Democracy Hijacked: How Foreign Nations are Using Our Own Political System Against Us

In recent years some of the smartest people in the world have worked on hacking the human brain in order to make you click on ads and sell you stuff. Now these methods are being used to sell you politicians and ideologies, too. And this is just the beginning. At present, the hackers rely on analysing signals and actions in the outside world: Not the metaphorical heart beloved by liberal fantasies, but rather the muscular pump that regulates your blood pressure and much of your brain activity.

The hackers could then correlate your heart rate with your credit card data, and your blood pressure with your search history. What would the Inquisition and the KGB have done with biometric bracelets that constantly monitor your moods and affections? In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals — a view inherited from Christian theology as much as from the modern Enlightenment — and come to terms with what humans really are: We need to know ourselves better.

Of course, this is hardly new advice. If you neglected to know yourself, you were still a black box to the rest of humanity. In contrast, you now have competition. As you read these lines, governments and corporations are striving to hack you. If they get to know you better than you know yourself, they can then sell you anything they want — be it a product or a politician.

It is particularly important to get to know your weaknesses. They are the main tools of those who try to hack you. Computers are hacked through pre-existing faulty code lines. Humans are hacked through pre-existing fears, hatreds, biases and cravings. Hackers cannot create fear or hatred out of nothing. But when they discover what people already fear and hate it is easy to push the relevant emotional buttons and provoke even greater fury.

If people cannot get to know themselves by their own efforts, perhaps the same technology the hackers use can be turned around and serve to protect us. Just as your computer has an antivirus program that screens for malware, maybe we need an antivirus for the brain. Your AI sidekick will learn by experience that you have a particular weakness — whether for funny cat videos or for infuriating Trump stories — and would block them on your behalf.

But all this is really just a side issue. For years, liberal ideals inspired a political project that aimed to give as many individuals as possible the ability to pursue their dreams and fulfil their desires.

We are now closer than ever to realising this aim — but we are also closer than ever to realising that this has all been based on an illusion. The very same technologies that we have invented to help individuals pursue their dreams also make it possible to re-engineer those dreams. So how can I trust any of my dreams?

From one perspective, this discovery gives humans an entirely new kind of freedom. Previously, we identified very strongly with our desires, and sought the freedom to realise them. Whenever any thought appeared in the mind, we rushed to do its bidding. We spent our days running around like crazy, carried by a furious rollercoaster of thoughts, feelings and desires, which we mistakenly believed represented our free will.

What happens if we stop identifying with this rollercoaster? What happens when we carefully observe the next thought that pops up in our mind and ask: If I see myself as an entirely free agent, choosing my desires in complete independence from the world, it creates a barrier between me and all other entities. It simultaneously bestows enormous importance on my every whim — after all, I chose this particular desire out of all possible desires in the universe.

Once we give so much importance to our desires, we naturally try to control and shape the whole world according to them. We wage wars, cut down forests and unbalance the entire ecosystem in pursuit of our whims. But if we understood that our desires are not the outcome of free choice, we would hopefully be less preoccupied with them, and would also feel more connected to the rest of the world. In fact, renouncing this illusion can have two opposite effects: It is like when you have a conversation with someone.

If you focus on what you want to say, you hardly really listen. You just wait for the opportunity to give the other person a piece of your mind. But when you put your own thoughts aside, you can suddenly hear other people. Second, renouncing the myth of free will can kindle a profound curiosity. You think you already know exactly who you are. This is just some changing biochemical phenomenon!

This can be the beginning of the most exciting journey of discovery any human can undertake. T here is nothing new about doubting free will or about exploring the true nature of humanity. We humans have had this discussion a thousand times before. But we never had the technology before. And the technology changes everything. Ancient problems of philosophy are now becoming practical problems of engineering and politics.

And while philosophers are very patient people — they can argue about something inconclusively for 3, years — engineers are far less patient. Politicians are the least patient of all. How does liberal democracy function in an era when governments and corporations can hack humans?

How do you live when you realise that you are a hackable animal, that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces. Unfortunately, these are not the questions most humans ask. Instead of confronting the challenge of AI and bioengineering, many are turning to religious and nationalist fantasies that are even less in touch with the scientific realities of our time than liberalism.

When you try to engage with these nostalgic fantasies, you find yourself debating such things as the veracity of the Bible and the sanctity of the nation especially if you happen, like me, to live in a place like Israel. As a scholar, this is a disappointment.

Arguing about the Bible was hot stuff in the age of Voltaire, and debating the merits of nationalism was cutting-edge philosophy a century ago — but in it seems a terrible waste of time. AI and bioengineering are about to change the course of evolution itself, and we have just a few decades to figure out what to do with them.

So what to do? We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity.

At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism, and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century. Greek mythology tells that Zeus and Poseidon, two of the greatest gods, competed for the hand of the goddess Thetis. Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things.

Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit. And she mentioned to him a firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father. I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word.

In some ways, an intern showing up and referring to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched. A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain.

Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump. There are three strands to this story.

How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored.

Whoever owns this data owns the future. My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica — as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet with a gravity-defying And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.

As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum.

All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off.

AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A day later, that online reference vanished. There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer.

Are we about to witness the most unequal societies in history?

It was too big a coincidence. EU, Vote Leave — denied it. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered. Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. They built our software for us. They held our database. You need to find Chris Wylie. Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from.

A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques.

And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends — a process then allowed by the social network.

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

The company also perfectly legally bought consumer datasets — on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel — and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter. Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee.

It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence. But does it actually work?

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Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy? Robert Mercer did not invest in this firm until it ran a bunch of pilots — controlled trials. This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context.

To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling. A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad in brings all the elements in this story together. The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time. And AggregateIQ — the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave — was brought in to build the targeting platform.

And this pays for the political work. The security work was to be the prize for the political work. These documents throw light on a significant and under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon now sits in the White House. In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals.

But, for private companies anything goes. Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state? A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration. Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch. It makes me think again about the story involving the intern, Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on? Cambridge Analytica and Palantir both declined to comment for this article on whether they had any relationship.

But witnesses and emails confirm that meetings between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir took place in The possibility of a working relationship was at least discussed. Further documents seen by the Observer confirm that at least one senior Palantir employee consulted with Cambridge Analytica in relation to the Trinidad project and later political work in the US. There was no upside to it.