YouSaid · the spoken record

Brittany Kaiser

lines on the record: 89
first: 2019-10-16
most recent: 2019-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right. So, for people that don't understand what happened there, there was a program at Facebook for about five years where you could be a developer on their platform and you would get access to their data feed, an API that is now known as the Friends API. And when you developed an app on that, it meant that when somebody consented to use that app, they were consenting for their data to be shared with the developer. But unfortunately with this API developer developer”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I saw was that Cambridge Analytica was one very bad example of how easy it is for a data to be abused that over the past decade or more, our data has been Collected in a way that we have not been fully transparent about. And that data has been collected and sold all over the world to be used for whatever people want to use it for without the knowledge of the individuals that produce that”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was more than kind and said, you know, I don't think you should let other people tell this story, you know, what do you, what are you going to do about it? Do you want to tell your own story? And he connected me with Paul Lewis, who at the time was Bureau Chief of the Guardian in San Francisco. And had been writing a lot recently. There had been the expose with Sandy Periculus out of Facebook, and he talked about the wider problems in the data industry in the same way that I saw them.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I originally started working with the Guardian last March in 2018. Specifically to provide documents around Facebook and Brexit that I knew that I had. This was before I realized that I actually had access to my entire work computer. I thought I just had some specific emails that were still saved on my phone. So I talked to Paul Hilder, the activist that I was friends with at the time, and said, okay, I'm seeing some things in the news that I actually have more evidence about What do you think I should do? Because some of the news that I'm seeing is not actually accurate. It's not what happened. And I think I have a lot of information that would be useful. And so.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it seems a lot different looking back on it than it was at the time, but I was seeking their advice to make sure that whatever I was promising a client I could do I could legally do in that country. And I would get told that we had enough expertise in-house if the data scientist told me we could do it, then I could and I should stop creating invoices.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every now and then I would get yelled at very badly when one of the lawyers' invoices would cross Alexander's desk and he would say why were you calling them? And funnily enough, it's actually Giuliani's law firm. So it seems a lot more.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He would usually promise that we could do things a bit faster and maybe a bit better than we actually could. So because I had spent a very long time in law school before I got there, I had a habit of calling our lawyers to ask if we could do certain things or not do certain things before I would propose them.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I suppose it's not that people had no idea. It's just that most people had no idea how bad it actually was, unless you saw end-to-end what was going on, just seeing one advertisement here and there or hearing that a campaign is going really well or not going really well and the client's upset. Piecing all of those things together into here's actually all of the campaigns that were put out, look at what all of these advertisements actually say, look at what they were intended to do, and look at what good or harm that caused.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I only took part in the beginning of helping design it and meet the client and get them excited about it. And then Alexander would send a team to whatever country and have me move on and keep on doing pitches.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, very quickly. I mean, engagement is enragement, right? I mean, if you think about it, like that's how you do it. Did you feel that this was a problem when you were doing this, or was it just sort of a melage of different clients that were, some of which were more dubious than others?”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, again, it's in politics, you're going to have campaigns that are positive, unfortunately, since the Obama campaign, I've realized most people engage in negative campaigning. So you're going to promote your candidate and you're going to not promote the others. Right. However, that happens to be. And as normal as that might seem in politics today, it can get really dark.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that organization or individual was actually trying to achieve, how much data they had or didn't have, what internal capacity they had to carry out a campaign. And then we would put together a proposal for exactly what we were going to do with them. Sometimes they had half the things that we were proposing already in-house. So we would just figure out how we were going to work with their team in order to slot in and provide extra value or measurement as part of the campaign.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So usually what we'd be meeting people that either had an election or a campaign to do in the beginning, I pitched quite a lot of nonprofits and charities that were trying to find new donors. So we would show them exactly what we did in strategic communication. So how we did qualitative and quantitative research and would be able to also take their proprietary data that they already had about their supporters. If it's political or they're donors, if it's for charities. And we would be able to make a suite of models specifically for them in order to identify the people that care most about their issues that are most likely to vote or take action, most likely to donate, right? and explain to them the whole micro-targeting process for communications and how we would measure results. And so we would figure out.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not initially. Not initially. Not initially. I just thought, well, if I'm going to be working in predictive analytics alongside my PhD running around Asian, Africa, someone so young, maybe I need to learn a bit more. Maybe I should go home and do it from home. So eventually there ended up being an opportunity to go back to America and still work for the company. And so I started to explore that.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that seemed great for the first few months that I was there only to find out that the way that that particular company operated in different countries and the people that they interacted with were not always as above board as I would have expected. I was definitely in over my head. How old?”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, at the time I was writing my Yeah, I was writing my PhD, so my goal was to really finish my doctorate and then continue on with my human rights work. And this was an opportunity to earn a bit of money while I was researching and actually be able to write the crux of my PhD, which is that it's possible to give real-time accurate information to decision makers so that they can prevent more, but without getting really deep into big data and analytics, I wouldn't be able to prove my thesis. I got involved with the campaign originally just to do social projects and international elections because I'm very interested in politics.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I suppose I saw the ugly side of individuals that were able to hide behind social media in order to let out the worst in themselves. I didn't think about companies that could possibly be doing that with paid messaging because at the time there wasn't any paid messaging. So I had never really experienced anything like that.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they consider to be good. And I always saw it as inherently good, something not to be questioned. So when I'm presented with a company that is doing this scientific I thought, hey, the only reason”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had never studied predictive analysis before. Well, I suppose it's actually a very commonly held belief and concept in humanitarian operations. It's called behavior change campaigns. And they're used very prolifically. And there's usually RFPs and project manager positions always advertised through United Nations websites all about being part of behavior change campaigning, but it's also supposed to be shifting things towards.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the outside, it seemed like a group of people who are trying to make the world a better place using technology. The first time I went in for a meeting at the SCL group's office, I got introduced to somebody who had been specifically working in preventive diplomacy for 10 years for the Commonwealth Secretariat, someone that had been the director of operations for the International Rescue Committee, somebody else that was a human rights lawyer that had worked with the European Commission, and they were all working on sometimes defense projects, but also social projects, so how you could use research and data analysis in order to figure out, for instance, how to get people to use new healthcare facilities instead of traditional medicine doctors and what have you.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And because it was a meeting with people who are going to have elections upcoming in their country, I got to hear his entire pitch. About everything that he did at his company at the time, he told us that his biggest project was on the defense side where he had a team of people that were using predictive analytics in order to find people who were vulnerable to being recruited into ISIS online. And to reach out to those usually young people 18 to 35 and convince them to stay at home with their families instead of sneaking themselves into Syria. I thought, wow, I mean, these are some incredible data scientists. I'd love to meet them. I'd love to learn what they do. This sounds perfect for my PhD. And I started exploring a relationship with the SEL group.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the time, I was still trying to pitch for side work to do social media for anybody that was working in elections or even charity campaigns. And I was introduced at a meeting where I was hoping to pitch for social media work to Alexander Nick”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so many years and degrees and jobs at NGOs like Amnesty International and United Nations, I'm writing my PhD on preventive diplomacy, which means using the power of ambassadors and heads of state in order to prevent war, violent crime, crimes against humanity before they happen. And I get to chapter three, and it ends up being all about how you can use big data sets in order to predict war before it happens. So you can get real-time valuable information to decision makers so that they can intervene more quickly. Nobody at my law school could teach me about predictive analytics.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Helicopters behind embassy walls so that they would be safe with whatever country that happened to be Vietnam or what have you. So trying to send them back. And that was really moving for me. I got involved with a Brussels-based NGO called Human Rights Without Frontiers. And they gave me accreditation to the European Parliament and the United Nations in order to undertake NGO lobbying. I spent my year in Hong Kong and went back to the University of Edinburgh where I was doing my master's degree and I would travel to Geneva and to Brussels all of the time in order to talk about human rights in China and human rights in North Korea and try to keep that on the top of the political debate.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you could imagine, there were very big protests that I was very actively involved in. I also got involved with a group of people who are helping smuggle North Korean refugees into safety. So refugees that ended up in China where they were going to be sent back to North Korea, we would try to find a way to get them behind embassy walls, sometimes even they would be dropped.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I spent very many years working in human rights activism. I really learned all about that, which is such a contemporary conversation right now when I went to Hong Kong. I got there and I met a big group of different human rights activists that at the time were fighting against something called Article 8 that the Chinese government was trying to pass, which would mean that the Chinese government would get a full veto of any decisions made in the Hong Kong parliament.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this was a very early decision when he had only kind of before he even won. I was told that if he does win, people who are early on in the campaign, you know, we're going to get the first offers of jobs for the communications team in the White House and another government departments, which most of my colleagues decided to take up. But I really thought I needed to move on and do something different. So talk about what you did.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Email in order to get Senator Obama. And so you wanted to get out of that. You wanted to, there wasn't a disgruntlement with the Obama administration or anything else to move. You were going to Hong Kong.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw the power of people being able to hide behind kind of a digital divide and therefore be able to speak their mind in a way that they never would in person and the development of fake accounts was not so not such a big thing in the very beginning. I wouldn't say there were even really bots. This was not too long after you didn't any longer have to have a college email in order to get on Facebook. So it wasn't really bots and fake accounts that were the problem. It was people for the first time feeling like they could say whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to whomever they wanted without any repercussions. And unfortunately there were quite a few people that took that very far and part of my job was actually to report people to the FBI when they threatened violence on Senator Obama.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was very tumultuous and trying to track and trace where that misinformation was coming from was very difficult at the time. Was it coming from opposing Democrats? Was it coming from the Republicans? Was it coming from advocacy groups and trying to manage that and police it and even develop internally our own debate about whether censorship or free speech was correct on social media just made it a very emotionally difficult job to have?”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not disappointed in the Obama campaign. It was more, I had a very difficult time while doing some of that work. Most days I actually ended up crying at work because of the incitement of racial hatred that we would get on our Facebook page, on our YouTube.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I actually applied to do in a broad program in Hong Kong. And at the time, I was very interested in human rights in China. So I wanted to move there very badly. I had taken Mandarin for many years. And the opportunity to go work in the White House first to go work on human rights in China and to further my Chinese language skills Was a no brainer for me.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. So you were doing this for them and worked for them for quite a while and you had a great regard for President Obama during this time. I mean, if the documentary is correct, you had quite a, like it was your candidate.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had worked in digital and high school on our high school newspaper. I was the head of photography and led the transition from film photography to digital and was quite advanced in working with Adobe products. But that was the most I had really done was digital design.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was very basic in the beginning. It was only later in the campaign when we started to do more advanced work with algorithms such as when we noticed that there were so many people that would write into us during a presidential debate, we decided to build a platform where people could text in their questions. And depending on the words used in those texts, it would categorize the text under a certain policy. And we would have different teams. Okay, here's the healthcare team and the foreign policy team. And we'd be live responding to all of their questions. And again, that was a basic algorithm that was being used, but that's when we started to use predictive analytics.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I joined in spring of 2007, so quite early, when the new media team was about five people. And that's when we were first starting to create social media accounts for Barack Obama to start testing the waters on how we could use these new platforms to start communicating with voters. So on my first day, I was actually asked to create a Facebook page for Barack Obama. And we started doing very rudimentary things to collect data, which was to post different messages and also see how people were reacting, what issues were they writing in to ask about. Was it healthcare? Was it the environment, foreign policy? And we could start to keep basic Excel sheets to find out what actually motivated people to care about Brock's candidacy or about politics in general. And that way we started to develop targeted messaging. So we know if this person ever writes into us again, they care about healthcare policy and we're always”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it was environmental policy that I was most interested in from a very young age. Barack was giving a speech about how him and Senator Dick Durbin were trying to stop British petroleum from dumping into the streams and waterways that fed into Lake Michigan. And that's what the rally was about on Boston Harbor when I first met him. So that's what originally motivated me to be interested in his candidacy. And from there forward, I started to get much more involved in human rights activism. Maybe it comes from a Jewish background where we learn about genocide and crimes against humanity so intensely growing up, but that became a very big interest of mine of how to use foreign policy in order to protect people and prevent war.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm from Chicago, Chicago. So I've known about Barack Obama since I was quite young. And I had volunteered for the DNC many years before that on first Howard Dean's campaign and then John Kerry's and continued to follow what was going on. And in 2004, I attended the DNC. And that's where I first met Barack Obama. And he actually invited me to volunteer on his senatorial campaign, which I did, and continued to keep eyes on him until he announced that he was going to run for president. And I left my degree when I got an internship to go back to Chicago to work for him.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who would be happy to host Mark Zuckerberg and Tucker Carlson for dinner. I have a thing or two I'd like to say to both of them, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to recode decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Brittany Kaiser, the former development director of Cambridge Analytica. She later testified about the company's misuse of Facebook data in the British Parliament and was one of the stars of the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. She's about to release a new book called Targeted, the Cambridge Analytical Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook broke democracy and how it can happen again. That's a big title. Brittany, welcome to Rico Deco. Thank you so much. A lot of words in there, Brittany. A lot of bad words together all mashed up together.”
2019-10-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The inside story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT