Since New Year’s Day, @hindsightfiles has been tweeting a steady stream of links to leaked Cambridge Analytica documents revealing the company’s work on election manipulation for candidates around the world, including Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil — 100,000+ documents relating to 68 countries, which @hindsightfiles has pledged to release in the coming months.
The documents — emails and working files — came from Brittany Kaiser, a whistleblower who once worked at Cambridge Analytica and made notable appearances in the documentary The Great Hack. Kaiser says her documents reveal major Trump donors discussing plans to launder and anonymize illegal political spending, and also how Cambridge Analytica systemtized these techniques for dark money spending elsewhere, including in the UK during the Brexit campaign.
Kaiser said the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation that worked with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns to manipulate and influence people, and that raised huge national security implications.The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm was working for a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Mueller’s inquiry and emails that Kaiser says describe how the firm helped develop a “sophisticated infrastructure of shell companies that were designed to funnel dark money into politics”.
Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’ [Carole Cadwalladr/The Guardian]