[kictanet] Voter profiling in the 2017 Kenyan election – Privacy International – Medium

Sat Jun 10 12:17:51 EAT 2017

I don't think this has made the rounds yet:

https://medium.com/@privacyint/voter-profiling-in-the-2017-kenyan-election-8d9ac1e52877

Voter profiling in the 2017 Kenyan election

Earlier this month, the Kenyan daily The Star reported that UK-based data
analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had been quietly contracted by President
Uhuru Kenyatta’s party in a bid to win himself a second term in office.
State House officials were quick to deny the claims
<https://www.kenyans.co.ke/news/president-uhuru-kenyattas-jubilee-party-hires-cambridge-analytica-company-supported-us>,
while the company itself issued no comment.

Cambridge Analytica has exploded onto the scene following revelations that
its psychometric profiling techniques were used and reportedly played a
role in both the US election and the UK Brexit referendum. The company has
been in the limelight
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/14/robert-mercer-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu-referendum-brexit-campaigns>
ever
since, and the UK information commissioner is launching an investigation
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/04/cambridge-analytics-data-brexit-trump>
into
the way political parties target voters through social media.

The news that Cambridge Analytica has reportedly been hired by an increasingly
unpopular president
<http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/05/18/raila-closing-in-on-uhuru-poll_c1562863>
(according
to some polls) to win a very close, tense election, does not necessarily
give case for alarm.

This is not the first time that Kenyatta’s administration has carried out
opinion polling to hedge its chances. In fact, Cambridge Analytica worked
on behalf of one of the candidates in the 2013 election, claiming to have
implemented <https://ca-political.com/casestudies/casestudykenya2013> the
largest political research project in Africa. The Kenyan government has
strategically called on the services of UK firms in the past
<http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2016/05/28/state-house-now-using-pollsters-to-win-70-in-2017_c1358560>.
London-based public relations Agency BTP Advisors, which is reportedly
working with Cambridge Analytica over the next few months
<http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2016/05/28/state-house-now-using-pollsters-to-win-70-in-2017_c1358560>,
represents the Kenyan government, including in interactions with the UK
Parliament
<http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/foreign-affairs/ListofmeetingstobepublishedSession2015-16.pdf>.
BTP Advisors, also claims credit for building scepticism
<http://www.btpadvisers.com/work/kenya-elections-2013> about the
International Criminal Court in Kenya, during the ultimately fruitless
attempt to prosecute President Kenyatta for alleged involvement in crimes
against humanity following the 2007 elections.

But in an election context, profiling and microtargeting of voters is
particularly problematic. Kenya’s presidential election this year is no
ordinary one. That the Kenyan president’s Jubilee party would commit a
reported 6 million USD to Cambridge Analytica for a mere 3-month project
contract so soon to the polling date, and with such secrecy, gives cause
for further scrutiny.

A short (recent) history of a bad idea

Political campaigns frequently rely on data, from constant polling, to
finding out where to hold rallies or how to communicate to undecided voters.

As people’s lives become increasingly digital, the volume of data available
to political campaigns and marketers increases, and so does the granularity
of data available. Everything we do is becoming traceable: the websites we
visit, who we talk to (and how often), where we have been, and what we care
about. All of these data can be used to make sensitive inferences and
predictions about people. Personality traits, for instance, can be
predicted from Facebook likes
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11838515/This-online-tool-reveals-your-personality-based-on-Facebook-likes.html>,
or even phone metadata
<http://web.media.mit.edu/~yva/papers/deMontjoye2013predicting.pdf>.
Behavioural data can also reveal someone’s sexual orientation — even though
an individual has never decided to consciously reveal this information
anywhere online.

Access to such data means that political campaigns and marketers are able
to create detailed profiles of individual voters and entire populations. As
early as 2008, for instance, the Obama campaign had reportedly gathered as
many as one thousand variables
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/>
about
each voter drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses,
and past campaign contacts to better target its messaging.

Such profiles include sensitive information, such as how likely an
individual is to vote at all, their income bracket, interests, health,
opinions, habits, or even predicted future behaviour. It also means that
messages can be microtargeted to individual voters, depending on how likely
they are to be persuaded.

Enter Cambridge Analytica. The company markets itself
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhvX9QCiZP0> as unique because it does not
simply predict individuals’ interests or future behaviour, it also creates
psychometric profiles (in addition to the plethora of other information
that can be obtained and predicted from the data traces we leave behind).
Psychometric data include personality, that is information about how an
individual scores on a number of measures, from neuroticism, to openness or
extraversion.

Data is not just important to target individual voters. Online
communication has radically transformed the way that people learn about the
news, including political campaigns and issues. Some suggest that this has
enabled new forms of automated propaganda to spread in ways we do not fully
understand — from fake news to political bots on social media. While
Cambridge Analytica specialises on political campaigns, it was created by
SCL Elections — a company that focusses on data-driven communications for
governments and military organizations worldwide.

What we do know from the Snowden revelations is that Western intelligence
agencies have considerable interest in harnessing these new possibilities.
The British signals intelligence agency GCHQ employs a unit called JTRIG
that uses insights from social science
<https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/>, such as
psychology, to engage in online manipulation and (mis)information campaigns.

More red flags than a bullfighting convention

Collecting data about millions of Kenyans to profile, target, and persuade
voters on behalf of the Kenyan president is a strikingly bad idea.

Let us count the ways.

1. In Kenya, ethnicity has become political. Very political.

The amplification and politicization of distinctions between Kenya’s over
70 ethnic groups results from a long history of manipulation by elites for
personal and group gain — a history in which Kenya’s colonizer, Britain,
played no small part. (See here
<http://www.dw.com/en/the-role-of-ethnicity-in-kenyan-politics/a-37442394>
 and here
<http://www.katibainstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ethnicity-Nationhood-pluralism4-returned.pdf>,
for example). Post-independence Kenya broadly saw the emergence of a
political elite of Kikuyu ethnicity, for a number of complex reasons
including favourable access to land in Kenya’s fertile rift valley, while
ethnic Kalenjin and Luo political elites also consolidated their own
political support among co-ethnics in an attempt to access state power
<https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/kenya_ethnicity_tribe_and_state>.

Fast forward to 2007. Widespread dissatisfaction over the re-election of
president Mwai Kibaki in December against contender Raila Odinga erupted as
extreme violence expressed often in ‘tribal’ language and targeting. At
least 1,100 people were killed
<https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/kenya1211webwcover_0.pdf> and
thousands forced to flee their homes; many of these were victims of the
now-banned Mungiki citizens’ militia, which espouses a virulent form of
Kikuyu nationalism. The International Commission of Inquiry on
Post-Election Violence
<http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/15A00F569813F4D549257607001F459D-Full_Report.pdf>
report
attributes much of the violence factors including many voters’ perception
that it was essential that the ethnic group from which they come to win the
Presidency in order to ensure access to state resources.

“Tribalism” is thus both the thing that should not be discussed — the National
Cohesion and Integration Commission <https://www.cohesion.or.ke/> assiduously
monitors ethnic hate speech — and also a resilient conceptual framework
through which economic <http://allafrica.com/stories/200807141478.html>,
social
<https://www.cohesion.or.ke/index.php/news-all/461-county-governments-are-a-den-of-ethnicity-says-ncic-chair>,
and political <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17531050802058401>
grievances,
particularly against the President’s Kikuyu ethnic group, are expressed

Profiling individual Kenyans — of the kind that Cambridge Analytica’s
technology would do — is particularly sensitive in this context. In Kenya,
someone’s name is often all you need to discern their ethnicity. Gathering
such personal data on millions of Kenyan citizens is highly problematic,
especially since it is unclear how such data will be stored and who will
have access to it. Such questions become even more pressing if the election
result is contested. The Cambridge Analytica affair has already fed into a
popular perception that the ruling party has allegedly mobilized state
resources in an attempt “rig” the election, as expressed by many
commentators
<https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/05/10/uhuru-hires-data-firm-behind-trump-brexit-victories_c1557720>
.

In short, the issue is already having an impact, and it’s not pretty:
“[Cambridge] Analytica is feared for extreme scaremongering and
fearmongering…” opines one opposition group
<https://www.kenya-today.com/pictures/raila-odinga-cord-effect> on
Facebook, for example. “Jubilee is intending to make this election the
dirtiest, most hate-filled campaign to retain power
<https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g3ryv9_sUIMJ:https://mbasic.facebook.com/profile.php%3Fv%3Dfeed%26filter%3D13%26id%3D212810272177254+&cd=16&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&lr=lang_en%7Clang_th&client=safari>
.”

2. Corruption and lack of transparency on political spending.

Kenya suffers extraordinary levels of corruption, particularly in the
public sector. Transparency International ranks Kenya among the top 30 most
corrupt countries
<https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016>
globally,
according to its Corruption Perceptions Index. Scandal
<http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2016/10/29/kenyans-outraged-over-uhuru-kin-links-to-sh5-billion-mafia-house_c1446156>
after
financial scandal has rocked the Kenyatta administration, and the Mwai and
Moi administrations <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-31733052> before
it.

The opposition has long accused the incumbent administration of taking
extraordinary advantage of access to state funds to cement its power. For
its part, opposition candidate Raila Odinga, too, has vowed to spare no
expense in setting up an alternative vote counting system, to ‘rig proof’
the results
<http://kenyannews.co.ke/politics/inside-nasa-raila-presidential-campaign-the-power-team-it-experts-volunteers-and-10millionstrong/>.
The secrecy and denials around the reported Cambridge Analytica deal, which
at its most benign is another example of a candidate mobilizing data to
their cause, do little to dissuade these tensions. Within the context of
pervasive state corruption in Kenya, the project risks adding to the gaping
absence of faith
<https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/02/11/apathy-faltering-listing-reflect-lack-of-faith-in-rigged-system_c1503863>
many
Kenyans feel in the democratic process.

3. Kenya has no data protection law.

Let’s imagine that Cambridge Analytica do for the Jubilee party what they
say they do
<https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win> for
other campaigns. If CA’s work is just slightly similar to what we have
learned about their work in the US and Europe, they will be creating a
database of highly sensitive information about a considerable share of a
country’s population. We don’t know what data sources they will use, or
whether they will be doing psychometric predictions. In this context, it is
important to note that personality has been predicted from phone metadata —
not just Facebook likes. The possibilities are endless. Could such a
database contain information about ethnicity, political leaning, and who
knows, sexual orientation or even health data? All of this happens in a
politically volatile country, as part of a tight and tense election. Will
Cambridge Analytica share or sell this data? Will they store it securely?
Could the data be leaked, hacked, or stolen? Could it be accessed by the
government? By the President?

There is no comprehensive guidance on how data collected and processed in
Kenya should be stored, retained, and protected — and this is worrying.

The Kenyan government has expanded its powers of surveillance
<https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/track_capture_final.pdf>
and
data collection. It passed Security Laws (Amendment) Act
<http://kenyalaw.org/kl/fileadmin/pdfdownloads/AmendmentActs/2014/SecurityLaws_Amendment_Act_2014.pdf>.
It is steaming ahead with the Cybersecurity Bill
<http://www.ict.go.ke/cabinet-approves-cyber-security-bill/>. It has put in
place a number of serious cybersecurity initiatives (more on that from us
later). But when it comes to data protection, those initiatives have lost
steam — the Data Protection Bill has been languishing since 2013.

4. Rampant unaccountable spying.

The intelligence services have a proven record of exceeding their legal
mandate to spy on Kenyans, according to our latest investigation
<https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/track_capture_final.pdf>
on
surveillance in the country. Again, this does not inspire confidence in the
government’s desire to “play by the rules” of democratic processes, such as
elections.

5. Finally, the election is slated to be a very close and possibly
contested.

Tensions are high
<https://www.ndi.org/sites/default/files/FINAL%20-%20Kenya%20PEAM%20statement%20-%20For%20Release.pdf>.
Following April’s primary elections, there have already been clashes
between supporters of rival parties
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-20/kenya-s-president-warns-of-hooliganism-as-election-nears>,
which President Kenyatta recently condemned
<https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-04-24/kenya-s-ruling-party-reattempts-primary-elections-after-chaos>
as
“hooliganism”. The National Cohesion and Integration Commission has
deployed monitors to counties in which it anticipates further trouble
<https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/04/14/ncic-trains-team-to-avert-violence-as-election-nears_c1543434>,
and recent polls suggest that election-related violence is Kenyans’
single-biggest worry
<https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000228493/election-related-violence-the-biggest-worry-for-kenyans-in-2017>
for
2017.

Even if Cambridge Analytica’s contribution only helps Jubilee party to sway
a few thousand votes, given how close the election will be (according to
some polls), this edge may well be decisive.

Not knowing or not caring?

Does Cambridge Analytica not know this, or does not care?

Even if the company does not have the power to influence significant
numbers of voters the mere *perception* that Cambridge Analytica’s service,
which relies on in-depth profiling of voters and which presumably includes
ethnicity — will add more wood to the pyre. Currently there are no that
once an extensive database of citizens’ sensitive information is collected
it won’t be abused.

In light of this, Privacy International has written to Cambridge Analytica
<https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/PI%20letter%20to%20Cambridge%20Analytica%20re%20Kenya%20.pdf>with
questions about how the company assessed the risk of their work in Kenya
and how it will ensure that Kenyans’ personal data will be protected.
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