Christopher Wylie’s strange and intriguing path from Canadian political operative to digital soldier to a whistle-blower has been long
Christopher Wylie was just six when a fight happened between him and a classmate in school. Things got so ugly that a court battle followed between the family and the school. Wylie and his parents were granted a settlement of $290,000 to make things right. The experience had already paved the way for the boy to turn into a whistleblower by confronting injustice and institutional corruption.
It’s no surprise that at 28, he is now the millenials first great whistleblower as hailed by some organizations.
Wylie is now the face of an expose which shows how a data firm he helped setup, Cambridge Analytica, collected 50 million Facebook profiles and manipulated it to influence elections.
With Cambridge Analytica ownership being partly with hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and headed at a point by Steve Bannon, ex senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, Trump’s election team and the Brexit campaign have tasted fruits of Cambridge Analytica.
Wylie’s disclosures have brought renewed interest in the way Facebook uses personal data.
Wylie though has a history. He started early at Victoria, where his mother is a psychiatrist and his father a doctor.
A boy who grew up in British Columbia, Canada Wylie got diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia early. Leaving school at the age of 16 with no qualification , it was his fascination with the internet that took him places over the years. His calling was politics.
By November, 2005, he was busy doing liaison between Victoria city hall and the youth as member of the City of Victoria Youth Council.
Foreign media writes Christopher Wylie in Victoria donated several hundred dollars to the Liberal Party of Canada in late 2006.
The registration for his company, Eunoia Technologies, lists his home address as a home near Victoria that was owned by his parents until they sold it last year, says a report. The five-bedroom executive home was listed last year for $2.5-million.
In 2008, Wylie went to work as a parliamentary assistant to then-Liberal MP Keith Martin, a physician who knew Wylie’s parents.
Wylie worked in office of leader of the Canadian opposition by 17, a year later he learnt data mining from former US President Barack Obama’s national director of targeting.
At 19, he taught himself coding, and by 20, he was at London School of Economics. Apart from studies, Wylie worked for British political party the Liberal Democrats.
In 2012, Brian Gold, a federal Liberal Party executive for Edmonton-Spruce Grove, wrote an internal paper for work on microtargeting, citing research by “Chris Wylie.
In 2013 he got twice lucky when he was introduced to SCL Group, which gave him the experience of launching Cambridge Analytica.
Working for them Wylie started work on how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour.
Here’s where the mind f@#$ tool was conceived.
Steve Bannon, then-editor of Breitbart News who became CEO of Trump’s election campaign was told about SCL Group’s election work.
Bannon took the idea to hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who, after meeting Wylie and now suspended Cambrdge Analytica CEO, Alexander Nix, helped bankroll the institution.
Bannon teamed up with University of Cambridge psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan’s company, Global Science Research and harvested Facebook data using a personality test app and went to work targeting US voters.
Wylie left Cambridge Analytica in 2014 and made Facebook aware of the data breach in 2016. While Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica ,the company also blocked Wylie from accessing his Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts.
For over a year, the Canadian was acting as a source for Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr. He fed the journalist every bit of detail about work undertaken by data firm Cambridge Analytica.
Christopher Wylie has been recognised by Edward Snowden who said: “Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post. They are not victims. They are accomplices.”
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