Heed the warnings of this former GCHQ boss
Robert Hannigan has warned that tech companies are becoming more powerful than governments and have a tendency to consider themselves above democracy. We should pay attention, writes Raymond Snoddy
The swirls of information and dis-information, claim and counter-claim, over everything from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, the Vote Leave campaign, and the general manipulation of people’s minds, get ever more dense.
The whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, claimed at a Commons Committee this week that Vote Leave hired CA and as a result the Brexit vote was secured.
Vote Leave denies hiring CA and denounces Wylie as a charlatan and a fantasist – a line, for obvious reasons, given considerable prominence in the Daily Mail.
Was the denial a piece of sophistry as Vote Leave instead hired a different company with claimed links to Cambridge Analytica?
Amid all the denials there is one strong piece of documentary evidence, The Bad Boys of Brexit, the book written by Aaron Banks, with the help of political journalist Isabel Oakeshott.
In it Banks, who helped fund the Leave campaign – some say in mysterious circumstances although this too is denied – is very clear.
He says bluntly: “We’ve hired Cambridge Analytica, an American company that uses ‘big data and advanced psychographics,’ to influence people.”
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The book also goes on to say their role will be to develop psychological profiles of the electorate by using data to filter the population into 150 personality types and craft appropriate messages, presumably using Facebook.
“With this information, you can tailor campaign material to particular groups to vote. It may sound a bit creepy, but these days it’s how most big political parties work.”
That seems creepy and clear enough, and surely the intent is there whether or not such campaigns are as magically effective as their perpetrators claim.
There is also the more telling question of whether campaigning was funded off the books – a very serious, criminal matter for the Electoral Commission to investigate, including the allegation, obviously denied as conspiracy theory, that Russian money might somehow have been involved.
Whistle-blowers come in all shapes and sizes. Some act out of pure public spirit, others have an agenda and a tendency to exaggerate, because along the way they have been spurned, either professionally or personally.
The MPs in general seemed to find Wylie a credible and impressive witness, a view shared by Labour MP Ben Bradshaw.
The former Culture Secretary said Wylie had produced evidence of serious law breaking.
Bradshaw added that when he had first raised concerns about the conduct of the EU Referendum campaign in the Commons he had been seen as a crank. Bradshaw called for a judge-led inquiry to investigate possible Russian funding of Brexit campaigning.
Bradshaw now believes that far from being a crank almost all of his allegations have now been substantiated.
For those too busy to devote all of their time to untangling this complex international web, a little help is at hand from a disinterested but very knowledgeable source – Robert Hannigan, former director of GCHQ.
Hannigan, now a senior fellow at RUSI, the defence and security think-tank, has admitted that we do not know whether Russia interfered in the Brexit campaign.
But then tellingly he added: “It would be very surprising if they hadn’t at least tried because we know they have tried in France and in Germany to influence elections and we know about, of course, the US, so it would be a bit strange if they hadn’t in the UK.”
There is a toxicology of information as well as the physical stuff and President Putin has a clear motive to use all methods at his disposal, and in particular the social media giants, to try and disrupt established Western governments and institutions. Some will think he has already succeeded only too well.
The former GCHQ director also warned that: the tech companies were becoming more powerful than governments, had a tendency to consider themselves above democracy and probably only had the rest of this year to reform themselves before action is taken.
In the Financial Times this week Robert Harrigan went further, much further: stating that the economic and social benefits of the age of data are “far too important to be left to technology companies.”
They claim to act like charities for the good of society but clearly don’t, and appear reluctant to admit how they make their vast profits, by monetising data and selling it to advertisers.
“Unable to be open about how they make their money, these companies have been continuously on the back foot: dragged into accepting some responsibility for the extreme content they carry, cajoled into paying more tax, attacked for anti-competitive tendencies and vacuuming up potential rivals. They feel under siege from all sides, but make the classic mistake of thinking that, because the motives of their critics are partly self-interested, their criticism are not worth addressing,” says Harrigan.
It is a long paragraph but rarely has the case against the social media giants been better expressed, although he could have added the collateral damage – a serious societal problem – that is being inflicted on the established media.
Ironically, in the face of Brexit, he believes as many do, that only organisations such as the EU have the clout to take on the technology companies in the absence of any meaningful US action so far.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an important first step in giving individuals greater power over their own data.
It is unlikely that there will be a single remedy powerful enough to protect beneficial flows of open data, while at the same time preventing personal data being exploited in a monopolistic, socially damaging way.
Educating people to be less casual and generous with their data has to be part of the solution.
Ensuring that the social giants wean themselves off tax minimalising schemes and action to stop them gobbling up every speck of potential competition as soon as it emerges, are also vital.
Perhaps most important of all, the Western democracies have got to get to the bottom of how servants of a malign Putin regime are using information and social media as a disruptive weapon.
It would also be interesting to know whether Christopher Wylie is right, and the extent to which Russia meddled in the Brexit campaign, whether or not it made any difference to the outcome.