With Dominic Cummings facing serious questions from the DCMS Committee, this latest article from Brexitshambles develops earlier strands from Carole Cadwalladr and Simon Hooper

Following the shock win for the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU Referendum, strange coincidences began to emerge concerning the methodology used by rival Leave campaign organisations Vote Leave and LeaveEU.

Both claimed they’d targeted the same number of ‘persuadables’ and both began to claim that the secret to their slim victory was in no small part due to dispensing with traditional campaign pollsters and advertisers in favour of PhD mathematicians, astrophysicists and computer scientists.

Curiouser and curiouser, the mystery intensified when the Electoral Commission published the returns and neither organisation appeared to have paid for any such profusion of PhD’s.

Through Twitter and the press, LeaveEU’s leader, Arron Banks, told the world how ’AI had won it’ and how Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, whilst loyal bagman Andy Wigmore told an ever evolving story including this 2017 interview with The Times:

“Cambridge Analytica provided initial help and guidance to the LeaveEU campaign, which then went on to develop its own artificial intelligence analysis methodology. The AI machine learning was developed in Bristol by 20 mathematicians and actuaries with input from Cambridge Analytica at the very beginning and then executed by Goddard Gunster.”

Last week the Electoral Commission fined LeaveEU £70,000 for failing to record over £77,000 of referendum expenditure, explaining that the figure may be considerably higher as they had also failed to record services provided by Goddard Gunster. They’ve now referred their CEO, Liz Bilney, to the Metropolitan Police on the grounds they believe criminal offences may have taken place.

Despite this lengthy list of transgressions, the Electoral Commission found no evidence of donations or paid services from Cambridge Analytica.

This wasn’t totally unexpected, this is the same myopic Electoral Commission that similarly found no evidence of suspicious activity between Vote Leave and BeLeave, only to then begin an investigation after suddenly discovering new evidence, once threatened with legal action, by barrister Jolyon Maugham QC to force a judicial review.

Clearly the Electoral Commission is under-resourced, and these complex, technical cases are undoubtedly difficult to investigate; akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, but it doesn’t help when the Electoral Commission can’t even find the haystack to begin with.

We learn of Vote Leave’s version of the mysterious mathematicians’ tale from their Campaign Director, Dominic Cummings, who has a propensity to write in a way that makes War & Peace look like a pamphlet.

It’s worth pointing out at this stage that Cummings’ reputation comes before him. Having been thrown out of the Westminster environs, following the mayhem he, as a SPAD, and his pandemonium partner, Michael Gove, the then Minister of Education, created whilst at the Dept. of Education, David Cameron went on to famously describe Cummings as a ‘career psychopath’.

Cummings explained extensively that “physics, mathematics, and computer science are domains in which there are real experts” and Tim Shipman, in his Brexit book, ‘All Out War’ describes how, in addition to hiring digital media experts AggregateIQ, Cummings ‘in great secrecy, rather than hire an off-the-shelf political consultancy, found experts in disciplines like astrophysics, who were confident with statistics and sophisticated computer modelling, to come at the problem from a different angle.’

What was this problem? The problem was that Vote Leave needed to identify a target audience. Cummings is once again helpful here, he wrote, ‘we had to build everything from scratch without even the money to buy standard commercial databases. We found ways to scrape equivalents off the web saving hundreds of thousands of pounds.’

Arch Eurosceptic Daniel Hannan sheds even more light on how these databases were constructed when he said, ‘Dominic had these astrophysicists who had found ways of scraping data of people’s Google searches and feeding it into a programme to tell you, by postcode, where your voters were.’

At the very least, the information from Cummings, Shipman and Hannan confirms that AIQ and the scientists were separate entities, so who were these mysterious physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists?

In London, there exists an organisation that offers a prestigious fellowship for PhD graduates, post-doctoral researchers and experienced software engineers. The fellowship is designed to assist them in their transition into a career in data science. This company is ASI Data Science.

A quick examination of their alumni reveals its 150-strong fellowship is littered with PhD’s in disciplines such as mathematics, astrophysics, particle physics, molecular biology and economics from the world’s most esteemed universities including Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Imperial, UCL and Heidelberg to name but a few.

Essentially the ASI fellowship is Top Gun for PhD’s wanting to enter the data science industry. ASI claim that 10% of the UK’s PhD’s in science, technology, engineering and mathematics apply for the fellowship which is heavily oversubscribed.

Founded in 2014 by Se Miao Angie Ma, Dr. Marc Warner and Dr. Daniel James Hulme, ASI Data Science promotes itself as ‘a world leader in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence’ offering services including consulting, training and sourcing data specialists from within their own data science fellowship.

As part of its referendum return, Vote Leave submitted five invoices from Advanced Skills Initiative Ltd for ‘advertising and market research’. Two were for insignificant amounts totaling just over £281, but the remaining three, according to the Electoral Commission website, were for £71,737.

Obtaining the actual invoices reveals more detail. Advanced Skills Initiative Ltd is the registered name of ASI whose name is on these invoices, the three invoices concerned were not for advertising but for data and polling analysis services and finally the amounts on the invoices do not correspond with those submitted. The total amount declared to the Electoral commission, including those for £281, amounts to £72,081. The actual amount on the invoices was £114,881, a difference of £42,800.

Referendum spending is defined as expenditure on certain campaigning activities, this includes all advertising and market research, that are intended to, or are otherwise in connection with, promoting or bringing about a particular outcome in the referendum. This includes spending on items or services used during the referendum period including those bought before the period begins.

It’s not immediately apparent why there is such a wide discrepancy between the amounts submitted and the actual amounts on the invoices. If the amount had been split with another campaign that would have shown up in the Electoral database, or if the service was supplied at a discounted rate the discount would have been calculated uniformly on both £40,000 invoices.

There’s probably a simple explanation for this, we don’t know what it is; we had hoped that the Electoral Commission would have cleared it up, but although we contacted them over twelve months ago, we’re still waiting for them to respond.

The claim by Vote Leave that ASI supplied some form of advertising is highly contentious. ASI are, by their own admission, a world leader in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence – not advertising.

Cummings’ claim that ‘data was scraped off the net’ would be a skill easily accomplished by people at ASI, everyone there would be highly familiar with Python, probably the most commonly used language in data science, which contains a library called ‘Beautiful Soup’ a tool specifically used for this task.

ASI and its fellowship programme are clearly an excellent resource for companies operating in the world of data science, which explains why SCL have an association with at least nine of their alumni, many of whom were until recently working for one or several of the companies that were once in the SCL Group prior to liquidation.

For companies hoping to recruit the best of the best it’s a cost effective programme, you pay a fee, much less than using an agency, and you have candidates working on a live project during which you can evaluate their worth.

Here’s Jack Hansom, a PhD experimental physicist, presenting at the demo day during his 2015 ASI fellowship after which he immediately went to work for Cambridge Analytica LLC as a Data Engineer until 2017.

*This video was uploaded by Paul Olivier DeHaye of PersonalData.IO who resisted a take-down request on the basis of fair use in light of journalistic interest.

Whilst there’s no suggestion that ASI have done anything wrong in supplying what they were asked to supply, given the track record of Vote Leave, who are already under multiple investigations, along with that of their opponents LeaveEU, all anomalies have to be investigated, especially those that could form part of a strategy to undermine the laws governing referendums and elections in the UK.

Data science, AI and machine learning used correctly, to keep the electorate better informed, should be embraced, but we need to be vigilant; in the wrong hands, where the aim is to manipulate the electorate by spreading lies and propaganda anonymously through social media platforms, the unscrupulous amongst us will do everything they can to exploit this technology and the temptation to act illegally in order to gain an even greater advantage over opponents becomes irresistible.

It’s a technology that has long since been embraced by intelligence services and it’s terrifying to think that a European democracy could have been exposed to it.

Another curious coincidence is that all the companies involved in the delivery of one form or another of data science to the referendum participants, appear to have all worked for the government at one time.

In an excellent example of AI being put good use, ASI has recently developed a piece of software for the Home Office which utilises advanced machine learning to automatically analyse terrorist propaganda videos uploaded to any platform on the internet, this project will be particular useful in the governments quest to combat Daesh.

Even associated companies have connections within government. Former director and founder of ASI, Dr. Daniel James Hulme (resigned in March 2016) is also a director of NPComplete Ltd. A British company that holds 100% of the equity of a Delaware registered company named Satalia, an applied artificial intelligence company that utilises AI to solve efficiency problems.

NPComplete and Satalia were formed in 2008 by Dr. Hulme with his partner and fellow director Professor Anthony Finkelstein.

Brother of the former executive editor of The Times and now Tory peer Daniel Finkelstein, Anthony Finkelstein is the Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security to HM Government. Professor Finkelstein, who left NPComplete in 2017, is also Professor of Software Systems Engineering at University College London (UCL).

Whilst the clandestine usage of ‘big data’ has become big news, seemingly, the world of data scientists is a relatively small one. Finkelstein is joined at UCL by Professor of Machine Learning, Thore Graepel. Alongside his role at UCL, Professor Graepel is Research Lead at Google DeepMind and was formerly a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC).

In 2013 Professor Graepel was joint author, alongside David Stillwell, of ‘Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behaviour.’ The now infamous research paper based on a study of US Facebook users obtained through the myPersonalityapp.

The psychometric date profiles harvested from the myPersonalityapp were held by David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski at the University of Cambridge’s The Psychometrics Centre. Dr. Alexandr Kogan, one of the characters at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, was previously part of the project.

Months later Kogan signed a deal with Cambridge Analytica after developing his own Facebook data app, ThisIsYourDigitalLife. Mirroring the work of Kosinski, Stillwell and Graepel, Kogan’s app enabled Cambridge Analytica to obtain a database that could ‘micro-target’ millions of US voters.

The company with the closest links by far to the government is (was) SCL Group. Let’s not indulge those who are attempting to pretend that AIQ aren’t part of the SCL business sphere, at least the Canadian politicians tell it as it is:

When it comes to HM Government involvement, SCL are in a league of their own. With their defence division reputedly a List X contractor which could explain the delay in the Information Commissioners Office gaining access to SCL’s premises, SCL and staff associated with them have been delivering programmes for the UK government for decades.

SCL’s senior executives are familiar with military contractor work. Master of disguise, Mark Turnbull, managing director of SCL Elections, has previously worked at Bell Pottinger as an expert in ‘Strategic Communications’.

An interesting endorsement of Cambridge University educated Mr Turnbull’s work comes from Bo Clayton, an officer in the US military who states: “Mark is an absolute professional in the field of influence and strategic communications as it related to Conflict Management. Having personally served with him in Iraq, I saw first-hand his ability to not only understand a complex communications strategy, but how to recruit, train, and orchestrate a dynamic group of individuals.”

An even more revealing endorsement comes from Ed O’Connell, CEO of ASI (no relation to the UK company), “Mark Turnbull was my supervisor on two tours to Somalia and short-tour in Afghanistan. I also worked with him in Iraq where he led a multidisciplinary team of experts taking on a very challenging task against a very lethal adversary. Mark is hands-down one of the top minds in the Strategic Communications field and the newer Conflict Transformation field.”

And in this article in The Times, the company’s defence division is accused of being involved in training British officials to deal with Russian propaganda:

“The company accused of using dirty tricks to manipulate elections trained British officials on how to tackle Russian propaganda. The officials were among 20 intelligence and military personnel from Nato countries sent on an eight-week course in 2015 run by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group. Steve Tatham, the company’s defence expert, taught them advanced “techniques to counter Russia’s propaganda”.

Steve Tatham is actually a contractor and like ASI and AIQ, his company website, Influence Options Ltd, now carries a statement distancing itself from the activities of SCL.

As the evidence mounts so does the silence from a government, a government that has several cabinet members involved in Vote Leave and only remains in power through the DUP, a party which is directly involved in the Vote Leave spending scandal.

Whilst LeaveEu has now been referred to the police, over possible criminal activity during the EU referendum, they are little more than a sideshow, an organisation that simply attempted to stir up racial hatred from UKIP and BNP supporters and direct that hatred towards the EU for their own selfish reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with their thinly veiled nationalism masquerading as patriotism and populism.

The real show will be when and if Dominic Cummings finally appears before the DCMS committee, he’ll face some tough questions because as Stephen Kinnock aptly described:

“The whole thing stinks,” Kinnock said. “I wrote to the commission with evidence that the value of work carried out by Cambridge Analytica was around £800,000.”

If anyone is thinking the SCL/Cambridge Analytica is limited to the activities of LeaveEU, think again…..there’s a clue in this video.