Brittany Kaiser burst onto the scene as a controversial Republican kingpin — a young Chicagoan who, while running business development for Cambridge Analytica, helped harvest the data of tens of millions of Facebook users to push Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Now Kaiser has taken on a completely different role: helping raise more than $100 million in cryptocurrency for Ukraine’s war against Russia. Her involvement was so important to the country’s fight for democracy that Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, told the Post that his nation’s war effort would not be the same without her. “Brittany has been a great friend — a great friend to me and to Ukraine,” he said in an interview, citing both Kaiser’s strategic game planning and social media connections as the country struggles against the bloody invasion. “We are very happy to have her.” In the world’s first crypto war, uncertainty about who will benefit To many familiar with Kaiser’s history, championing the Ukrainian cause may seem like an unexpected transformation. At Cambridge Analytica, Kaiser not only worked closely with Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, but also helped strengthen the company’s relationship with the Kremlin-linked Russian energy company Lukoil. But Kaiser says her new job fits a redemption story that began when she began leaking damning information about her former employer after he came under fire in 2018. News of Kaiser’s role in helping Ukraine adds a new twist to a complex character study of a millennial (now in her 30s) who combines cutting-edge digital tools with old-fashioned political instincts. And it raises questions about how to process a world in which technology can so often confound ideology. More than 100,000 people around the world have used cryptocurrency to donate to Ukraine’s war effort as a sort of grassroots handout of foreign government aid. Ukrainian officials estimate that at least $100 million has flowed into its coffers, with tens of millions more pouring into NGOs such as Come Back Alive, which was started to benefit pro-Ukrainian militants in the east of the country. The funds allowed him to buy everything from medical supplies to food to bulletproof vests from Ukraine. FTC votes in favor of $5 billion settlement with Facebook in privacy probe Kaiser found himself in the middle of this story after a long odyssey. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica — with the help of Facebook — improperly harvested data on tens of millions of people so it could target swing states with a barrage of ads. Many pundits believe the game led to Trump’s election. Central to the effort was Kaiser, who in 2015 began working for the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, securing several key partnerships. She gained some notoriety as the scandal boiled over in 2018, testifying to a UK parliamentary inquiry, releasing documents and positioning herself as a whistleblower. (Cambridge Analytica was also retained by the Leave Brexit movement that led to the United Kingdom’s existence from the European Union.) Her celebrity was boosted by the 2019 Netflix documentary “The Great Hack,” in which Kaiser was cast as a kind of harrowing hero seeking to atone for her privacy-infringing sins. Kaiser also published a whistle-blowing memoir, Targeting, and founded an organization, Own Your Data, that advocates for citizens to recover their data from hacking exploiters. Cambridge Analytica database identifies black voters as ripe for ‘deterrence’ In recent years, Kaiser has also rebranded itself as a champion of crypto, the technology-based monetary system that some believe can be a democratizing political force. Kaiser has advised Wyoming lawmakers on a number of crypto-friendly laws and worked on the presidential campaign of Brock Pierce, the child actor-turned-crypto-millionaire who made a statement to run in 2020. He is now running for the US Senate as an independent. in Vermont. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Kaiser jumped right into the fray. It negotiated with former global soccer star David Beckham to promote crypto donations on his social media accounts. He pushed for more cryptocurrencies to be accepted by the Ukrainian government (there are about 15 now). He also worked with Gavin Wood – the crypto pioneer who helped found the ethereum blockchain – to facilitate the donation of millions to the Polkadot coin he created and recruited further donors into the so-called “Polkadot Community”. To do this, Kaiser used what amounts to both backchannel offensive charm and public tweets. Crypto fundraising is a lot like the real world — the skill is in knowing where to look (and who to please). Wood did not respond to a request for comment. Speaking by phone recently from Paris, where she was meeting with government leaders about cryptocurrency-based human rights efforts, Kaiser said she felt compelled to jump on the Ukraine fray. “They’re basically in bomb shelters, so figuring out what to tweet was a lot easier,” Kaiser said, letting out a trademark chuckle. She says the exact amount she is responsible for is difficult to determine. But he can park it. “It’s hard to say in total – maybe a hundred million collected in wallets?” What the life and death of Cambridge Analytica tells us about politics Soon after she began raising money, Kaiser began traveling with high-ranking Ukrainian officials such as Bornyakov and Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on their world tours, even helping convince them in May to travel to a crypto booth she had set up in past. in Davos, her youthful energy matched by the Ukrainian government technician. Her relationship with Bornyakov has become so close, she said, that they text “basically every day.” Bornyakov said that in addition to attracting major donors, Kaiser has helped set up “multisig” wallets — the advanced crypto-storage application considered more secure because it requires validation by more than one user. “It’s amazing what he does,” she said. But not everyone buys into Kaiser’s redemption story, seeing it as one of opportunism more than altruism. “Brittany is going to do a lot of Machiavellian things in her career and make her look altruistic when it all depends on who she’s working for,” said David Carroll, a digital rights activist who sued Cambridge Analytica and followed it closely. Kaiser’s work He cited, among other things, Cambridge Analytica’s alleged brutal tactics against Nigeria’s opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari as evidence of its hired gun ways. “With Brittany, the story being told is never the whole story,” he added. Kaiser disagrees with these criticisms. She sees a clear moral arc in her professional life, of which Cambridge Analytica was just an unfortunate deviation. “At Cambridge, I didn’t realize that what I was doing most of the time had no moral or ethical compass,” he said. “But I’ve always been a very active human rights activist,” referring to her work as a member of Barack Obama’s media team during his first presidential campaign. “And that’s as good a cause as you can find.” Ukraine asked for donations in crypto. Then things got weird. Kaiser seeks to turn even her tenure at Cambridge into a noble moment. On the CAA speakers website, which represents her, she identifies herself as a “Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower.” Others, however, disputed this view. Former Cambridge employee Christopher Whalley criticized the whistleblower’s claim in his memoirs, saying Kaiser’s willingness to spill the beans only came after she had no other choice. And some critics of “Targeted” noted a curious lack of remorse. “Like Breaking Bad, by the end you get the sense that she cares more about her own legacy than any wrongdoing on her part,” NPR said in its review. Some have also noted Kaiser’s involvement with polarizing players, such as Kaiser’s alleged links to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as detailed in a series of stories by the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr. Kaiser’s latest turn will do little to dissuade some skeptics, given that the very value of a cryptocurrency is based on what critics say is finding an older fool to buy it. Kaiser’s actions go to the heart of the cryptographer’s moral ambiguity, where one man’s idealism is another’s hustle. But she rejects these cryptocurrency naysayers as forcefully as she repels her own. “Crypto gives people access to services and capital that they wouldn’t have,” he said, citing bank freezes that would make traditional currency transfers in Ukraine much more difficult. “This general position is more consensual and democratic. And that really fits with what I believe.”
