Whistleblower: Russians used Cambridge Analytica to influence 2016 election

Christopher Wylie, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, declares that Russian fingerprints are all over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

He said that he thinks that the Russians had access to the data that Cambridge Analytica illicitly collected on millions of Americans, and that the company was paid by Russians to perform some projects.

Additionally, Wylie says that Cambridge Analytica used Russians to harvest data on Americans that was then shared with companies which had active links to the FSB.

The Straits Times reports:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Political consulting group Cambridge Analytica used Russian researchers and shared data with companies linked to Russian intelligence, a whistleblower told a congressional hearing on interference in the 2016 US election Wednesday (May 16).

Christopher Wylie, who leaked information on the British-based firm’s hijacking of data on millions of Facebook users, told a Senate panel he believes Russian intelligence services had access to data harvested by the consultancy.

Wylie told the panel that Russian-American researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who created an application to harvest Facebook user profile data, was working at the same time on Russian-funded projects, including “behavioral research.”

“This means that in addition to Facebook data being accessed in Russia, there are reasonable grounds to suspect that CA may have been an intelligence target of Russian security services…(and) that Russian security services may have been notified of the existence of CA’s Facebook data,” Wylie said in his written testimony.

Wylie added that Cambridge Analytica “used Russian researchers to gather its data, (and) openly shared information on ‘rumour campaigns’ and ‘attitudinal inoculation'” with companies and executives linked to the Russian intelligence agency FSB.

The hearing is part of a broad inquiry on both sides of the Atlantic over the misuse of Facebook data by the consulting firm working on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Facebook has accused Cambridge Analytica of misappropriating its user data by violating terms of the data agreement with Kogan, the academic researcher.

Wylie told the panel that “the ethos of the firm was ‘anything goes'” for its political campaigns, including “attempting to divert health ministry funds in a struggling African country to support a politician’s re-election campaign.”

He added that he was aware of “black ops” at the company, “which I understood to include using hackers to break into computer systems to acquire kompromat or other intelligence for its clients.”

Why does Mr. Wylie feel obliged to share this information? Everyone already knows that if there is hacking to be done, or has been done, then the Russians are/were behind it. Even if it was the Brits, they only did it because they were not only ‘targeted’ by the FSB, who had access to their data, but they shared that data with the Russians, which the Russians apparently had access to. And it was all to help put Trump in the White House. Those dastardly Russians