Relentlessly mired in controversy, the Trump team saw a new side to its troubles open up when earlier this year, reports began circulating about the questionable activities of the data firm employed by the campaign, Cambridge Analytica.
Led in part at one point by eventual Trump adviser and confidante Steve Bannon, the firm acquired the Facebook data of upwards of tens of millions of people and used that data to inform its political consulting. Since the revelation of the company’s possession of the data, Facebook itself has faced scrutiny, but their scrutiny has not been at the level seen by CA itself.
Now, British authorities have slapped a new demand on the company — which is ceasing operations while its owners work on forming something new — demanding that they produce all of the information they have on a certain American voter within thirty days unless they want to face criminal prosecution. Besides handing over the data itself, The Guardian reports that the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office has also ordered CA parent company SCL Elections to reveal their source for the data and the course it took once it was in their possession.
The American whose data CA has been ordered to hand over is New Yorker David Carroll, who exploited the stricter U.K. privacy laws and the fact that CA operated in the U.K. to bring a case against the company in an effort to reclaim his data. He first became aware of the company’s questionable practices after they sent him a profile they’d created of him without disclosing their methodologies.
Carroll told the British outlet The Guardian:
‘This should solve a lot of mysteries about what the company did with data and where it got it from. I hope that it will help the ongoing investigations in my country and yours, and other places like Canada. There’s a lot of questions that no one has been able to answer until now so hopefully this will be a major breakthrough in our understanding of what it did.’
CA did not immediately return a request from The Guardian for comment. British authorities made clear that the company would not be able to avoid pressure to comply with the request by hiding behind their recently announced impending liquidation.
The company’s original argument against Carroll’s “subject access request” made under U.K. law for his data was to compare him to a member of the Taliban, as if they thought that any authority anywhere would go along with such an argument. Human rights lawyer Ravi Naik called the company’s behavior in response to Carroll’s request “astonishing.”
Their behavior in response to Carroll’s request is certainly not the only “astonishing” thing known about the company at this point. Senior members of the organization were caught on camera in an undercover investigation carried out by Britain’s Channel 4 indicating that they use bribes and sexual entrapment in their efforts against rival politicians.
The company unsurprisingly denied those claims and claimed their staffers to have just been bluffing, but not before the damage was done.
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