BRITAIN: Whistleblower Testifies That Pro-Brexit Groups Had “Common Plan” To Evade UK Election Laws

The Guardian reports:

There was a “common plan” to use the network of companies orbiting Cambridge Analytica to get around election spending and co-ordination laws, Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, has told a parliamentary committee.

“For me, this is about the integrity of the democratic process, which is more important than anything else,” Wylie said, before emphasising his words: “I am absolutely convinced that there was a common plan and common purpose with Vote Leave, [pro-Brexit youth group] BeLeave, the DUP and Veterans for Britain.”

All four groups had employed the services of Aggregate IQ (AIQ), a Canadian company that Wylie said was “set up and worked within the auspices of Cambridge Analytica [and] inherited the company culture of total disregard for the law”. But at the point they employed the services of AIQ, he said, it had effectively no public presence.

Reuters reports:

A scandal engulfing Facebook over the use of its data by political consultants widened on Tuesday when a whistleblower said Canadian company AggregateIQ had developed a program to target Republican voters in the 2016 U.S. election.

Christopher Wylie, who previously revealed that consultancy Cambridge Analytica had accessed the data of 50 million Facebook users to build voter profiles on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign, said AggregateIQ (AIQ) had built software called Ripon to profile voters.

Wylie was giving evidence to a British parliamentary committee over the scandal, minutes after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to appear before the legislators to discuss what went wrong. The head of the committee called Zuckerberg’s decision “astonishing” and urged him to think again.

Zuckerberg has said he will testify before the US House.