Saturday, March 24, 2018

AggregateIQ and Brexit, the Canadian Connection Partly Explained. Alleged Campaign Expense Violations.


Just what everyone needs. Three or four new names to add to the snowballing cast of characters in the AggregateIQ/Brexit/Cambridge Analytica/Trump campaign scandal. Not only is the volume of names hard to keep track of, you can't tell just yet anyway who may be important and who is just another face.

British electoral law prohibits co-ordination between different campaign organisations, which must all comply with spending limits. If they plan tactics or co-ordinate together, they must have a shared cap on spending. Vote Leave strongly denies any such co-ordination.
Sanni says that after the commission opened an investigation last March, Victoria Woodcock, the operations director for Vote Leave, deleted herself, campaign director Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave’s digital director, Henry de Zoete, from dozens of files on the drive Vote Leave shared with BeLeave to hide the fact of co-ordination. On a blog post on Friday, Cummings said this was “factually wrong and libellous”. Vote Leave say staff acted “ethically, responsibly and legally in deleting any data”. It is not known whether she was acting under instruction.

Most of the £625,000 donation went to a Canadian data company called AggregateIQ, which has links to Cambridge Analytica, the firm that used harvested Facebook data to build a political targeting system in the US. Christopher Wylie, the former CA employee turned whistleblower, said that at the time of the referendum, the Canadian firm was operating “almost as an internal department of Cambridge Analytica”.

AIQ would eventually soak up about a third of all Vote Leave’s official spending, receiving £2.7m from the group in addition to the money that came via BeLeave. The firm also received £100,000 from Veterans for Britain and £32,750 from the DUP. After the referendum, Cummings stated on AIQ’s website: “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of Aggregate IQ. We couldn’t have done it without them.”

The gist of the story is that the Leave campaign used a youth group, BeLeave, to circumvent spending limit laws.

Shahmir Sanni’s central claim concerns a donation of £625,000 that Vote Leave ostensibly made to an independent referendum campaign organisation called BeLeave. He claims the money, channelled to a digital services firm linked to the controversial Cambridge Analytica firm, violated election rules because it was not a genuine donation.
The money was registered by BeLeave with election authorities as a donation from Vote Leave to an independent youth operation. Sanni says BeLeave shared offices with Vote Leave – fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – which in practice offered advice and assistance to the group and helped them to decide where their cash would be spent.
British electoral law prohibits co-ordination between different campaign organisations, which must all comply with spending limits. If they plan tactics or co-ordinate together, they must have a shared cap on spending. Vote Leave strongly denies any such co-ordination.
Sanni says that after the commission opened an investigation last March, Victoria Woodcock, the operations director for Vote Leave, deleted herself, campaign director Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave’s digital director, Henry de Zoete, from dozens of files on the drive Vote Leave shared with BeLeave to hide the fact of co-ordination. On a blog post on Friday, Cummings said this was “factually wrong and libellous”. Vote Leave say staff acted “ethically, responsibly and legally in deleting any data”. It is not known whether she was acting under instruction.
If Leave was using BeLeave as a proxy, a straw man for the purpose of circumventing campaign spending laws, that could undermine the legitimacy of the Brexit vote to leave the EU.

I expect some day this will all make sense to somebody.

3 comments:

the salamander said...

.. I was always under the impression
folks voted for people..
based on fundamental policy
the votes got tabulated
and a majority of a political riding
had someone in their corner
Fisherman or Teachers or housewives
welders, firefighters, truck drivers

You know, childcare, seniors support
speed limits.. a bit o law n order
paved roads n snow ploughs
That was the Scope of Work..
th job description

Somehow it got abstract grandiose n all
Secret Trade Deals signed in Vladivostok
Tax exemptions or credits to create tailing ponds

Off goes Scheer to See the Queen
after Trudeau blindsided himself in India
Kenney flips flops n flies like a landed sunfish
the rest of the provincial premiers
seem like similar 'rockfish'
when we elect them, they swallow the hook

.. Pliers please

I look upon life like many farm kids..
Winter, you look after the herd, milk, beef or goats
a lot of manure spreading

Spring, you can't wait to be out on th land
but for gawds sake don't bury the tractor
up to the axels in a wet field

Then the planting and the haying
Then the harvest.. plus daily husbandry
and the odd call to the vet to save a calf

Snow falls..

There's a natural rythmn to this that makes sense

From today's politicians though..
I get noise & more noise & abdication
of what they were elected to accomplish

We will save the atmosphere via more tar sands
and extirpate the caribou.. while poisoning wolves
because Asia.. We don't want to supply food or water to Asia
or Arabia.. we want to feed their industrial generators
or send them armored jeep/transports
to slaughter people in Quatar.. or Yemen

The Mound of Sound said...


This scandal illustrates why democracies need tough laws against those who interfere with a citizen's right to vote freely. If someone uses powerful electronic manipulation to discourage one side's supporters, to inflame its own or to otherwise confound that exercise of the democratic franchise, it should be met with a stiff prison sentence.

It's now obvious that the Americans made a serious error when they tolerated the early dirty tricksters, Atwater, etc., who begat today's Cambridge Analytica, AIQ and who knows how many others waiting in the wings. When groups such as that use essentially the same techniques against their citizens as an adversarial foreign power would use to attack their country, it has to stop.

This isn't just an American problem.

Toby said...

Nasty electioneering is as old as the vote. There was a time when each of many Canadian political parties published their own newspapers and lied to their hearts' content. Buying votes, in one way or another, and stuffing ballot boxes is nothing new. What we have now is pretty much the same nonsense but on a massive scale.

Most of what was done on Facebook probably wasn't exactly illegal but it sure was unethical.