Christopher Wylie, who exposed the role Cambridge Analytica played in big political events such as Brexit, says it has done “all kinds of projects” in India.
New Delhi: Cambridge Analytica, the controversial British political consulting firm which is at the centre of a global data sharing scandal along with Facebook, has worked extensively in India and the Congress party had been one of its clients, whistleblower Christopher Wylie has claimed before a panel of British MPs.
Wylie testified before the MPs late on Tuesday and spoke about the various countries that CA has worked in, including developing countries such as Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria, besides India.
Wylie said that Facebook data was the “foundational base” of the company’s operations, after the social media giant came in the line of fire for selling user data to the company for $1 million.
One of the MPs brought up India, saying it was a “country rife with political discord” with “opportunities for destabilisation”, and added that Facebook’s biggest market, in terms of number of users, is India.
At this point in the testimony, someone in the background is heard saying Cambridge Analytica has worked extensively in India, which Wylie then confirms. “They have an office in India,” Wylie said.
The same MP who asked about India earlier went back to Facebook’s “biggest user market”. Calling it the world’s biggest democracy with “lots and lots of elections all the time,” the MP said India was presumably a prime source of business.
“I believe their client was Congress, but I know that they’ve done all kinds of projects,” Wylie said.
While he didn’t recall a project at a national scale, he said there were regional projects. “India’s so big that one state can be as big as Britain,” he said. “But they do have offices there, they do have staff there. I believe I do have some documentation on India that I could provide if that’s of interest,” he offered to the committee.
“Another country that doesn’t need any tensions,” the same MP said.
Earlier in the deposition, Wylie described the company as an example of modern-day colonialism. He later called it a “privatised colonising” operation, to which end it is important to have “your guy” in a position of power.
All documents provided to the questioning committee — the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British government — will be made public.
How Cambridge Analytica worked in India
An exclusive report published by ThePrint last week said that Cambridge Analytica intended to create a database for 28 Lok Sabha seats, with the intention of selling them to parties and politicians for the 2014 elections.
While the company met top politicians in both the Congress and the BJP, the company’s CEO, Alexander Nix, was more keen to work with the Congress. During the process for collecting information for the database, however, the questions being asked by Indian surveyors seemed biased and anti-Congress.
This is because the company eventually ended up working with a private client – an Indian businessman in the United States – who wanted to see Congress lose the elections.
Working for profit
Wylie’s deposition echoed ThePrint report. He said that the company was simply interested in making money and wreaking havoc.
Wylie revealed that the people behind Cambridge Analytica, like Nix, were extremely wealthy. “For certain wealthy people, they need something to keep them occupied – they need projects – and going into the developing world and running a country is something that appeals to them,” he said.
“This is a company that goes around the world and undermines the big institutions of countries that are struggling to develop those institutions,” he said.