I created Steve Bannons psychological warfare tool: meet the data war whistleblower

[Judi Lynn]

The Cambridge Analytica Files

For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate

by Carole Cadwalladr

Sat 17 Mar 2018 14.00 EDT Last modified on Sat 17 Mar 2018 20.10 EDT

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

[regnaD kciN]

1. Sorry if I have ZERO sympathy for Wylie...

He whored himself out to Mercer and Bannon, never once questioning what purpose his work might be used for. Now that we all have to live in the nightmare world he created, he wishes to renounce his work and appear virtuous?

Too. Fucking. Late.

Well, I'll admit to a tiny bit of sympathy for his experience as a childhood abuse victim. Until I read that, my title for this reply was going to be "Dear Christopher Wylie: kill yourself." But that sympathy pales before the untold amount of suffering that deported immigrants, the poor, women, minorities, your own LGBT community, the sick who will die without healthcare, areas of this planet that will be devastated through the overturning of environmental protection, not to mention those throughout the world who will suffer the depredations of Putin's growing empire-building -- all of which was made possible by your efforts.

You know who you are, Christopher Wylie? You're the modern-day Pandora. Except that there's no "hope" as the final figure to emerge from your box.

And I hope you have to live with the crushing guilt of that knowledge for the rest of your wasted life.