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Anonymous ID: 22bd5f Aug. 2, 2019, 3:45 p.m. No.7315118   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>5198

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/02/brittany-kaisers-work-with-cambridge-analytica-helped-elect-donald-trump-shes-hoping-world-will-forgive-her/

 

https://outline.com/fVMs9D

 

Brittany Kaiser’s work with Cambridge Analytica helped elect Donald Trump. She’s hoping the world will forgive her.

 

She’d like to be remembered as a whistleblower and a human rights advocate. You decide.

 

Brittany Kaiser first emerged in last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal as a seemingly nefarious figure, an insider steeped in the dark secrets of a new kind of voter manipulation powered by Facebook data. To make matters worse, news reports also raised questions about Kaiser’s mysterious dealings with WikiLeaks mastermind Julian Assange at a time when he remained holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

 

For Kaiser — at the time a 30-year-old Democrat from Texas who’d become business development director for Cambridge Analytica, a firm created to elect Republicans — the massive wave of critical news reports about the company threatened to deliver catastrophic damage to her reputation and even made her fear possible arrest.

 

So she did something drastic: Kaiser fled to Thailand, and she let a crew of filmmakers tag along.

 

What followed was a highly public — and still unfinished — quest for moral redemption that has played out across the globe and, now, in a Netflix documentary called “The Great Hack,” released July 24. It includes images of Kaiser up to her shoulders in a giant pool under an impossibly blue sky in Thailand, uncertain what to do. And it later depicts Kaiser, in a far more determined frame of mind, testifying before the British Parliament about the many unsavory deeds of her former employer and warning of the ongoing privacy threats posed by Facebook, whose dealings with Cambridge Analytica resulted in July in more than $5 billion in U.S. fines.

 

But two important elements are missing from the film. The first is Kaiser’s private meetings with British and U.S. prosecutors, including those from then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office, which she recently detailed in interviews with The Washington Post. In these she also explained her visit with Assange in 2017 and how close she came during the hottest days of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to turning over the entirety of her hard drive to WikiLeaks for publication online.

 

The second missing element is a decisive moment of reckoning for Kaiser, during which she fully acknowledges her role in matters she now regards as wrong and possibly illegal. She repeatedly calls herself a “whistleblower” but viewers of the film may wonder: Why didn’t she blow the whistle a little sooner — ideally before Cambridge Analytica’s misdeeds had become front-page news worldwide?

 

It’s a question, Kaiser told The Post, that she still struggles with herself.

 

“I used to make so many excuses to myself,” she said. “I used to make excuses to my friends and family on why I was there and that it was okay to be working with these people and that what they were doing wasn't all that bad, and I was just doing my job. I look back at some of it, and it's shocking.”

 

Kaiser’s efforts to wrestle with this legacy in such a profoundly public way shoots a charge of emotional electricity through a film otherwise devoted to distinct heroes and villains. She occupies a middle ground of moral complexity while she seeks to emerge from what she now depicts as a fever that consumed more than three years of her life.

 

“She knew before the story blew up that the rights of Americans had been violated,” said David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the New School in New York and a hero in the film for his dogged legal battle to gain access to the data Cambridge Analytica had collected on him. He is among those who would think better of Kaiser had she spoken up about her qualms with Cambridge Analytica before the scandal erupted.

 

“Once that’s out, it’s hard to be a whistleblower,” Carroll said. “You’ve missed your chance.”

 

But whistleblower or not, Kaiser’s story is a compelling one for the insights it offers into the dark heart of Cambridge Analytica, the unregulated market for our personal data and also — and perhaps most importantly — what happens when questionable decisions get thrust to the center of the world’s white-hot gaze.