BREACH

Whistleblower: Canadian Company Helped Republicans Target Voters

Cambridge Analytica figure claims “cheating” may have also swung Brexit vote.

The whistleblower who exposed the data-harvesting tactics of Cambridge Analytica told a British government panel that a Canadian company worked on software that was used to identify Republican voters ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Christopher Wylie, who formerly worked for the controversial political consultancy, told lawmakers in the British Parliament on Tuesday that Canadian company AggregateIQ built the software known as Ripon, which allowed Republicans to manage its voter database, target specific voters, conduct canvassing, manage fundraising, and carry out surveys, Reuters reported. “There’s now tangible proof in the public domain that AIQ actually built Ripon, which is the software that utilized the algorithms from the Facebook data,” Wylie told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. He also claimed that “cheating” using Cambridge Analytica data may have swung the U.K.’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, saying: “If you cheat on an exam, you get a fail. If you cheat in the Olympics, you lose your medal. You shouldn’t win by cheating.”