World / Americas Cambridge Analytica shared data with Russian researchers, says whistle-blower BL PREMIUM

Washington — Political consulting group Cambridge Analytica (CA) used Russian researchers and shared data with companies linked to Russian intelligence, a whistle-blower told a congressional hearing on interference in the 2016 US election on Wednesday. Christopher Wylie, who leaked information on the British-based firm’s hijacking of data on millions of Facebook users, told a US Senate panel he believes Russian intelligence services had access to data harvested by the consultancy. Wylie told the panel that Russian-American researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who created an application to harvest Facebook user profile data, was working on Russian-funded projects at the same time, including "behavioural research". "This means that in addition to Facebook data being accessed in Russia, there are reasonable grounds to suspect that CA may have been an intelligence target of Russian security services... [and] that Russian security services may have been notified of the existence of CA’s Facebook ...