In a separate November 2017 meeting filmed by Channel 4, Turnbull appears to admit that the company is in the business of preying on people's fears. "Our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else, to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns," he says in the video. "It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about emotion.”

Turnbull (left) and Nix (right). Channel 4 News Turnbull (left) and Tayler (right). Channel 4 News

That aptly describes fears about about Cambridge Analytica's so-called psychographic profiling, which aims to target people with ads based on their personality type. The company reportedly depended heavily on that trove of 50 million Facebook users' data to develop these profiles. That data was acquired via a third-party researcher, who created an app that asked users to take a personality quiz. Nearly 300,000 people downloaded that app, thereby handing the researcher—and Cambridge Analytica—access not only to their own personal data, but that of their friends. In 2015, Facebook officially closed the loophole that gave app developers the ability to suck up people's friends' data as well. Facebook also made Cambridge sign a legally binding agreement that it had deleted the data that year, but over the weekend, sources close to the company told WIRED that data was still visible to employees within Cambridge in early 2017. Facebook has since suspended SCL and Cambridge Analytica's access to the platform, while it investigates. SCL and Cambridge maintain the data was deleted in 2015.

Turnbull does appear to express doubt about these methods. In a Channel 4 video of a December 2017 meeting, he says: "So we’re not in the business of fake news, we’re not in the business of lying, making stuff up, and we’re not in the business of entrapment, so we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t send a pretty girl out to seduce a politician and then film them in their bedroom and then release the film. There are companies that do this but to me that crosses a line." Turnbull, though, was present for prior meetings in which such tactics were discussed.

In a phone call captured in the Channel 4 video, executives openly boast about working "in the shadows" because, as Nix explains to the reporters, "we have many clients who never wish to have our relationship with them made public.” Nix notes that the company often sets up fake IDs and websites. "We can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists," he explains in the video of the January 2018 meeting.

Turnbull appears to make the same claim in the video of the December 2017 meeting, in which he says that the company would create "a different entity, with a different name, so that no record exists with our name attached to this at all, and I think we can work in that space as well.” One of the most mysterious aspects of SCL and its offshoot, Cambridge Analytica, is its organizational structure. The company includes a vast web of related businesses that even current and former employees struggle to truly comprehend.

In the same video of that December meeting, Turnbull plays up the company's ties to former British intelligence agents, who were part of MI5 and MI6. "They will find all the skeletons in his closet quietly, discreetly, and give you a report,” he explains.

The videos appear to offer unique insight into how Cambridge Analytica thinks about elections, although it doesn’t confirm that the company has actually done any of these things. It may just be bluster in an attempt to close a sale. And in a fuller response, Cambridge Analytica strongly disputed the report.