It’s hard to reconcile the AggregateIQ we see in Victoria with the damning description Chris Wylie gave to British politicians on Tuesday.
Here, the tiny tech company, which until February worked out of a funky second-floor space in Market Square, looked like every other geek shop in town — a handful of young guys hunched over laptops in a space the size of your rumpus room. A chessboard sat on a table. Most recently, they were in the news for their involvement in Todd Stone’s run for the B.C. Liberal leadership.
Yet the testimony from Wylie, the 28-year-old Victoria-raised whistleblower at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, paints another picture entirely. It goes beyond the question of AIQ’s involvement in the Brexit vote — though he portrays that as underhanded — and casts the Victoria company as being complicit in undermining democratic institutions in the developing world.
Wylie even told a British parliamentary committee that AIQ distributed violent, anti-Muslim videos as a part of a campaign to influence voters in Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election. He also quoted AIQ co-founder Jeff Silvester as telling him Brexit campaign efforts were “totally illegal.”
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This all goes against the image fostered by AIQ, which in recent days has downplayed its links with Wylie and his former employer SCL — a British company that tries to influence opinion on behalf of clients in politics and the military — and denied any association with SCL offshoot Cambridge Analytica. AIQ has acknowledged doing unspecified contract work for SCL in 2014, but said it had no contact with the British company after that work was done. It is emphatic that it has never knowingly broken the law.
On Saturday, it released a statement saying: “AggregateIQ is a digital advertising, web and software development company based in Canada. It is and has always been 100 per cent Canadian owned and operated. AggregateIQ has never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL.”
Wylie dismissed those as “weasel words” that were technically true but misleading. He described AIQ as a “franchise” that was set up after Wylie, SCL’s new research director in 2013, tried to recruit Silvester — whom he described as someone he respected after working with him on previous projects — to help build SCL’s software capacity and tech infrastructure. He said Silvester and other Canadians, citing young families and new homes, balked at moving to London, so SCL agreed to the creation of AIQ as a free-standing Canadian outfit as long as its intellectual property was assigned to SCL and it traded as SCL Canada.
In practice, he said, AIQ operated as a part of the British company. It built the software later used by Cambridge Analytica — described as less of a company than a brand used by conservatives Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon in the U.S. — to profile Republican voters, and allegedly used to handle data obtained from Facebook users.
Wylie was scathing about SCL itself. “They don’t care whether or not what they do is legal as long as it gets the job done.” While the focus has been on the Facebook story, the Victorian pointed to SCL’s activities in developing countries, where he accused it of undermining democracy on behalf of clients seeking to exploit political ties. “They are an example of what modern-day colonialism looks like.” He told the British politicians that AIQ distributed “kompromat” for SCL, mentioning a case in which videos of people being dismembered or having their throats cut were sent to Nigerian voters.
Again, contrast that cloak-and-dagger imagery with what we know of AIQ.
The company was founded in Victoria in November 2013 by Silvester — a one-time aide to former Liberal MP Keith Martin — and Zack Massingham, young men who shared interests in IT and politics. Two other Victoria men are minority shareholders, but Massingham and Silvester are the company’s only directors.
The company first made the news just over a year ago when British media reported that much of the money spent by the Leave side in the run-up to Britain’s June 2016 referendum on whether to stay in the European Union had been funnelled through the Victoria consultancy. The money, which AIQ said went largely to online advertising, included £2.7 million from the official Vote Leave organization, plus more than £800,000 spent by three other pro-Brexit groups. They included BeLeave, the latter headed by 23-year-old fashion student Darren Grimes, who reportedly received £625,000 from Vote Leave.
Why would Vote Leave give other groups money? Because it was nearing its £7-million spending cap allowed under British election law. Giving the others money wasn’t illegal on its own, but it would have been illegal had they all co-ordinated their activities and collectively broken the £7-million ceiling.
Britain’s Electoral Commission initially cleared them of any wrongdoing, but then opened a new investigation in November. This past weekend, British media and the CBC reported that someone from within the BeLeave group had said yes, there was collusion, that they broke the rules of the vote that changed the course of British history.
Wylie told the parliamentary committee Tuesday that he approached Silvester at AIQ’s office after media reports surfaced of the money funnelled through Grimes, his friend. He was worried Grimes would get in trouble. It was when he asked Silvester how the pro-Brexit side had won that Silvester, seemingly amused, said it was “totally illegal.” (That doesn’t mean, though, that AIQ itself broke the law.)
Remember, this is all Wylie’s side of the story, as imparted to the parliamentary committee. It would be good to get a full accounting from those at AIQ, but in recent days they have responded to requests only with short written statements. Silvester, in a brief phone conversation last week, sounded frustrated by the need to defend his company against allegations that sounded like something out of a spy novel.
There are so many questions that need answering by Silvester and Massingham, whose earlier depictions of AIQ’s activities sounded benign compared to the dark arts described by Wylie, but the pair, who are reportedly bound by a nondisclosure agreement, have kept a low profile. British journalists are sniffing around town trying to find them. This is a big story in the U.K., where AIQ’s image has been much darker than the one we have seen in Victoria.
