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
And now, it was on me to make it right.
The car drifted smoothly through the streets of the capital and I began to sense that we were closing in on our destination. I had been warned by the special counsel’s team not to be afraid or surprised if, upon arriving at the secure building where I was to be questioned, throngs of press awaited me. The location, it was said, was no longer secure. Reporters had caught on that the site was being used for the interviewing of witnesses.
A reporter, the driver said, was hiding behind a mailbox. He recognized her from CNN. He had seen her loitering around the building for eight hours at a time. In heels, he said. “What they wouldn’t do!” He exclaimed.
As we neared the place and turned a corner into a garage in the back, the driver told me to turn my face away from the windows, even though they were tinted. In preparation for my conversation with the special counsel, I had been told to clear my day. Completely. I had been told that no one knew how long I would testify or for how long I would then be cross-examined. However long it would be, I was ready. After all, my presence there had been my own doing.
A year earlier, I’d made the decision to come forward, to shine a light in the dark places that I had come to know and to become a whistleblower. I did this because, as I’d come face-to-face with the realities of what Cambridge Analytica had done, I saw all too clearly just how misguided I’d been. I did this because it was the only way to try to make up for what I’d been a part of. But, for more than any other reason, I did this because telling my story to anyone who would listen was the only way we could learn, and hopefully prepare for, what comes next. That was my mission now—to raise the alarm about how Cambridge Analytica had operated and about the dangers that Big Data posed, so that next time voters on both sides would understand the full stakes of the data wars that our democracy is up against.
The driver took us deeper and deeper into the garage, circling, circling farther down.
Why so deep? I wondered. But of course, I already knew: Privacy is a hard thing to come by these days.
EARLY 2014
The first time I saw Alexander Nix, it was through a thick pane of glass, which is perhaps the best way to view a man like him.
I had shown up late for a business lunch that had been hastily arranged by my close friend Chester Freeman, who was acting, as he often did, as my guardian angel. I was there to meet with three associates of Chester’s, two men I knew and one I didn’t, all of whom were looking for talent at the intersection of politics and social media. I counted this area as part of my political expertise, having worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign; though I was still busy researching my dissertation for my PhD, I was also on the market for a well-paying job. I had kept the fact secret from nearly everyone except Chester, but I was in urgent need of a stable source of income, to take care of myself and help out my family back in Chicago. This lunch was a way for me to obtain a potentially short-term and lucrative consultancy, and I was grateful to Chester for the well-timed assist.
By the time I arrived, however, lunch was nearly over. I’d had appointments that morning, and though I’d hustled to get there, I was late, and I found Chester and the two friends of his I already knew huddled together in the cold outside the Mayfair sushi restaurant, smoking post-meal cigarettes in view of the neighborhood’s Georgian mansions, stately hotels, and expensive shops. The two men were from a country in Central Asia, and like Chester, they, too, were passing through London on business. They had reached out to him for help in connecting with someone who could aid them with digital communications (email and social media campaigns) in an important upcoming election in their country. Though I knew neither of them well, both were powerful men I’d met before and liked, and by gathering us there for the lunch, Chester intended only to do all of us a favor.
Now, in welcome, he rolled me my own cigarette and leaned in to light it for me. Chester, his two friends, and I caught up with one another, chatting brightly and shielding ourselves from the rising wind. As Chester stood there in the afternoon light, ruddy cheeked and happy, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his journey. He’d recently been appointed as a diplomat for business and trade relations by the prime minister of a small island nation, but back when I’d first met him, at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, he’d been an idealistic, shaggy-haired nineteen-year-old wearing a blue dashiki. The convention had been in Denver that year, and Chester and I had both been standing in a long line outside Broncos Stadium, waiting to see Hillary Clinton endorse Barack Obama as the party’s nominee, when we bumped into each other and started talking.
We had come a long way since then, and each of us now had a hodgepodge of political experience under our proverbial belts. He and I had long shared the dream of “growing up” to do international political work and diplomacy, and recently he’d proudly sent me a picture of the certificate he received upon his diplomatic appointment. And while the Chester who now stood before me outside the restaurant looked the part of a newly minted diplomat, I still recognized him as the genius chatterbox friend I’d known from the beginning, as close to me as a brother.
As we smoked, Chester apologized to me for the last-minute, cobbled-together lunch. And by way of acknowledging what a motley crew he’d assembled there, he gestured to the plate glass window, through which I glimpsed the third person he’d invited—the man, still seated inside, who would change my life and, later, the world.
The fellow appeared to be an average, cut-from-the-cloth
