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More than 100,000 Cambridge Analytica documents relating to 68 countries are to be released to the public over the coming months.
More than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser – due to speak next May at Future Human 2020 – are to be released over the coming months, which will reveal the former company’s plans for global voter manipulation across 68 countries. The documents were subpoenaed as part of the Robert Mueller investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections.
According to The Observer, a string of documents were released on New Year’s Day by a Twitter account called HindSightFiles, which pointed to material on elections in Brazil, Kenya and Malaysia. The documents were lifted from Kaiser’s email accounts and hard drives and are among thousands of pages that, she said, go “way beyond what people think they know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal”.
Among the documents was material suggesting the disbanded company was working with a political party in Ukraine in 2017, despite being under investigation as part of the Mueller probe. Kaiser said emails during this time show how Cambridge Analytica created a web of shell companies “designed to funnel dark money into politics”.
“There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles,” she said. “These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics.”
Emma Briant, an academic at Bard College, New York, has seen a number of the documents and described what she has come across as just “the tip of the iceberg”, painting a much clearer picture of what happened during the 2016 US presidential election.
“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing,” Briant told the Observer.
“This is an entire global industry that’s out of control, but what this does is lay out what was happening with this one company.”
Editor’s note: Please note that Future Human 2020 has been rescheduled to take place on 29 and 30 October 2020. More details can be found here.
