquiry, and he wastes no time getting to the heart of the matter.

  Did you work with Steve Bannon? Yes.

  Did Cambridge Analytica have any contacts with potential Russian agents? Yes.

  Do you believe that this data was used to sway the American electorate to elect the president of the United States? Yes.

  An hour goes by, then two, then three. I chose to come here of my own accord and to answer these questions about how a liberal, gay twenty-four-year-old Canadian found himself part of a British military contractor developing psychological warfare tools for the American alt-right. Fresh out of university, I had taken a job at a London firm called SCL Group, which was supplying the U.K. Ministry of Defence and NATO armies with expertise in information operations. After Western militaries were grappling with how to tackle radicalization online, the firm wanted me to help build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat extremism online. It was fascinating, challenging, and exciting all at once. We were about to break new ground for the cyber defenses of Britain, America, and their allies and confront bubbling insurgencies of radical extremism with data, algorithms, and targeted narratives online. But through a chain of events that unfolded in 2014, a billionaire acquired our project in order to build his own radicalized insurgency in America. Cambridge Analytica, a company few had ever heard of, a company t
hat weaponized research in psychological profiling, managed to turn the world upside down.

  In the military, when weapons fall into the wrong hands, they call it blowback. It looked as if this blowback had detonated in the White House itself. I could not continue working on something so corrosive to our societies, so I blew the whistle, reported the whole thing to the authorities, and worked with journalists to warn the public about what was going on. Sitting before this panel, jet-lagged from a transatlantic flight the day before, I still cannot help but feel on the spot as the questions grow more pointed. But several times, my attempts to explain the intricacies of the company’s operations leave everyone with puzzled faces, so I simply pull out a binder and slide it to the congressmen. What the hell, I think. I’ve come this far, so I might as well give them everything I have with me. There is no break, and the door behind me remains closed the entire time. I’m locked in a stuffy, windowless room deep underground, with nowhere to look except straight into the eyes of these members of Congress as they all try to figure out what the hell just happened to their country.

  * * *

  —

  THREE MONTHS BEFORE THIS, on March 17, 2018, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Britain’s Channel 4 News had simultaneously published the results of a yearlong joint investigation, spurred by my decision to reveal the truth about what was happening inside Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. My coming out as a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. In Britain, the National Crime Agency (NCA), MI5 (the U.K.’s domestic intelligence agency), the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Electoral Commission, and London’s Metropolitan Police Service all got involved. In the United States, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) jumped in.

  In the weeks before that first story, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller had been heating up. In February, Mueller indicted thirteen Russian citizens and three Russian companies, charging them with two separate counts of conspiracy. A week later came indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates. On March 16, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, just a little more than twenty-four hours before he was to retire with a pension. People were desperate for information about what had happened between the Trump campaign and Russia, but no one had been able to connect the dots. I provided evidence tying Cambridge Analytica to Donald Trump, Facebook, Russian intelligence, international hackers, and Brexit. This evidence revealed how both an obscure foreign contractor engaged in illegal activity and the same foreign contractor had been used by the winning Trump and Brexit campaigns. The email chains, internal memos, invoices, bank transfer records, and project documentation I brought demonstrated that Trump and Brexit had deployed the same strategies, powered by the same technologies, directed by many of the same people—all under the specter of covert Russian involvement.

  Two days after the story’s release, an urgent question was brought to the main chamber of the British Parliament. In a rare moment of solidarity, government ministers and senior opposition members of Parliament sang as a unified chorus about Facebook’s negligence in failing to prevent its platform from becoming a hostile propaganda network for elections and the implications for Western democracies. The next wave of stories focused on Brexit, with the integrity of the referendum vote called into question. A collection of documents I provided to law enforcement revealed that the Vote Leave campaign had used secret Cambridge Analytica subsidiaries to spend dark money to propagate disinformation on Facebook and Google ad networks. This was determined to be illegal by the U.K.’s Electoral Commission, with the scheme ending up as one of the largest and most consequential breaches of campaign finance law in British history. The office of the U.K.’s prime minister, 10 Downing Street, descended into communication crisis as the evidence of Vote Leave’s cheating emerged. The NCA and MI5 were later handed evidence of the Russian embassy’s direct relationship with the largest funders of pro-Brexit campaigns during the referendum. A week later, Facebook’s stock plummeted 18 percent, amounting to an $80 billion loss in valuation. The turbulence would continue, culminating in what still stands as the largest single-day loss in share value in U.S. corporate history.

  On March 27, 2018, I was called before Parliament for a live public hearing—something I’d get quite used to over the next several months. We covered everything from Cambridge Analytica’s reliance on hackers and bribes to Facebook’s data breach to Russian intelligence operations. After the hearing, the FBI, DOJ, SEC, and FTC launched investigations. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee, House Judiciary Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senate Judiciary Committee all wanted to talk to me. Within weeks, the European Union and more than twenty countries had opened up inquiries into Facebook, social media, and disinformation.

  I told my story to the world, and now every screen was a mirror reflecting it back at me. For two weeks straight, my life was chaos. Days would start with appearances on British breakfast shows and European networks at 6 A.M. London time, continuing with interviews on U.S. networks until midnight. Reporters followed me everywhere. I started to receive threats. Fearing for my safety, I had to hire bodyguards to protect me at public events. My parents, both physicians, had to temporarily close their medical clinic due to a frenzy of journalists asking questions and scaring patients. In the months that followed, my life became almost unmanageable, but I knew I had to keep sounding the alarm.

  The story of Cambridge Analytica shows how our identities and behavior have become commodities in the high-stakes data trade. The companies that control the flow of information are among the most powerful in the world; the algorithms they’ve designed in secret are shaping minds in the United States and elsewhere in ways previously unimaginable. No matter what issue you care about most—gun violence, immigration, free speech, religious freedom—you can’t escape Silicon Valley, the new epicenter of America’s crisis of perception. My work with Cambridge Analytica exposed the dark side of tech innovation. We innovated. The alt-right innovated. Russia innovated. And Facebook, that same site where you share your party invites and baby pictures, allowed those innovations to be unleashed.

  * * *

  —

  I SUSPECT I WOULDN’T have been interested in technology, or ended up at Cambridge Analytica, had I been born into a different body. I defaulted to computers because there was not much else available to a kid like me. I grew up on Vancouver Island, on the west coast of British Columbia, surrounded by oceans, forests, and farmland. My parents were both physicians, and I was their eldest, followed by my two baby sisters, Jaimie and Lauren. When I was eleven, I started to notice that my legs were becoming stiffer and stiffer. I couldn’t run as fast as the other kids, and I started to walk funny, which of course made me a target for bullies. I was diagnosed with two relatively rare conditions, whose symptoms included severe neuropathic pain, muscle weakness, and vision and hearing impairment. By twelve I was in a wheelchair—just in time for the onset of adolescence—and I used that chair for the rest of my school days.

  When you are in a wheelchair, people treat you differently. You can sometimes feel more like an object than a person—your means of getting around is how people come to understand and define you. You have to approach buildings and structures differently—What entrances can I go in? How do I reach my destination while avoiding stairs? You learn to look for things that other people never notice.

  Not long after I discovered the computer lab, it became the one room at school where I didn’t feel alienated. Outside, there were either bullies or patronizing staff. Even when teachers shepherded other kids to interact with me, it was always done out of obligation, which became even more annoying than being ignored. Instead I’d go to the computer lab.

  I started making webpages around age thirteen. My first website was a Flash animat
ion of the Pink Panther being chased by a bumbling Inspector Clouseau. Soon after, I saw a video about programming tic-tac-toe in JavaScript and thought it was the coolest thing ever. The game seems simple enough until you start having to break down all of the logic. You can’t just let the computer randomly select a box, as that would be boring. You have to guide the computer with rules, like putting an X in a box adjacent to another X—that is, unless there is an O already in that row or column. And what about diagonal Xs—how do we explain them?

  Eventually I strung together hundreds of lines of spaghetti code. I still remember the feeling of making a move and then watching my little creation play back. I felt like a conjurer. And the more I practiced my incantations, the more powerful my magic could become.

  Outside of computer lab, school remained an education in what I wasn’t able or allowed to do, and who I could not be. My parents encouraged me to keep trying to find a place where I could fit in, so when I was fifteen, I spent the summer of 2005 boarding at Lester B. Pearson United World College, an international school in Victoria named after the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Canadian prime minister who conceptualized the world’s first U.N. peacekeeping force during the 1950s Suez Crisis. Spending so much time with students from every part of the world was enthralling, and for the first time, I was actually interested in the lessons and what my peers had to say. I became friends with a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who told me one evening when we were up late in our residence hall about how his family was murdered and what it was like walking alone all the way to a refugee camp in Uganda when he was just a child.

  But it was after sitting at a dinner one evening in the dining hall where Palestinian and Arab students sat directly across from Israeli students, forcefully debating the future of their homelands, that I really started to wake up to the world around me. I realized how much I didn’t know about what was happening—but I wanted to—and so I very quickly developed an interest in politics. The following school year, I began skipping class to attend town hall events with local members of Parliament. At school, I rarely talked to anyone, but at these events I felt free to express myself. In a classroom, you sit in the back while the teacher tells you how and what to think. There is a curriculum, a prescription of thought. But in a town hall, I discovered the opposite. Sure, the politician stands up front, but it is the people in the audience—us—who get to tell him or her what we think. That inversion was so incredibly appealing to me, and whenever members of Parliament would announce an event, I’d show up, ask questions, and even tell them what I thought.