PORT-OF-SPAIN – THE Trinidad and Tobago Government will appoint a special prosecutor to look at the Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal.
National Security Minister Stuart Young said the Government will also be asking for a criminal investigation into the scandal as it relates to TT.
He was speaking at a news conference on Wednesday at his Abercromby, Port-of-Spain, office.
Young said, “We the Government will be asking for the commencement of a criminal investigation.”
He added, “We will also utilise the Office of the Attorney General to carry out that investigation internationally.
“We will be seeking the appointment of a special investigator/prosecutor to get to the bottom of this, to find out who committed criminal acts, what laws were breached and most importantly to put an end to this.”
Young said, “It is important that we find out how this was perpetrated upon us.”
This comes after revelations in a book written by Canadian data consultant Christopher Wylie. In his book Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America,Wylie he has named TT as one of the countries involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Young said former People’s Partnership Government used state apparatus and assets to “get behind what we the citizens doing on a daily basis minute by minute.”
Wylie claimed the Peoples Partnership Government allowed Cambridge Analytica to gain access, through this TT’s telecommunication servers, to tap in to see citizens smart phones and computers anywhere in the country at any given time.
He said, “This means if you were conducting banking transactions, they can see pin. If you were surfing the internet they have direct access to not only your historical information but real time access to what you were doing.”
Wylie said, “We were spying, pure and simple with cover from the Trinidadian leader.”
In his book, he claimed that the TT government was violating the privacy of all its citizens in one swoop.
He wrote, “The raw census would obviously be useful for the project but it wasn’t a resource we could expect to have available to us in developed countries. Privacy is a concern usually reserved for the rich.”
Wylie added, “Not surprisingly, it was a lot of porn. People were browsing everything imaginable, including the culturally specific ‘Trini Porn.’”
UNC MP Rodney Charles, has told local media he was not aware of the book and asked for more specifics on Wylie’s claims.
And in a release on Wednesday, the UNC described the claims that it tried to spy on citizens and use data mining to win elections while in government as a “fairytale” by the People’s National Movement.
