Meet The Journalist Who Inspired The Great Hack
AVLON: 2016 campaign taught us a lot about the dangers of disinformation and how harnessing voter's personal information but not just target ads but intentionally undermine our ability to reason together. That's the focus of Netflix's popular new documentary, The Great Hack which focuses on how data company Cambridge Analytica access the personal information from upwards of 50 million Facebook users to benefit the Trump and Brexit campaigns. Featured in the documentary is the journalist who broke the dam on the story and led to investigations that I'll play put Cambridge analytic out of business. Investigative Reporter and Writer for The Observer and Guardian Carole Cadwalladr. And I asked her earlier about how was she first dug into the story.</s>CAROLE CADWALLADR, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: I think this sort of advance which I had was just having this different perspective on it. Because the people I was talking to right from the very start were saying well, this doesn't actually even sound illegal what they're doing with data in Britain. And in fact, the very first big article that I wrote on Cambridge Analytica very early on -- this was at the beginning of 2017 -- it triggered these two major investigations both of which are still ongoing, and one of which became this -- it's the -- it's the biggest investigation in data protection investigation in the world. And we hope we're still going to -- this was -- this was the investigation that seized the servers from Cambridge Analytica's office and find Facebook its maximum ever fine.</s>AVLON: Now, one of the open questions speaking of an ongoing journey is we know the Mueller investigation interviewed people about Cambridge Analytica particularly Brittany Kaiser who had been a principal at the company and -- turned whistle-blower and is featured heavily in The Great Hack. What was so striking to me is that Cambridge Analytica is not mentioned in the Mueller report. And do you based on your sourcing think that's because it's an ongoing investigation whether in counter- intel or some other place, or is it that they simply didn't find anything or chose not to pursue it because it was outside what Mueller defined as his purview in the investigation?</s>CADWALLADR: So it's just another ongoing mystery, isn't it? Does it form part of the counterintelligence aspect of the Mueller report which is you know, out of public sight? Is that the reason? Because it's not just that we know nothing about Cambridge Analytica from the report, we also know nothing about what actually happened on Facebook during the U.S. presidential election. And that question about whether there was any overlap between the targeting that the Trump campaign was doing and the targeting that we know the Russian government was doing with its advertisements, that question has not been answered and it seems that that hasn't even really been asked in America yet. This should be in public site. This is you know, it's of paramount public interest that that information is transparent and it's made public and it can be studied by academics and by forensic analysts.</s>AVLON: And we know also from The Great Hack that one of Cambridge Analytica's selling points was in a case study in the Trinidadian elections in which they sort of perfected the art of voter suppression through the creation of a third party movement not to vote. So I think as you look at patterns of trying to suppress votes, that was one of Cambridge Analytica's stated expertise.</s>CADWALLADR: Yes, and if -- I mean, I find that so fascinating. And we know, for example, we know that it was claimed that the Trump campaign was running three different voter suppression campaigns. And we know that were -- at least one of those was racially targeted.</s>AVLON: One thing that is definitely disturbing that you've experienced personally is the kind of threats and harassment that come to many reporters these days via online sources but you have experienced very personally and legally as a result of the investigative work you've done. And I want to give you a chance to tell folks about that.</s>CADWALLADR: There's a pattern of harassment that I've experienced now over two and a half years in trying to investigate and write about these subjects. And it has been difficult because it's very personal. It's directed at me. They found it very hard to attack my reporting because it's evidence-based and it's led to multiple legal investigations actually around the world. One of the individuals who I've been reporting on for a long time who is a businessman in Britain who bankrolled the Brexit campaign who's been close to Trump, he's a man called Aaron Banks. The day after the trailer for The Great Hack was released, he filed formal legal proceedings against me in Britain over a line in a TED talk that I gave earlier this year. I have very robust defenses, but the idea is to sort of tie me up in litigation for a year to make it more difficult for me to report upon him. And it's -- you know, it's not -- it's not just an attack upon me, it really is an attack upon journalism.</s>AVLON: There is much more to my full conversation with Carole Cadwalladr on this week's RELIABLE SOURCES podcast available on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your pod app of choice. And when we come back, Trump hits another milestone. How should journalists cover a president who consistently lies?