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Democracy in Danger: How Safe is Britain's Next Election? – Byline Times bylinetimes.com/2019/03/29/the…
“Everyone tries to walk away with the data at the end of a campaign.”
That was the stunning admission by a senior Vote Leave data specialist following the shock victory of the Brexit campaigns in the 2016 EU Referendum.
That was the stunning admission by a senior Vote Leave data specialist following the shock victory of the Brexit campaigns in the 2016 EU Referendum.
Vote Leave spent at least 40 per cent of its budget on the controversial Canadian electioneering and data company AIQ, and more than £2.7 million on automated targeting – including 1,433 ads aimed at specific groups of people on Facebook, viewed more than 169 million times.
What’s to stop people just walking off with our sensitive personal data after major campaigns? And where has all that Brexit referendum data gone?
Insiders who experienced the highly-charged atmosphere inside the Vote Leave HQ at Westminster Tower told Byline Times about the “colourful” discussions that were necessary to try to protect data as the simmering battle for votes boiled over in 2016.
When asked, senior Vote Leave officers refused to explain how their data authorisation system worked. Neither could they provide an internal audit trail documenting who accessed their sensitive databases and when.
Vote Leave also developed a specialised system canvassing platform. This was known as VICS (Voter Intention Collection System), and a tribute to Victoria Woodcock, Vote Leave’s head of operations. Invoices reveal the software was coded and maintained by the Canadian company AIQ.
At first blush the much vaunted software was just a website for volunteers to canvas voters. But according to Chris Vickery, a data security expert who gave testimony to parliamentary inquiries in Canada and the UK, the VIC system looks like a “cover story” for AIQ “shenanigans”.
But it’s not just dark ads funded by dark money from domestic campaigns that threaten the integrity of future elections.
“It would be extremely surprising if adversarial nations were not devoting large sums of resources to do the same,” Vickery said... “for malicious intent.”
“It would be extremely surprising if adversarial nations were not devoting large sums of resources to do the same,” Vickery said... “for malicious intent.”
