A rich supporter of former
President Goodluck Jonathan reportedly hired SCL, a data analytics company, to
paint President Muhammadu Buhari bad in the buildup to the 2015 elections. Fresh information reveals that fixers hired
by a billion in support of the Jonathan campaign hacked into Buhari’s personal
data.
SCL is the parent company of
Cambridge Analytical, a data marketing firm, which harvests data from different
sources and creates microtargets, with the ultimate goal of changing audience
behaviour. It is reputed as one of the factors responsible for the outcome of
the US presidential election and the Brexit vote of 2016.
Cambridge Analytica was accused
of improperly using data on behalf of political clients. Reports say the
company may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook
users to try to sway elections.
According to UK Guardian, a
Nigeria billionaire whose identity was not revealed committed a large amount of
money to the bid to stop Buhari.
The reports also revealed that
the fixers for the Jonathan campaign hacked into Buhari’s medical and financial
records, in a bid to sway the decision of the electorate on regarding the
historic election.
“It was the kind of campaign that
was our bread and butter. We were employed by a billionaire who’s panicking at
the idea of a change of government and who wants to spend big to make sure that
doesn’t happen,” the newspaper quoted an ex-employee of SCL to have said.
Guardian said the company had
established a reputation of weaponising information to harm an opponent.
“It was a methodology honed and
developed in the company’s defence and military work – the fifth dimension of
warfare, defined by the US military as ‘information operations’,” the report
read.
“What was new, or at least new to
those employees who have now spoken out, was bringing these techniques to the
company’s election work.
“Seven individuals with close
knowledge of the Nigeria campaign have described how Cambridge Analytica worked
with people they believed were Israeli computer hackers.
“The sources – who spoke to the
Observer over many months – said the company was looking for “kompromat” on
Muhammadu Buhari – at the time, leader of the opposition.
“They said the hackers offered
Cambridge Analytica access to private information about Buhari.”
Their testimony paints an
extraordinary picture of how far a western company would contemplate going in
an effort to undermine the democratic process in Africa’s most populous nation.
However, Cambridge Analytica has
insisted it did not take possession of or use any personal information for any
purpose and did not use any “hacked or stolen data”.
The company confirmed, however,
that it had been hired to provide advertising and marketing services in support
of the campaign of Jonathan.
That work seems to have come
about through Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica, and a
senior strategist on the campaign team of President Donald Trump.
Regarded by colleagues as a prolific
networker, in December 2014 she was introduced to an oil billionaire who wanted
to fund a covert campaign to support Jonathan.
An ex-employee reportedly said:
“[Kaiser] got a phone call. It was just before Christmas and she flew out to
meet them in Washington DC. It was all a bit ridiculous. It was only six to
eight weeks before the election and they were looking to spend nearly $2m.”
“There were a lot of scared
millionaires worried that Buhari would get in. It was all very last-minute. A
team flew out to Abuja and put together a communications campaign. It was a
straightforward, normal comms campaign in most respects.”
The Observer reportedly obtained
an astonishing and disturbing video that Cambridge Analytica used in the
campaign.
“Coming to Nigeria on February
15th, 2015,” the voiceover says in the manner of a trailer for a Hollywood
movie.
“Dark. Scary. And very uncertain.
Sharia for all.” And then it poses the question: “What would Nigeria look like
if Sharia were imposed by Buhari?”
Its answer to that question is
certainly dark. And scary. It’s also graphically, brutally, violent. One minute
and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria’s troubled past set to a
horror movie soundtrack.
There are scenes of people being
macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in. A former
contractor said: “It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It
was targeted at Buhari voters in regions to basically scare the shit out of
them and stop them from voting.”
“If Buhari wins, the film warns:
women would wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced. And the inference
is, you may be macheted to death.
“It wasn’t just videos spreading
fear. The Cambridge Analytica campaign team in Nigeria were jumpy too.”
There were the meetings: three
sources have told the Guardian about one that took place between Cambridge
Analytica employees and two people they were told were Israeli intelligence
operatives.
“There was a two-hour meeting
that took place in the hotel lobby between two senior campaign members and
Israeli intelligence. After which they swept our hotel rooms for listening
devices and said they would switch out our phones. The story we were told was
that there were intelligence agents from a number of different countries,
including Israel and France, who were supporting Goodluck Jonathan and helping
the campaigns,” a source was quoted to have said.
There is no suggestion that
Jonathan was aware of or implicated in this support. Another employee said:
“Basically the Israelis didn’t want [Buhari] to win.”
Other employees questioned
whether they were “real” Israeli intelligence operatives, or Israeli private
contractors.
“A few weeks later, as the
campaign was drawing to a close, there was another meeting at Cambridge
Analytica’s London office,” the report read.
An expert had flown in from
Israel with a laptop, sources say.
“And Alexander Nix, Cambridge
Analytica’s now suspended CEO, and Kaiser, asked employees to take a thumb
drive and download the contents on to their own computers.
“The content was private emails
and the information, they were told, related to Buhari’s financial and medical
records.
“One employee who was present at
the London meeting said he had initially assumed the visiting expert was Mossad
or Israeli intelligence passing on what he called legtimate information.
“But he began to realise this
wasn’t the case, he said, when he saw the reaction of his colleagues. One of
them had “freaked out”, he said. “He was like, ‘What the fuck? I don’t want
anything to do with this.’”
The witnesses are clear – at
least in their own minds. The information they were shown had come from
hackers.
Back in Nigeria, the team still
on the ground found out what was going on from their colleagues in London. There
was more “freaking out”. This time with live, pressing concerns.
“They were fucking scared,” said
a colleague who spoke to them while they were in the country. The campaign
fixer, the person with local knowledge who navigated them through the ins and outs
of Nigerian politics, made it clear to them: they needed to get out of the
country right away.
Cambridge Analytica had put them
all in danger, they said. If opposition supporters found out, there was no
saying what might happen.
One member of the team missed his
flight and instead of asking the office to re-book it, he got the first fight
out – to Dubai – and put it on his credit card.
A spokesman for the company said
its team remained in the country throughout the original campaigning period but
“left in accordance with the company’s campaign plan”.
“Team members were regularly
briefed about security concerns prior to and during deployment and measures
were taken to ensure the team’s safety throughout,” he said.
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