Former Labour MP and Digital Culture, Media and Sport Committee member Ian Lucas looks at diluted parliamentary oversight after two landmark reports on dirty data and dark money
The Unresolved Investigation
The Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham was questioned last week by the Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee – specifically, its Sub-Committee on Disinformation – and, thanks to dogged, well-briefed questions by particular MPs, we learned a lot.
We learned, for example, that Facebook’s secret deal with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in October 2019 prevented the public from being told about many issues. I was a member of the DCMS Committee at the time, waiting on tenterhooks, for a report the ICO which it had been promised by Autumn 2019.
I was hoping that the report would arrive before the 2019 General Election as that it would address issues relevant to the 2016 EU Referendum – including whether the Vote Leave campaign, led by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, had shared data unlawfully.
I wanted the public to know the answer to this question before they voted. I hoped it would give the DCMS Committee information about what exactly had been seized in the ICO’s dramatic raids on the offices of the scandal-hit data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica in March 2018 – raids which had followed news of large-scale data breaches by the company linked to the 2016 US Presidential election; concerns around Facebook’s suspicious, subsequent appearance at the same offices; and questions raised about what exactly Facebook’s connections to Cambridge Analytica were.
The Committee had passed information it had secured during its Disinformation Inquiry in summer 2018 to the ICO, including a digital repository from the firm AIQ – Vote Leave’s main social media campaign arm – showing that Gove had instructed it to act in his 2016 Conservative Party leadership campaign.
We also hoped that we would learn more about the relationship between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica. The Committee had heard contradictory evidence from witnesses: former Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie told us that Cambridge Analytica shared data with AIQ; AIQ’s Jeff Silvester told us that it had not and that there was never a contractual relationship between the two businesses.
There were important questions to answer.
Background to the Breach
In the event, just like the Russia Report, it did not arrive by the December 2019 General Election. In fact, it never arrived.
Instead, in October 2020, the ICO wrote to the DCMS Committee and said that it had concluded the matter. Media coverage in the UK at that time focused almost exclusively on the Information Commissioner’s bald conclusion that “I have found no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA [Cambridge Analytica and its parent company] were not involved in the EU Referendum campaign in the UK”.
I had expected a full report from the ICO and I hoped that it would explain why it was that different organisations including Vote Leave, BeLeave, the DUP, Veterans for Britain, and others, had all used the Canadian firm AIQ in the referendum campaign and whether Wylie’s allegation of data sharing – which would be a good (though illegal) explanation for AIQ’s popularity with the Leave campaigning organisations – was well or ill-founded.
We knew from the elections watchdog, the Election Commission, that the Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns had collaborated unlawfully on election finance – had they also collaborated on the use of data?
Addressing this question, the ICO stated in its letter to the DCMS Committee – without disclosing its rationale or the evidence which justified its view – that “we have not discovered any evidence to support that such data sharing occurred”.
Later in October, therefore, I was very puzzled by a document released, for the first time, by former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser – a 2015 draft agreement relating to the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign headed “Cambridge Analytica in partnership with AIQ”. This flatly contradicted AIQ’s evidence to the DCMS Committee that the two businesses had “no contractual relationship”. It also appeared to question the ICO’s conclusion that Cambridge Analytica was not involved in the 2016 EU Referendum campaign.
If AIQ was in partnership with Cambridge Analytica in November 2015, as the document disclosed, how distant was it from the Referendum campaign in the first half of 2016?
I also asked myself whether the ICO had seen the document, or similar documents, on Cambridge Analytica’s servers seized in 2016 as it appeared to be a Cambridge Analytica document from a Cambridge Analytica source.
Private Briefings
Elizabeth Denham offered a private briefing “to unpack that finding” that there was no evidence of data sharing by the Leave campaign organisations.
Such private briefings have become very popular in the world of Big Tech. Facebook, in particular, is very fond of them. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who, famously, refused to give evidence in public