Brittany Kaiser - Targeted - My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump, Brexit and Facebook Broke Democracy

Copyright Copyright Dedication Prologue 1 A Late Lunch 2 Crossing Over 3 Power in Nigeria 4 Davos 5 Terms and Conditions 6 Meetings and Reunions 7 The Face of Brexit 8 Facebook 9 Persuasion 10 Under the Influence 11 Brexit Brittany 12 Straitjacket 13 Postmortem 14 Bombs 15 Quake 16 Breakup 17 Inquiry 18 Restart 19 Of Truth and Consequences 20 The Road to Redemption Epilogue Picture Section Acknowledgments Notes About the Publisher

The names of some characters have been changed to protect their privacy.

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Brittany Kaiser 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Cover photograph © Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

All photographs courtesy of the author unless marked otherwise

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Brittany Kaiser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008363895

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008363918

Version 2019-10-16

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that footnotes and endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

Dedication Dedication Prologue 1 A Late Lunch 2 Crossing Over 3 Power in Nigeria 4 Davos 5 Terms and Conditions 6 Meetings and Reunions 7 The Face of Brexit 8 Facebook 9 Persuasion 10 Under the Influence 11 Brexit Brittany 12 Straitjacket 13 Postmortem 14 Bombs 15 Quake 16 Breakup 17 Inquiry 18 Restart 19 Of Truth and Consequences 20 The Road to Redemption Epilogue Picture Section Acknowledgments Notes About the Publisher

To the Truth:

May it set us all free.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1 A Late Lunch

2 Crossing Over

3 Power in Nigeria

4 Davos

5 Terms and Conditions

6 Meetings and Reunions

7 The Face of Brexit

8 Facebook

9 Persuasion

10 Under the Influence

11 Brexit Brittany

12 Straitjacket

13 Postmortem

14 Bombs

15 Quake

16 Breakup

17 Inquiry

18 Restart

19 Of Truth and Consequences

20 The Road to Redemption

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Publisher

Prologue Prologue 1 A Late Lunch 2 Crossing Over 3 Power in Nigeria 4 Davos 5 Terms and Conditions 6 Meetings and Reunions 7 The Face of Brexit 8 Facebook 9 Persuasion 10 Under the Influence 11 Brexit Brittany 12 Straitjacket 13 Postmortem 14 Bombs 15 Quake 16 Breakup 17 Inquiry 18 Restart 19 Of Truth and Consequences 20 The Road to Redemption Epilogue Picture Section Acknowledgments Notes About the Publisher

There’s nothing like a car ride with federal agents to make you question your life choices. That was exactly where I found myself the morning of July 18, 2018, winding through the streets of Washington, DC, heading toward an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

My trip that morning consisted of riding in two cars, actually—the first took me to a coffee shop that the Department of Justice had randomly selected. This had been the driver’s instructions when I initially slid into the backseat: they had chosen a place unexpectedly, without planning it out or telling anyone beforehand. Then, once we were on our way, he was to radio in our destination. At the coffee shop, the second driver was waiting. Like the first driver, he was wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, but there was a second man with him as well. From the second car—outfitted like the first with tinted windows—I watched as the city’s gleaming monuments, bright and sudden and very white, flashed by us like camera bulbs.

When I was settled in the backseat between my two attorneys, it was hard not to consider just how I’d ended up here, on my way to talk to federal prosecutors about my role with the now-infamous political communications firm, Cambridge Analytica. How a situation that I’d entered with the best of intentions for me and my family had ended up so horribly and irrevocably twisted. How in the process of wanting to learn how to use data for good, and while helping my parents through a difficult financial moment, I’d ended up compromising my political and personal values. How a mixture of naïveté and ambition had landed me squarely and disturbingly on the wrong side of history.

A little more than three and a half years earlier, I’d joined Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the SCL Group—specifically, their humanitarian division, SCL Social—working on projects under the company’s CEO, a man named Alexander Nix. In the years since that leap of faith, nothing had gone as I’d envisioned it. As a lifelong Democrat and devoted activist who had worked for years in support of progressive causes, I had started my work with Cambridge Analytica under the pretense that I would be separate from the company’s Republican client base and outreach. It didn’t take long, though, to find myself gradually pulled away from my principles by the difficulty of securing funding for humanitarian projects and the allure of success on the other side. At Cambridge Analytica there was the promise of real money for the first time in my career, and a way to buy into the vision that I was helping to build a revolutionary political communications company from the ground up.

In the process, I had been exposed to the vast sweep of Cambridge’s efforts, both to acquire data on as many U.S. citizens as possible and to leverage that data to influence Americans’ voting behavior. I’d also come to see how Facebook’s negligent privacy policies and the federal government’s total lack of oversight about personal data had enabled all of Cambridge’s efforts. But, most of all, I understood how Cambridge had taken advantage of all these forces to help elect Donald Trump.

As the car drove, my lawyers and I sat quietly, each of us preparing for what was to come. We all knew I would share any part of my story in full; the question now was what everyone else wanted to know. Mostly people seemed to want answers, both professional and personal, about how this could happen. There was a variety of reasons why I’d allowed my values to become so warped—from my family’s financial situation to the fallacy that Hillary would win regardless of my efforts or those of the company I worked for. But each of those was only part of the story. Perhaps the truest reason of all was the fact that somewhere along the way I’d lost my compass, and then myself. I’d entered this job believing I was a professional who knew how cynical and messy the business of politics was, only to learn time and again how naïve I’d been.