Government is moving to have Cambridge Analytica’s (CA’s) “whistleblower” Christopher Wylie appear before Parliament’s Joint Select Committee (JSC) on the data-mining issue, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi said yesterday.
Speaking at the weekly Government media briefing, the AG said Wylie’s attorneys have indicated willingness to help T&T identify the culprits in the CA data matter “who sat in the last Government.”
He said Government is seeking to “bring home” the evidence on the CA matter and had talks with the appropriate channels on this.
“Government’s evidence will come via testimony by someone who will blow the whistle,” Al-Rawi added.
Al-Rawi said Government’s attorneys were in touch with Wylie’s over the last 18 months.
“We have a Parliament team, headed by Fitzgerald Hinds, sitting to treat with the CA matter,” he said.
In 2017, Wylie told a UK House of Commons and US Senate committee of alleged unauthorised possession of personal private data from 87 million Facebook user accounts, obtained for creating targeted political campaigns for the 2016 US presidential elections. In evidence he alleged Aggregate IQ (AIQ), a company set up alongside CA worked on a project in T&T in 2013 for a former national security minister, attempting to harvest browsing data of T&T’s population.
UNC leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar later said the UNC wasn’t involved.
However, the Congress of the People (COP) confirmed in April 2018 that they had talks with CA and another company, SCL, to do press releases and imaging for the 2013 local government election.
The COP said that “it never went any further than that.”
COP leader Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan said that as COP chairman in 2013 she wasn’t aware of the extent of the engagement with the data-mining company but was aware then COP leader Prakash Ramadhar and then vice-chairman Nicole Dyer-Griffith spoke with SCL regarding re-imaging of the COP.
She said there were discussions as far back as 2009 for a customer-relationship-management system but said nothing took place and that no payment was made or agreed to.
Former People’s Partnership National Security Minister Gary Griffith who is now the Commissioner of Police later welcomed Government’s probe of the CA matter.
Netflix on Wednesday released a movie on Cambridge Analytica.
The UNC has said it wouldn’t participate in, or testify before the JSC.