- [Narrator] There is at least the possibility that the American public and publics in other countries have been experimented on.

(ominous music) - [Woman] The truth is we didn't target every American voter equally.

The bulk of our resources went into targeting those whose minds we thought we could change.

- Cheyenne's Brittany Kaiser and the impact of big data next on Wyoming Chronicle.

(lively music) - [Narrator] This program was funded in part by a grant for Newman's Own Foundation.

Working to nourish the common good by donating all profits from Newman's Own food and beverage products to charitable organizations that seek to make the world a better place.

More information is available at NewmansOwnFoundation.org.

(gentle music) Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council.

Helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwhy.org and by the members of the WyomingPBS foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- And I wanna welcome our viewers to this special Wyoming Chronicle with Brittany Kaiser.

Brittany, thank you first so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me, Craig.

- You bet.

And I know that many our viewers, Brittany may not know who you are.

So before we get to your work with the Own Your Data Foundation and the concerns you have with big data, what big data is and how it influences and impacts us.

Brittany, I think it's really important that our viewers understand your background.

So walk with me through kind of your resume, your vita, if you will, starting in 2007 when you began to work on the media side of President Obama's campaign.

What was that like and why did you enter that realm?

- So I became a political activist when I was very young.

I was working on my first campaign when I was only 13 years old.

Luckily, throughout high school and college, university, I was given so many opportunities to engage in campaigns where I really got to have an impact on issues that I cared about.

So whether it was a campaign about the environment, or it was a particular political candidate I really found that the more that I could get involved, the more that I had the opportunity to impact my own future.

And the policy that I would live in.

So I joined Obama's campaign while I was studying as a human rights lawyer.

I was actually studying in the UK.

So I flew back home to Chicago, to stay with my parents and start working at campaign headquarters.

And that was on the New Media Team.

Where we were actually the team who invented social media strategy.

Over the many months that I was there in the beginning, we were a small team of five that grew to 10, that grew to hundreds, and then tens of thousands of people around the country that were managing Barrack's Facebook page, YouTube, even Myspace at the time.

Twitter, not even become popular yet.

And we were the first people to start really taking data off of social media, to better understand who we were talking to so that we could do what is now called targeted messaging but it was basic at the time.

But we saw the more that we learned about what voters cared about, the more likely they were to show up and engage.

When we talked about a specific policy they cared about.

Something that was particularly important to their family and on and on, we started to develop different strategies to make sure that people were only hearing about what they cared about.

At the time, that seemed revolutionary.

And for me, the eternal optimist, I thought that that would always continue to be a good thing.

- Fast forward here to 2015, Brittany, when you are credited largely with pitching Cambridge Analytica's data services to president Trump's campaign.

First of all, give us a 30,000-foot definition of what Cambridge Analytica was.

And then we'll get into what has really evolved into a lot that has taken your life up here relative to a book, to a Netflix documentary.

All of those things we're gonna talk about but I wanna have you walk our viewers through what you pitched to the Trump campaign.

The work that you had did for Cambridge Analytica.

And then we'll talk more about what happened next, if we could.

- So after I left the Obama campaign, as I was studying as a human rights lawyer, I worked around the world consulting to different organizations.

Whether they be a human rights campaign or a smaller charity and nonprofit, teaching them how to use some of the tools that we had invented on the Obama campaign.

Teaching them how to use data, how to use different marketing or advertising tools in politics and in the nonprofit world to gain supporters and donors, to get people to care about a cause.

And it was actually on that exact same pathway that I ended up being introduced to the CEO of Cambridge Analytica.

I was studying for my doctoral thesis, writing my PhD on something called preventive diplomacy.

In politics, that means when a head of state, a president or prime minister and ambassador is able to stop a crisis before it happens.

And the only way that someone can do that is if they have the right amount of real-time information that something is going to happen.

And they can head it off by making an important decision.

Now, this is really all based on data.

What type of data sets are available, who is analyzing that data and how quickly does a report get to someone that is a president or prime minister for instance, that has the ability to do something about it?

And I realized I had to learn more about data science and Cambridge Analytica was a data science company that was doing very advanced work for militaries, governments, political parties and even commercial advertising for companies.

What they were doing was buying large scale datasets.

And what datasets really mean is your personal information.

It's everything about you.

What you buy, where you go on vacation with your families, what you read online.

All of your activities day and night for as far back as it started being recorded, which probably means since you first got a computer or a smartphone and all that.

(indistinct) Exactly.

So, all of his data can go to companies or governments or militaries and tell them more about your behavior.

If you are likely to buy a new type of toothpaste or if you are likely to vote for a certain candidate or if you're likely to incite or cause violence.

And all of this information can be analyzed in an inappropriate way where we can stop someone that would have caused violence from doing it in the first place.

We can convince someone to vote for somebody different than they would have or more simply, which I suppose happens every moment of every day, we can convince you to buy a different brand of toothpaste which I suppose is on the easy end of the scale.

- One other thing that I wanna throw in here just to make sure we talk about it.

You can also target folks who might be leaning the other way and create apathy so they may not go to the polls.

That to me is almost more chilling than anything that you have said yet.

Do you wanna comment about that?

- Absolutely.

So for those of you that know me as the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower or those that don't, there's a reason why I eventually ended up leaving this company called Cambridge Analytica.

And it's because I was privy to information that clients around the world, not just Donald Trump, had started to use this data science technique in political campaigning to figure out who would possibly not go out to vote.

Who was motivated by their fears and insecurities.

And then campaign teams were using this data in order to try to keep people at home and stop them from participating in the democratic process.

In traditional politics, this is called voter suppression tactics.

But usually it looks like someone being told that their local polling booth closes before it does or that it's in a different location.

But these days instead, you can be shown fear-based messaging that makes you no longer interested in your candidate or afraid to go to the polls in the first place.

And we've seen this proliferation of this type of messaging from around 2015, 2016 and the rise of it where it got even worse, this past election cycle in 2020.

- So many questions.

So Brittany then, of course you, we all know the results of the 2016 presidential campaign.

President Trump won.

I think papers have demonstrated the use of social media messaging in terms of the millions of messages had an impact perhaps in the outcome.

Is that the way you saw it?

And do you see that still today?

- Yes, I believe that anyone that is running an effective campaign is using data and they're using that data to understand what people care about or what motivates them.

How they actually make their decisions and take their actions.

And if you have enough information about that, which most people on social media you've accidentally provided enough of that information to people that are trying to figure this out about you.

Because of what you click on, what you read, what makes you comment, what makes you upset, what makes you emotional.

All of this can be told in the data that you create on a daily basis.

That you will receive a message that is just for you.

It is based on so much of your behavioral activity.

So much of your historical decision-making that you won't realize that what you're being shown, you might be in a very small group of people maybe just hundreds or thousands of people that see that exact message.

That's not being shown to everyone in America.

That is specifically targeted just for you.

And that's why it makes you emotional.

That's why it makes you share it.

That's why it makes you upset.

And unfortunately, the social media platforms that are used by most people like Facebook and Twitter.

The way that they're built on the backend, the way that the artificial intelligence or AI works is that algorithms are pushing things to the top that are more likely to make you upset.

Because if you're upset, you will share something, you will comment on it, you will create more data and you will get more people to engage around that topic.

It doesn't work the same with positive messaging or positive news unfortunately.

- We're gonna also talk in a moment about Own Your Data Foundation, Brittany, which you've now spent a lot of time and attention on.

And I think it's very, very important.

But I think our viewers should know then that when you left Cambridge Analytica, you needed to testify before UK's Parliament relative to Cambridge Analytica's influencing the Brexit Campaign.

And also testified before the Mueller Commission relative to the work that Cambridge Analytica did in President Trump's 2016 campaign.

I'm not sure what you can or can't share with us about those two experiences but I'd really be, love to hear what was going through your mind at those times, because quite frankly, in the documentary, it was a dicey time for you, it seemed to me.

- Absolutely.

Becoming a whistle blower is one of the scariest decisions one can ever make.

It's kind of like jumping off a cliff without knowing if you even have a parachute or if you do, whether or not it works.

(laughs) Because you know.

- As someone who skydives, I know exactly what you're talking about but go ahead.

(laughs) - What they call a crisis of conscience, where you feel like you just need to do something about the problem and you're not thinking ahead enough on what the consequences might be.

So I ended up testifying to about 15 different investigations all around the world.

Not just the UK and the United States but most of them were in the United States.

And what I learned throughout this time is that a lot of lawmakers and regulators have not had a lot of time to become incredibly technical.

To understand the way that technology works and the way that this governs all of our lives.

Over the past many decades, technology has developed to take as much personal information from every single person as possible.

And therefore, the more data that companies have, the more powerful they become.

And governments have not moved quickly enough to regulate how our information is used, how much of that can be taken and then how our information can be used by these organizations.

So we've now come to a head or a tipping point, I would say, where the government has made a very specific mandate upon themselves to say, we need to become more technical.

We need to understand how this works.

And I personally, I've worked with tons of different colleagues over the past few years to make sure that legislators are creating laws and that regulators are also informed of exactly how we need to enforce the, not just regulation of social media, but of privacy and data protection in general.

All of our rights depend on whether or not we have the ability to control our own information and what people do with it.

We're finally getting to a point where over the next couple of years, we're going to have so much more control than most people I think ever imagined possible.

- You know, let's hope so.

You've mentioned before that you believe data now is more valuable as a commodity than oil.

Do you still believe that?

- I definitely believe that.

Data is the highest value industry in the world.

Our data surpassed oil and gas in 2017.

And this year in 2020, we have created exponentially more data than ever before because we're leading a completely digital life during the pandemic.

We're in front of screens, nearly 24/7 if we're awake, We are on a screen.

And what that means is that we are producing so much more behavioral data about what we like, what we do, who we're connected with, what we care about and it makes it so much easier to manipulate us and makes us easier to become emotional or to become incited.

- Brittany, here comes the opportunity to do a documentary.

First of all, what was your motivation to participate in the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, which I really encourage viewers to go out and watch.

It's very stunning and very eyeopening and certainly gives insight into your life, Brittany.

But how did that come about?

- The day that I became a whistleblower, I was afraid of what was going to happen in both of the countries that I call home, both the United States and the United Kingdom.

When I had said that the last election in the United Kingdom and the election in the United States had been run illegally or not completely done in an ethical manner either.

And you don't know what's going to happen when you put yourself in that situation.

There's a lot of whistleblowers that become persecuted by governments or by individuals.

Sometimes you lose your ability to travel or your own safety.

So I decided to leave the country and I'm getting on a plane.

And I get a call from these two directors who I knew their work very well, Kareem and Jehane.

Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim who had made The Square.

And when Netflix, that was their first Academy nominations.

And I knew that they had made this incredible documentary about the uprising integrity square.

And everything that had happened in Egypt, a lot of which was organized on social media.

So their understanding of political revolutions, their understanding of the complexities of our relationships with social media and political organizing around that was far ahead of most people.

And so when they wanted to talk to me, I thought, wow.

These are people that are now making a movie about data.

These are definitely probably the right people to do it.

So they flew over to Thailand to see me.

- Were you afraid?

Were you afraid for your own life at that moment, Brittany?

I got that sense.

You can see it.

You can just see it, that you're concerned.

And you talk about it in Targeted as well.

- Yeah.

I definitely think that most people that put themselves in a high level situation where they're trying to make a change, but while making a change, you're saying that certain high level people in positions of power have done something wrong.

You don't know what's going to happen.

So, you know, traditional famous whistleblowers that we all know about have a lot of difficulty with how their lives are run.

You know, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, et cetera and so forth.

You know, that that type of figure is, you know, someone that doesn't lead an easy life.

So I went away for a little while to see what was going to happen and these amazing directors followed me.

And when Karim landed in Thailand, I thought I was gonna do a quick interview so that I could give my opinion about data.

And nine months later, (laughs) we were still working together.

They came with me to D.C. when I was testifying to the Mueller investigation.

They came with me to all of the activist work I was doing, the conferences I was speaking at.

And they also followed, you know, David Carroll and Carol Cadwallader and managed to put together a seamless narrative about what the problem was.

- I thought they did an incredible job and I was honored to be a part of it.

- Brittany, do any countries get it right today relative to the data protections and the privacy issues that you've talked about?

- Well, I definitely think the best step in the right direction that has happened so far is GDPR in Europe, where you have to opt in.

So you have to consent for your data to be collected.

In the United States, we are pre-opted in.

So anyone is allowed to collect our data and to opt out is very difficult to do.

So the way that the laws work here just makes Americans in general, much more easy to target than people in Europe, for instance.

But a lot of countries around the world don't have any laws yet around privacy and data protection.

So we're still in early days.

Which is why I do this every single day of my life because I know we're at this incredible turning point where governments are starting to take this seriously.

Companies are starting to be held accountable and individuals are starting to wake up and realize that we have to be more digitally literate.

We have to understand what our data is.

We have to understand the way technology works since we're using it every single day of our lives.

And in order to be successful, we also have to know how to protect ourselves.

- Is this a bipartisan effort in your view?

- Absolutely.

I think there's not a single person that wouldn't argue to protect your own human rights, to protect own civil rights.

And in order to do that, you need to understand the way that technology works.

You need to understand what you are giving away or not.

And if you are choosing to consent to something how do you make sure that your data is being protected and that your information isn't going to be used against you?

Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians, everybody can agree to something like that.

So it's really getting to a point where people understand how this works.

And then I think what we can come to a mutual understanding where everyone can benefit.

- So here we are with the Own Your Data Foundation.

You've started it.

What is it?

How has it going for you and what do you hope that it accomplishes?

- The Own Your Data Foundation is a Wyoming 501(c)(3) registered charity.

And what we do is digital literacy education.

We believe that everyone should have access to this type of knowledge.

And we're specifically working on parents and teachers and trusted adults in children's lives so that all adults actually understand what their data rights are and basic cyber security.

How to stop cyber bullying how to not be addicted to their devices and can help take kids through these educational curriculums as well.

You teach a curriculum called DQ, which just like IQ or EQ is a digital intelligence quotient that has been developed over the past 10 years by a lot of the world's top think tanks and government departments and universities that work in the technology space.

And this is starting to be rolled out all around the world.

There are even entire countries that are implementing these programs into their public school curriculums.

And so we're one of the partners that is teaching this curriculum in the United States and trying to get it into the hands of as many families and schools as possible.

- We're showing a link to your website on our screen right now, Brittany.

If you could give us some consolidated advice here that can have the most effect the most quickly.

What would you tell us?

What would you tell someone like me, who runs around with his phone, who uses, you know, types his number into the grocery counter stand, who does the same thing when he goes and fields gas, you know, who buys everything you know, from airline tickets to whatever online, you know.

Subscribe to movie pass for crying out loud and they wanted right up front to sell your data and I knew it but I wanted the convenience of having movie pass.

What would you tell someone like me?

- I would say that you should take a moment and step back and think about the amount of information that you produce and give away every day.

And decide what you are comfortable with or not.

Because a lot of times we give away information without fully understanding where it's going or what hands it could possibly get into.

So for instance, look in your phone and look at an application that you use every single day if you've never the terms and conditions which most people never have, maybe you take a quick glance.

You might notice that that application has access to all of your photos and videos, your contacts, all of the data you create in other applications, your live location.

And if you don't know the company that created that application or where, what country those developers are sitting in, you should think, am I comfortable with this company having access to all of that?

There's a lot of times you can go in and you can change your preferences to make sure that some of that data is not given away to people that you don't know and trust.

So my best advice is to start being more aware and think about it before just giving away your information.

Because every single day there starts to be more technologies where you don't have to give away your data in order to use their services.

Instead of Facebook, you can use voice.com.

Instead of WhatsApp, you can use Signal by The Signal Foundation.

Instead of using Google Chrome, you can use DuckDuckGo or Brave browser.

So there's a lot of privacy by design choices that are starting to come out.

They're gonna be more accessible and easy to use.

So everyone can be more protected than they are today.

- Brittany, you wrote a book, you wrote a memoir.

And the book I read about a year ago, absolutely fascinating.

The title is right there on our screen.

It's Targeted.

The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's inside story of how big data Trump and Facebook broke democracy and how it can happen again.

Brittany, has it happened again?

- Unfortunately, some of the predictions that I made in the end of my book just happened to us this past week.

What we saw was the intense radicalization of individuals over social media platforms where people have been incited all the way to physical violence, not just to mobs and crowds online.

- Well Brittany Kaiser, it's been an absolute pleasure to visit with you.

We could continue talking forever.

Own Your Data Foundation.

Urge people to look at your website.

I think we should suggest that people watch your documentary or the documentary, The Great Hack which gives them tremendous insight into your life.

And certainly your memoir Targeted is a worthwhile read and I can't thank you enough, Brittany, for taking time today from Austin, Texas.

Even though Cheyenne is also somewhat of your home for joining us on Wyoming Chronicle.

- Thank you so much, Craig.

Thank you to the people of Wyoming and thank you to everyone who listened to this.

- [Narrator] This program was funded in part by a grant for Newman's Own Foundation.

Working to nourish the common good by donating all profits from Newman's Own food and beverage products to charitable organizations that seek to make the world a better place.

More information is available at NewmansOwnFoundation.org.

(gentle music) Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council.

Helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwhy.org and by the members of the WyomingPBS foundation.

Thank you for your support.