![]() ![]() The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. And she mentioned to him a firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.” “She said, ‘You really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. On that day in January 2013, the intern met up with SCL’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. ![]() It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. ![]() We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.” It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. Was that really what you called it, I ask him. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.” “That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. ![]()
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