Thread by @carolecadwalla

Not a single UK news org reported on UK links in Senate Intel report. Including amazing detail that Cambridge Analytica polling data from Trump was passed to Russian spy. In fairness..it sounds too nutty to be true, right? Much easier to dismiss & move on. Except..it is true

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1295760473628053504

I mean..I get it. It’s literally crazy. And...so un-British. We are not built for plots like this. Kitchen-sink dramas are our thing. But you can’t really understand the misreporting of this week’s Cambridge Analytica news without understanding the bizarro background context

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1295808634824392704

Elizabeth Denham, the UK commissioner, has led the world in investigating the abuse in data in politics. She did something bold & brilliant in taking on the tech giants & trying to uncover the truth about how personal data has been weaponised but political parties & campaigns

And in March 2018, she seized Cambridge Analytica’s servers. As well as investigating the referendum & all political parties & all political campaigns, she also took on the task of processing 700 terabytes of data from a firm which worked on 150+ elections around the world...

A Wilmslow-based govt regulator basically tried to do the job of the FBI. Its final report - that was supposed to include a forensic analysis of the 700 terabytes of data - has been delayed & delayed & delayed. And then it was announced that it wasn’t coming..

Instead she wrote a letter to parliament’s DCMS committee. That contained a few brief broad brushstrokes. Which prompted this headline which led to an unholy alliance of Brexiteers & data bros saying I told you so. Plus ca change, plus c’est etc etc. But here’s the thing..

The truth is so much wilder than you’d believe. I wish I *was* a crazy cat lady but this stuff is literally written down in congressional reports based on evidence of people now in jail. All this stuff *did* happen. Cambridge Analytica polling data *was* passed to a Russian spy

I don’t make this shit up. I’ve just spent 4 years down a rabbithole trying to wrestle it out into the open. The fact that the ICO basically gave up on trying to figure it out does not surprise me one bit. If I could have given up I would have. It’s crazyville. It’s a headfuck.

The stuff about the Russian spy is eyebrow raising. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg. We know it actively sought to subvert elections. We know it was involved in - allegedly - criminal offences. We know it partnered with Israeli psyops firms. This is documented

The ICO is not the FBI. And the idea that it could interrogate & prosecute an operation of this scale is for the birds. But I end with a plea: *please* don’t delete the evidence. One day in the future, we will need to understand..surely? We will want to know how we got here..