Cambridge Analytica’s Brittany Kaiser has been working for Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Kaiser jumped right into the scrum. She negotiated with former global soccer star David Beckham for him to promote crypto donations on his social media accounts.

She pushed for more cryptocurrencies to be accepted by the Ukrainian government (some 15 now are).

She also worked with Gavin Wood — the crypto-tech pioneer who helped found the blockchain ethereum — to facilitate his donation of millions in the Polkadot currency he created, and recruited further donors within the so-called “Polkadot community.” To do this, Kaiser used what amounts to both a back-channel charm offensive and rallying public tweets. Crypto fundraising is much like the real-world kind — the skill lies in knowing where to look (and whom to thank). Wood did not reply to a request for comment.

Speaking recently by phone from Paris, where she has been meeting with government leaders for crypto-based human-rights efforts, Kaiser said she felt an obligation to jump into the Ukraine struggle.

“They’re up and down in bomb shelters, so me figuring out what to tweet was much easier,” Kaiser said, letting go a trademark big laugh.

She says that the exact amount she has been responsible for is difficult to pinpoint. But she can ballpark it. “It’s hard to say altogether — maybe a couple-hundred-million raised across wallets?”

What the life and death of Cambridge Analytica tells us about politics

Soon after she started raising money, Kaiser began traveling with high-ranking Ukrainian officials like Bornyakov and digital transformation minister Mykhailo Fedorov in their barnstorming tours around the world, even helping to convince them in May to travel to a crypto pavilion she had previously set up at Davos, her youthful energy matching the Ukrainian government’s can-do techie-ism. Her relationship with Bornyakov has become so close, she said, that they text “basically every day.”

Bornyakov said that in addition to bringing on big donors, Kaiser has helped with the setup of “multisig” wallets — the advanced crypto-storing app seen as safer because it requires validation from more than one user.

“It’s amazing what she’s doing,” he said.

But not everyone accepts Kaiser’s redemption story, seeing in it a story of opportunism more than selflessness.

“Brittany will do a lot of Machiavellian things in her career and makes it seem like she’s altruistic, when it all just depends on who she’s working for,” said David Carroll, a digital-rights activist who sued Cambridge Analytica and who has closely followed Kaiser’s work

He cited Cambridge Analytica’s alleged brutal tactics against Nigerian opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari, among others, as evidence of her hired-gun ways.

“With Brittany, the tale she tells is never the whole story,” he added.

Kaiser disagrees with these criticisms. She sees a clear moral arc in her professional life, from 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 ethical or moral compass,” she said. “But I’ve always been a very active human-rights activist,” citing her work as a member of Barack Obama’s media team during his first presidential campaign. “And this is as good a cause as you can find.”

Ukraine asked for donations in crypto. Then things got weird.

Kaiser seeks to turn even her Cambridge tenure as a noble moment. On the speakers’ website of CAA, which represents her, she identifies as “Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.”

Others, however, have questioned that view. Fellow ex-Cambridge employee Christopher Wylie criticized the whistleblower claim in his memoir, saying Kaiser’s willingness to spill the beans came only after
she had little other choice.

And some reviewers of “Targeted” observed a strange lack of penance. “Like Breaking Bad, by the end of it you get the sense that she’s more concerned with her own legacy than reckoning with any wrongdoing of her own 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 chronicled extensively in a set 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 rests on what those critics say is finding a greater fool to buy it. Kaiser’s actions go to the heart of crypto’s moral ambiguity, in which one person’s idealism is another person’s hustle.

But she dismisses those crypto naysayers as forcefully as she waves away her own.

“Crypto gives people access to services and funds they wouldn’t have had,” she said, citing bank freezes that would have made traditional-currency transfers to Ukraine much more difficult.

“It’s this overarching place that’s more consensual and democratic. And that really fits with what I believe.”