Before Trump, Cambridge Analytica quietly built “psyops” for militaries

Revelations of dirty tricks and improperly-harvested Facebook profiles turned Cambridge Analytica into a global symbol for the dark side of big data. In 2016 the company claimed to have psychologically profiled every American voter as part of its work for Donald Trump, but its actual impact on his insurgent victory remains one of many mysteries surrounding the disgraced political consultancy. The company’s sophisticated-sounding electioneering tactics, which promised to provide clients with “behavioral understandings of your electorate,” seemed to rely as much upon hype and marketing whimsy as they did upon basic psychology, Facebook ads, and pools of data.

In reality, Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to influence voters followed a decade of behavioral influence research that its parent company undertook for militaries and governments, including the U.S. and the U.K. In the years before Cambridge began working on Trump’s campaign, SCL Group developed a set of techniques to battle extremism and disinformation for a range of defense agencies, including the British Foreign Office, the Norwegian Government Defense Research Agency, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the British Army’s 15 Psychological Operations Group, and multiple U.S. agencies, according to interviews and documents seen by Fast Company. As SCL built its reputation in the worlds of psychological warfare and political campaigns, the company relied upon close ties with current and former officials, including eventual Trump national security advisers Michael Flynn and John Bolton.

Among SCL’s clients was Sandia National Laboratories, a leading Pentagon research and development partner. Last year a Sandia spokesperson told Bloomberg that the laboratories had never formally worked with SCL. But documents show Sandia collaborations with SCL on counterextremism projects between 2007 and 2012, including “an in-depth behavior change study in relation to violent extremism in South and Southeast Asia.” In a more recent interview with Fast Company, a Sandia spokesperson acknowledged the partnership and apologized for the earlier denial. “Sandia unintentionally muddied those waters” due to “human error,” the spokesperson said.

Emma Briant, a scholar of propaganda at Bard College who has spent years studying SCL, says the company’s mix of work demonstrates how military-funded psychological research can be exploited to wage domestic political warfare, establishing a dangerous template for political campaigning. During elections, tactics intended for battlefields could be used to foment division and extremism or discourage voters.

“Personnel and methodological insights were shared and informed the behavioral methodology SCL Elections deployed in numerous elections, and SCL’s global experience shaped the formation of a digital strategy that crystallized in the abuses of Cambridge Analytica,” she says. “The risks of influence industry companies adapting military-funded techniques or repurposing data and its derivative models have not been focused on enough, and there have been few questions raised over how U.S., U.K. and NATO government procurement and oversight for contractors can be strengthened. Oversight, transparency and reporting were clearly not fit for purpose.”

The conglomerate has sunk under bankruptcies, lawsuits, and investigations. But its personnel and data persist, and similar influence operations are thriving, powered by state-sponsored actors and an unregulated industry of influence peddlers. In a report last year, a UK parliamentary committee investigating SCL and voter manipulation found campaigns “financed by less than transparent means and employ legally dubious methods.” The committee noted how “easy it is for discredited companies to reinvent themselves and potentially use the same data and the same tactics to undermine governments, including in the UK.”

SCL touted two decades of experience in marketing, electioneering, and data analysis when, in 2013, it helped launch Cambridge Analytica as a U.S.-focused political subsidiary. With the backing of billionaire donor Robert Mercer and the guidance of future Trump adviser Steve Bannon, the company would go on to work for Bolton’s super PAC and dozens of right-wing candidates before joining the campaigns for Ted Cruz and Trump.

As SCL’s military-focused subsidiaries sought government contracts, the company capitalized on a revolving-door culture and cultivated close ties to defense officials. SCL’s officers and advisers have included modern psychological operations commanders, top defense officials, and members of the inner circle of Margaret Thatcher’s administration.

In 2010, SCL undertook one of its earliest military projects, analyzing Afghani populations under the auspices of the U.S.’s then-leading intelligence official in Afghanistan, Michael Flynn. In late 2016, shortly before he would become Trump’s first national security advisor, Flynn agreed to work as a consultant for SCL’s defense unit.

SCL began working in U.S. elections the previous year, on behalf of another future Trump national security adviser. In 2015, a group billing itself as “Cambridge Analytica, in partnership with SCL Elections” began working on U.S. congressional campaigns for the John Bolton super PAC. Using voter profiles gleaned from focus groups, phone surveys, AggregateIQ software, Facebook data, and psychographic models, the companies analyzed target audiences and created a series of anti-immigration and pro-military advertisements in support of hawkish Republican candidates like Tom Cotton, Cory Gardner, and Thom Tillis.

“Primarily concerned with promoting [Bolton’s] agenda with regards to national defence and foreign policy, the PAC made use of significant input from SCL on messaging and target audiences, with positive results,” read a 2014 post-election report by Cambridge Analytica, released last year by the Center for Public Integrity. “Respondents [who] had been targeted with Bolton Super PAC messaging on foreign policy and national security showed a significant increase in their awareness of these subjects.”

By mid-2015, Cambridge was making use of data unwittingly collected from millions of Facebook users in order to hone its targeting methods and build its infamous psychographic models. The company contends it deleted its cache of ill-gotten Facebook data by 2016, but as late as November 2016, some of Cambridge Analytica’s political and commercial campaigns targeted audiences on Facebook and Instagram that were named by personality trait.

In December 2016, around the time of Flynn’s brief consultancy for SCL, the firm signed a half-million dollar counter-terrorism contract with the US State Dept. That month in London, the CEO of Cambridge had an off-the-record, undisclosed meeting with then-Foreign Secretary and current Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The sitdown was followed by SCL’s appearance at a closed-door Foreign Office event on data analytics in early 2017. By that year’s end, SCL Insight, the conglomerate’s only surviving subsidiary, began work on a contract for unspecified data analysis on behalf of the U.K. Ministry of Defence.

Alongside defense contracts, other government-funded projects managed by SCL aimed to enhance stability and disseminate propaganda. In recent years, one subsidiary was hired by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to build a “psychological road map” of its citizenry in an era of declining oil prices and to test reform plans by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, like legalizing cinemas and allowing women to drive. One consultant who viewed SCL’s report described it to New York Times as “Machiavellian,” calling it a manual for the prince to manage widespread discontent. An SCL executive would only say the work helped to advance human rights.

In 2017, as the company was under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, one SCL company was researching Islamic extremism for the U.S. State Department while another waged a covert and controversial reelection campaign for the Kenyan president. That October, a newer SCL company microtargeted diplomats during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, using #BoycottQatar messages on social media. Months later, the subsidiary, SCL Social, retroactively registered as a foreign lobbyist on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s leading rival, which paid SCL $333,000 for the campaign, according to documents.

Information operations missions tend to be shrouded under the cover of national security, and government agencies have been tight-lipped about their work with SCL. But within the defense establishment, the company’s capabilities were respected. The British government gave SCL “List X” status until 2013, granting it access to classified documents, and for a time the company’s techniques were considered to be under export control. In a 2016 memo, U.S. State Dept. officials argued that SCL deserved to win a contract, worth roughly half a million dollars, because its methods were considered unparalleled.

“There are no other companies that can compete with SCL in gathering the necessary data and analyzing it in a way that permits the design of effective, data-driven influence campaigns,” officials wrote in the July 2016 memo, which was released in heavily redacted form to the Center on Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative news organization. The officials cited SCL’s “unique qualifications and special capabilities in designing influence campaigns that work,” but said that “evidence of those capabilities would need to be kept secret in order not to compromise national security or create other security risks.”

The disclosures last year about Cambridge Analytica’s elections work by whistleblower Christopher Wylie—drawn out by reporting from journalist Carole Cadwalladr and Channel 4—recently culminated in a record $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine against Facebook and a $100 million Securities and Exchange Commission fine over privacy violations. In July, the FTC sued Cambridge over “deceptive practices,” and, as part of a probe into the company—one of a number of ongoing investigations—the agency is investigating Bannon’s involvement. Britain’s privacy regulator issued a report urging the government to “legislate at the earliest opportunity to introduce a statutory code of practice” addressing the “use of personal information in political campaigns.” The Great Hack, a documentary about the scandal, has become a hit on Netflix and earned a legal threat from Brexit-funder Banks.

At the center of the film is David Carroll, a professor at the New School in New York who sued SCL last year in order to obtain his personal data. Cambridge claimed to have 5,000 data points, including psychological scores, on most American voters, and Carroll is still trying to obtain his file. To Caroll, SCL and its offshoots demonstrate not only the perils of weak digital privacy laws but of expansive corporate secrecy. Limited liability companies, or LLCs, “can be used to shield money from election law and regulation, and LLCs can be used to launder data and be shielded from traceability when you want to follow the money and follow the data.”

Even after the company’s apparent demise, tactics for military psychological warfare—intended for countering terrorists and propagandists—continue to seep into domestic politics. “The most shocking and disturbing and distressing part was not the psychometrics, but the porous boundaries between SCL and Cambridge Analytica, and knowing what those companies were,” he said. “That there was basically an entity with security classifications in multiple countries working also in elections—it was just astonishing that this was allowed to happen, and nobody thought this would be a really bad, bad idea.”

A SECRET WEAPON: TARGET AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

Former executives insist there was no connection between the defense and political sides of SCL’s businesses. But documents also show that the companies had a small group of common shareholders and often functioned like separate office departments, sharing staff, finances, data, and tactics. In a report last year on the Brexit campaign, the British data regulator examined Cambridge, SCL Elections and AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm affiliated with SCL, and found “a permeability between the companies above and beyond what would normally be expected to be seen.” When SCL Group acquired a 30% stake in Cambridge Analytica’s U.K. holding company in 2015, the company may have become the first military contractor to be involved in a U.S. presidential election.

Two projects that year illustrated the complicated mix of the conglomerate’s work.

In May 2015, nearly two dozen NATO-affiliated military analysts and psychologists arrived in Riga, Latvia, to learn how to better fight Russian disinformation campaigns across Europe and the Baltics. The two-month course was taught by SCL, and the subject, according to a statement from the NATO StratCom Center of Excellence, was Target Audience Analysis: a “scientific application, [that] involves a comprehensive study of audience groups and forms the basis for interventions aimed at reinforcing or changing attitudes and behavior.”

TAA is a central component of U.S. and European information warfare missions, and the technique was SCL’s specialty. “Significantly, the methodology increases the resilience of susceptible audiences and enables them to withstand foreign propaganda effects,” the Center said in a statement.

Canada paid SCL $754,800 for the course, the first and only project that SCL conducted for the Center, a spokesperson told Fast Company. “Canada is delighted to fund this unique and world-class training course which will act as a real counter to the insidious Russian propaganda,” Canada’s ambassador to Latvia, Alain Hausser said at a launch event in Riga.

Weeks after SCL’s NATO training, executives from Cambridge were pitching TAA for another purpose: helping to microtarget British voters with pro-Brexit messages.

“As we discussed, we will make sure that the Target Audience Analysis (TAA) suits the purposes of Leave as well as [UKIP, the UK Independence Party] and we will try to seed some questions into the survey that will help inform future study of insurance risk profiling,” SCL executive Julian Wheatland wrote in a December 2015 email to the CEO of Leave.EU. “Once we have completed the TAA and matched it to the Experian data we will be in a position to start microtargeting and, at that time, we would propose that we start digital outreach and a program of voter engagement and fundraising,” he wrote.

While lawmakers could not determine if money changed hands between Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica, documents show the company performed data analysis for the campaign, and Aggregate IQ was paid to microtarget voters for other pro-Brexit campaign groups. Leave.EU and Eldon Insurance, a firm owned by Leave.EU funder Arron Banks, were fined a total of $150,000 earlier this year for data breaches during the campaign, amid ongoing U.K. investigations.

SCL’s behavioral influence and microtargeting techniques are increasingly commonplace in digital electioneering, but some of the firm’s tactics boasted a common source, an in-house research group called the Behavioral Dynamics Institute. Launched by SCL’s founder, Nigel Oakes, in the early 1990s, BDI claimed several leading psychologists and strategists among its contributors, and helped develop tools to understand audiences and shape behaviors for “militaries, NGOs or political parties,” according to one BDI paper. It had “invested over £19m in developing scientific approaches for ‘influencing a target audience,'” it claimed.

The cornerstone of Oakes’ arsenal was Target Audience Analysis. “Using advanced research techniques, the BDi can accurately diagnose an audience from within (in theatre) or remotely,” its now-deleted website stated, in an apparent reference to theaters of war. “The Behavioural Dynamics Institute can tell you how ‘difficult’ an audience is likely to be, how best to influence the audience and then can actually produce the communications or triggers that will change the audience.”

In a research paper for the U.S. Army, Steve Tatham, a former British naval expert in psychological operations who was working closely with SCL at the time, wrote that TAA is focused on identifying “key groups—who may not yet have emerged—through accurate behavioral profiling of groups,” and ranking them by their respective influence and susceptibility to influence, “key information for policymakers to know in advance.”

Plus, Tatham wrote in a NATO strategic communications journal, “TAA can be undertaken covertly. Audience groups are not necessarily aware that they are the research subjects and government’s role and/or third parties can be invisible.”

Wheatland, who helped manage the pitch to Leave.EU and eventually served as Cambridge Analytica’s final CEO, has dismissed any connection between the companies’ defense and political work. He blames the confusion on the inflated sales pitches of former Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix.

“The idea that somehow SCL took military-grade technology and turned it to [political] influence was fantasy,” he said in a recent interview. “But it was fantasy that got air time, not least because Alexander used to like to talk about the defense business as a way of marketing the elections business. There was never any operational overlap between the two.”

Oakes and Nix did not respond to requests for comment. During testimony before a Parliamentary committee last year, Nix said there was no connection between the elections and defense businesses. Oakes has remained largely out of public view in the wake of his company’s collapse, and said little publicly.

“I wonder if part of that is because he doesn’t feel as though he was part of, or responsible for, what Alexander Nix went and did with some of these behavioral techniques at Cambridge Analytica,” said Sven Hughes, a former reservist in Afghanistan with the British Army’s psychological operations group who worked for SCL nearly a decade ago.

Oakes addressed the question in a podcast interview last year with Hughes. “This weapon system wasn’t used in the American election, and it was actually no longer my company that was involved in it,” the SCL founder told Hughes. Previously, however, Oakes had boasted that the proprietary methodologies assembled at SCL were integral to those of Cambridge Analytica. In a 2017 interview with Briant, the propaganda scholar, he exclaimed, “Without this, you couldn’t do any of that!”

Briant, author of a forthcoming book on Cambridge Analytica and the digital influence industry, Propaganda Machine, has warned British and American lawmakers that BDI’s influence weapons pose a danger beyond the battlefield, and there are no rules governing their use in elections.

“SCL’s counter-terrorism projects for Western governments through BDI informed their methodological understandings of the psychology of extremism as well as how to counter it,” she tells Fast Company. “If Nix had access to these methodological insights, that’s worrying.”

In the interview with Hughes, Oakes sounded regretful about the misuse of his arsenal. “I don’t want it to be used for negative reasons and non-ethical purposes, and maybe using it for commercial purposes is non-ethical. Maybe using it for political or election-winning purposes is unethical. But for many years, I operated without much of an ethical radar because I was just so impressed that we’d got something that actually worked, in an environment where so much didn’t… I was very excited that we had a gun that worked.”

COMING TO AMERICA

Oakes, a former DJ and ad exec, launched SCL in London in the early ’90s as Strategic Communications Laboratories, a behavioral-research, government messaging, and marketing consultancy. After the attacks of Sept. 11, he plunged the firm into military work, and in 2005 made a splash at the U.K.’s largest defense expo, in a fashion familiar to spy movie fans: with a high-tech “OpCentre” exhibit covered in video screens. “We used to be in the business of mindbending for political purposes,” he told the Guardian at the time, “but now we are in the business of saving lives.'”

The idea was to show potential government clients how media could be used “to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception” on the public of a big city like London, Slate reported. Oakes’s arsenal also included a wealth of powerful connections. Alongside investors like the property tycoon Vincent Tchenguiz, many of its officers hailed from the upper ranks of the British Conservative Party’s defense establishment. One of SCL’s early directors was Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Oakes’s talent for hype didn’t hurt: the operations center mockup was actually a set designed by a team who worked on the James Bond movie GoldenEye.

But SCL’s pitch also fit with an increasingly popular approach among military leaders like Flynn: Modern irregular warfare would depend not just on bombs and bullets but on hearts and minds. And during a post-9/11 period that was profitable for private military contractors and psychological operators, SCL stood out with its enviable staff of experienced military veterans and its ability to stay under the radar. That was also appealing at the Pentagon: In a 2004 report on strategic communications, the Defense Science Board recommended that more reliance should be made on contractors, who it noted had a “built-in agility, credibility and even deniability.”

Amid a flood of new contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, SCL also separated itself from other defense firms due to its simultaneous pursuit of political work. Before it entered the U.S. electoral market, a variety of its branches worked on political campaigns and surveys in countries including Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, where, it once boasted on its website, it ran a “voter-suppression” effort.

In the years after its reboot, SCL’s election work—increasingly under the guidance of Nix—grew at a better rate than its defense portfolio. Some of the firm’s campaigns in the Commonwealth Caribbean during that time have earned the scrutiny of British lawmakers, who wrote last year that the campaigns “were not financed in a transparent way, overstepping legal and ethical boundaries.” In those former British territories, SCL chose its clients on behalf of interests connected to the global passport investment industry, using those contracts to test and refine dubious campaign tactics, as the Spectator and Fast Company reported.

In 2013, SCL found its way into U.S. politics, thanks, reportedly, to a fortuitous encounter: a former Air Force officer and a pair of Republican advisers wound up seated next to each other on a cross-country flight.

The advisers were Mark Block and Linda Hansen, who had recently run the ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign for GOP candidate Herman Cain. Their efforts for Cain had earned ridicule and a nickname for Block—”the Smoking Man”—after an offbeat TV ad featured his comically earnest drag of a cigarette. As luck would have it, the military veteran next to them happened to be subcontracting at SCL, a British government contractor looking for U.S. political clients. “They do cyberwarfare for elections,” the vet told the consultants, according to a company email.

Block arranged a meeting with Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, to pitch the company’s electioneering services to Mercer, the conservative donor and Breitbart owner. Shortly after the 2013 meeting—on the Hudson River, aboard Sea Owl, Mercer’s megayacht—the semi-billionaire hedge fund whiz made the $15 million startup investment that would birth Cambridge Analytica. Nix would be CEO of the new firm, and Bannon, who was also in attendance, was given a stake in Cambridge and appointed a vice president and board member.

With an initial boost from new SCL sales executives Block and Hansen, Cambridge Analytica soon began slinging its psychological influence and data tools to Republican midterm political campaigns. Nix claimed 44 paying U.S. clients in 2014 alone, including several backed by Bolton, as well as three 2016 presidential candidates: Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and, ultimately, Trump.