Keith Martin emerged from a conference in New York on Sunday to see Chris Wylie’s face all over the news.
“I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It didn’t compute at all.”
The former member of Parliament remembers Wylie as a bright Victoria teenager who, just over a decade ago, volunteered in Martin’s Ottawa office. Today, Wylie is the whistleblower at the heart of an uproar over the exploitation of social media data to manipulate voters.
The 28-year-old says he was with London-based data-mining company Cambridge Analytica when it obtained the information of tens of millions of Facebook users for political purposes. The company, an offshoot of the SCL Group, was co-founded in late 2013 by future Trump strategist Steve Bannon with funding from U.S. conservative billionaire Robert Mercer. Wylie, who left the company in late 2014, has been reported as saying he created the psychological warfare tool that allowed Cambridge Analytica to microtarget voters with social media messages that twisted their perception of reality.
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All that baffles Martin, who sat as a Liberal for his last seven years as Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca MP, a job he held from 1993 to 2011. He remembers Wylie being part of a group of young Liberal volunteers, one who was so eager that Martin agreed to his request to spend several months doing unpaid work in the MP’s Ottawa office.
“He was a smart, keen young man who was interested in learning about Parliament.”
Martin, an emergency room doctor before entering politics, also knew Wylie’s parents from that life. They had interned as physicians at Royal Jubilee Hospital the year before he did, and helped show him the ropes when he was there.
“I haven’t spoken to Chris in a decade,” Martin said this week. He knew, though, that Wylie had gone on to work with the Obama Democrats in the U.S. and the Liberal Democrats in Britain, parties with “progressive” leanings. That’s what made it so jarring to find Wylie’s name tied to hard-right conservatives like Bannon. “It’s counterintuitive. I don’t understand at all.”
Since 2012, Martin has worked in Washington, D.C., as executive director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, a non-profit that applies the research of 166 academic institutions to human and environmental health challenges around the world.
Wylie isn’t the only person in this tale with ties to Martin. Jeff Silvester, who worked in Martin’s Langford constituency office until the MP’s departure from politics in 2011, went on in 2013 to become a co-founder of AggregateIQ, which works with clients in the political realm.
Much has been made in Britain about the seemingly unlikely role the little-known Victoria company played in 2016’s Brexit campaign, when some supporters of the Leave side, including the official Vote Leave group (though not the rival Leave.EU) funnelled about £3.5 million through AggregateIQ, money the company said went mostly to online advertising. There have been attempts to link AggregateIQ, Wylie, the Brexit work and Cambridge Analytica.
No, Silvester says. AggregateIQ did contract work for SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent, in 2014, but had no contact with the company after that. He knew Wylie from the SCL contract days, and from their earlier association with Martin and the federal Liberals, but says Wylie played no part in AggregateIQ getting the Brexit work in 2016. “He had no idea until well after the fact.” Silvester said Wylie didn’t know until they bumped into one another on the street in Victoria some time after the vote. What still needs to be fully explained, though, is the earlier connection between SCL, Wylie and AggregateIQ, all these paths between Victoria and Britain crossing.
AggregateIQ recently vacated its Market Square offices, but Silvester says the company is still a going concern, and is simply relocating. It is feeling the heat, though, as its name gets bandied about as part of the larger story.
The company felt compelled to put out a statement this week: “There has been some speculation in the media about AggregateIQ and its services and we believe it is important to present the facts about our business. AggregateIQ was founded in 2013 and is a digital advertising, web and software development company based in Victoria, British Columbia. AggregateIQ has always been 100 per cent Canadian owned and operated. AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where we operate.
“AggregateIQ has never managed, nor did we ever have access to, any Facebook data or database allegedly obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica.”
In December, the U.K.’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham — a Victorian who took on the British job after holding a similar post in B.C. — singled out AggregateIQ as one of 30 organizations, including political parties and campaigns, data companies and social media platforms, being put in the spotlight as part of an investigation of the use of data analytics for political purposes. (Wednesday, a Sinn Fein MP from Northern Ireland asked that Denham’s investigation include a £32,750 payment made to AggregateIQ by the Democratic Unionist Party in the run-up to the Brexit vote.)
B.C.’s deputy information and privacy commissioner, former Victoria school board chairman Michael McEvoy, has spent the past six months seconded to Denham’s office to help with her investigation. He is due to become B.C.’s commissioner April 1.
B.C.’s acting commissioner, Drew McArthur, is conducting a separate investigation into whether AggregateIQ has been in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act.
Silvester says AggregateIQ is co-operating fully with the investigations. He sounds frustrated, though, by the need to stamp out the fires, or at least wave away the smoke surrounding his company, as the whole Wylie-Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story blazes away elsewhere.
There are, in fact, clouds and clouds of smoke to peer through as this all plays out, so many questions to answer. “It’s incredibly opaque,” Martin says.
