More skeletons tumble out of the closet.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie on Wednesday claimed that JD(U) had availed the services of the data mining firm's parent company SCL’s services in 2010. Yesterday, he had told a UK parliamentary committee, Cambridge Analytica had been employed by the Indian National Congress.
He wrote on Twitter: “I've been getting a lot of requests from Indian journalists, so here are some of SCL's past projects in India. To the most frequently asked question - yes SCL/CA works in India and has offices there. This is what modern colonialism looks like.”
While the slides don’t mention any other party, they do explicitly name Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) as a client in 2010.
The tweet read: “SCL india was asked to provide electoral research and strategy for the 2010 State Elections for the Janata Dal (United). SCL undertook a behavioural research programme targeting over 75% of households to assist the client in not only identifying the correct battlegrounds, but also the right audiences, messages and most importantly the right castes to target their campaigns'.
The slides claim among other things:
- SCL has a database of over 600 districts and 7 lakh villages, which is constantly updated.
- It carried out a caste census in Uttar Pradesh on behalf of a national party in 2012.
- SCL India undertook a statewide (200 million) in 2011 in UP to identify voter caste by household.
- In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, it managed the campaigns of several MPs.
- In 2007, SCL carried out a full political survey on behalf of a major party.
- In 2007, they carried out a project, to support a 'trans-national programme for countering the non-desired behaviour of recruitment into violent jihadism. It was carried out in Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and UP.
- In 2003, they carried out a psephological study and opinion polling for national party to identify swing voters in MP for a national party.
- In 2003, they carried out two pieces of work, an internal audit for a major party to assess its organisational strength, and one to find another to find the nature of the voting population.
A former employee of Cambridge Analytica turned whistleblower said on Tuesday that the company had worked extensively in India and believed it was employed by the Congress party during his evidence before a UK parliamentary committee investigating the issue of fake news.
Christopher Wylie deposed before the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS) amid an escalating row around alleged Facebook data breaches linked with the controversial UK-based company, which has also been linked with alleged attempts to influence elections in India.
"When you look at Facebook's biggest market, India is the top in terms of numbers of users. Obviously, that's a country which is rife with political discord and opportunities for destabilisation," said Labour MP Paul Farrelly, member of the parliamentary committee, during his questioning. "They (Cambridge Analytica) worked extensively in India. They have an office in India," Wylie responded.
"I believe their client was Congress, but I know that they have done all kinds of projects. I don't remember a national project but I know regionally. India's so big that one state can be as big as Britain. But they do have offices there, they do have staff there," the 28-year-old added, on being probed further. He offered to provide the committee "documentation" on India, which was welcomed by Farrelly, who said India was a country that did not need any added "tensions".
During his evidence, Wylie also said that his predecessor, Dan Muresan, Head of Elections at SCL Group, had also been working in India before he died in Kenya under mysterious circumstances. He claimed to have heard stories that Muresan, a Romanian national, may have been poisoned in a hotel room while in the African country.
Paul-Olivier Dehaye, co-founder of PersonalData.IO, a service that helps individuals regain control over their personal data, also giving evidence to the committee, added that he had heard reports that Muresan was being paid by an Indian billionaire who wanted Congress to lose elections. "So he was pretending to work for one party but actually paid underhand by someone else," said Dehaye. He added that it would be for Indian and Kenyan journalists to get together to investigate the matter further.
Wylie has accused his former employer, Cambridge Analytica, of gathering the details of 50 million users on Facebook through a personality quiz in 2014. He alleges that because 270,000 people took the quiz, the data of some 50 million users, mainly in the US, was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.
Wylie claims the data was sold to Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to psychologically profile people and deliver material in favour of Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential elections. He also criticised Cambridge Analytica for running campaigns in "struggling democracies", which he called "an example of what modern-day colonialism looks like".
"You have a wealthy company from a developed nation going into an economy or democracy that's still struggling to get its feet on the ground and taking advantage of that to profit from that," he told MPs.
Cambridge Analytica denies any of the data acquired was used as part of the services it provided to the Trump campaign. As the controversy continues to escalate, Zuckerberg took out full-page advertisements in several UK and US Sunday newspapers to apologise. "This was a breach of trust, and I am sorry," the back-page ads said.
In an undercover report last week, Cambridge Analytica executives had been caught boasting that they, along with parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories, had worked in more than 200 elections around the world, including India, Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic and Argentina. The recordings were made during a series of meetings at London hotels between November 2017 and January 2018.
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