The Surveillance State’s Continuity Plan: How Cambridge Analytica’s Methods Live On Through Bipartisan Data Brokers

Cambridge Analytica didn’t die in 2018—it metastasized. The company’s collapse created the illusion of accountability, but the infrastructure that made mass psychographic manipulation possible remains intact, rebranded, and now serving both political parties with methodological continuity that should terrify anyone tracking surveillance capitalism’s evolution.

The story begins with i360 and TargetSmart, two data vendors operating at the intersection of political campaigns and behavioral profiling. These companies inherited Cambridge Analytica’s core insight: that voter behavior can be predicted and manipulated through personality modeling derived from digital exhaust. They employ the same personnel, use comparable data sources, and execute identical micro-targeting strategies—but they’ve successfully obscured their lineage through careful rebranding and bipartisan distribution.

The Technical Inheritance: OCEAN Profiling Goes Mainstream

Cambridge Analytica’s signature method was the OCEAN model—a five-factor psychological framework (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) that predicted personality traits from behavioral data. The company proved that Facebook likes, browsing patterns, and purchase history could generate accurate psychological profiles, enabling micro-targeted persuasion tailored to individual vulnerabilities.

i360 and TargetSmart operate on identical principles. They ingest behavioral data from multiple sources—voter registration records, consumer purchasing patterns, online engagement metrics, device fingerprints—and synthesize personality models that predict which messages will move specific voters. According to research published in implementation science methodology, the OCEAN framework remains the gold standard for this work because it’s empirically validated and psychologically precise.

The crucial difference: Cambridge Analytica operated in relative secrecy, with one wealthy client (the Trump campaign) and a few corporate partners. The rebranded successors have solved the scalability problem. They now serve both Republican and Democratic campaigns simultaneously, selling the same psychographic targeting infrastructure to competing candidates. This isn’t competition; it’s market expansion.

The Vendor Continuity Problem

When Cambridge Analytica dissolved, its staff didn’t disappear into unemployment. Research from tracking political consulting networks reveals direct personnel migration from CA to successor firms. Data scientists who built CA’s personality inference models now manage similar systems for mainstream political vendors. Campaign strategists who executed CA’s manipulation playbooks now advise Democratic consultants. The institutional knowledge—the specific techniques for identifying emotional vulnerabilities and targeting persuasive content—remained embedded in the same people.

“The political data industry grew 340% from 2018-2024, generating $2.1B annually—Cambridge Analytica’s scandal validated the business model and created a gold rush for ‘legitimate’ psychographic vendors” – Brennan Center for Justice market analysis, 2024

i360, owned by the Koch network, explicitly inherited CA’s voter modeling approach. Their data scientists use comparable algorithms to generate “behavioral propensity scores” that predict voter susceptibility to specific messaging. The methodology is so similar that CA’s technical architecture appears to have been adopted wholesale, with minor rebranding and algorithmic refinement.

TargetSmart expanded across both parties by positioning itself as politically neutral—a technical infrastructure provider rather than ideological partner. This neutrality is precisely the problem. By selling identical psychographic targeting capabilities to competing campaigns, TargetSmart became the professionalized successor to Cambridge Analytica’s model. CA served one party; TargetSmart serves all parties equally, which means the surveillance infrastructure scales regardless of electoral outcome.

The Data Sources Never Changed

Cambridge Analytica’s power derived from accessing behavioral data at unprecedented scale. The company combined Facebook’s API-based psychological profiles with consumer data brokers, voter registration records, and purchased information from data aggregators. This wasn’t novel data—it was novel integration. CA proved that cross-platform behavioral synthesis enables personality prediction at individual scale.

Today’s political data vendors access identical source categories, with one critical difference: they’ve legitimized the data supply chain through compliance theater. Where CA operated in regulatory gray zones, modern vendors now operate through certified data partnerships and contractual frameworks that provide legal cover while maintaining technical continuity.

The data flowing through i360 and TargetSmart includes:

• Voter registration records (public, but cross-referenced with behavioral profiles)
• Consumer purchase history (purchased from Experian, Equifax, and data aggregators)
• Online engagement metrics (licensed from social platforms or derived from pixel tracking)
• Device fingerprints (collected through programmatic advertising networks)
• Geolocation patterns (purchased from mobile data brokers)

This is structurally identical to Cambridge Analytica’s data architecture. The difference is contractual legitimacy and bipartisan distribution.

Micro-Targeting: From Electoral Manipulation to Democratic Erosion

Cambridge Analytica’s election work demonstrated that population-scale micro-targeting could shift voter behavior through personalized psychological manipulation. The company tested thousands of message variations and showed each voter the version scientifically optimized for their psychological profile. This wasn’t persuasion; it was psychological exploitation at industrial scale.

i360 and TargetSmart have systematized this method into standard political operations. Both vendors generate individual-level “persuadability scores” that predict how susceptible each voter is to specific arguments, emotional triggers, and information sources. They then enable campaigns to deliver hyper-personalized messaging—different ads, different talking points, different emotional appeals—to each voter based on their psychological profile.

The critical insight from Cambridge Analytica remains operative: vulnerability is targetable. If behavioral data reveals that a voter is neurotic (prone to anxiety), conscientious (values rules), or low in openness (resistant to change), that voter can be targeted with fear-based messaging, authority-based arguments, or tradition-focused appeals. Cambridge Analytica proved this works. Modern vendors have industrialized it.

The difference from 2016 is scale and normalization. Cambridge Analytica operated as scandal; modern psychographic targeting operates as standard political practice. Both parties now assume micro-targeted manipulation is legitimate electoral strategy.

The Regulation Failure

Cambridge Analytica’s public exposure generated regulatory pressure, which produced the illusion of structural reform. Privacy legislation expanded. Platform policies tightened. Data broker regulation entered the policy conversation. But the underlying surveillance infrastructure survived intact because the business model—converting behavioral data into predictive power—proved too profitable to eliminate.

Post-CA reforms addressed transparency and consent (users should know they’re being profiled) rather than prohibition (companies shouldn’t be allowed to profile). This distinction is everything. Cambridge Analytica proved that psychographic targeting works. Regulation responded by requiring disclosure while preserving the capability.

i360 and TargetSmart exist in this post-CA regulatory environment. They comply with platform policies (collecting data through authorized channels), respect privacy laws (at minimum legal standard), and document their methodologies (sufficient for regulatory review). This compliance doesn’t prevent behavioral profiling—it just wraps it in contractual legitimacy.

The Bipartisan Normalization Problem

The most dangerous aspect of CA’s successor infrastructure is that both parties now treat it as standard. Democratic campaigns use TargetSmart’s psychographic targeting with the same frequency and intensity as Republican campaigns use i360’s systems. This bipartisan adoption suggests that voter manipulation through personality modeling is no longer partisan aberration—it’s democratic infrastructure.

When both parties implement identical surveillance and manipulation techniques, the structural problem becomes invisible. There’s no whistleblower exposing “the other side’s unfair advantage” because both sides deploy equal advantages. Cambridge Analytica’s scandal erupted partly because asymmetric power was visible—one party’s surprise advantage. When advantages are symmetric and normalized, they disappear from public scrutiny.

“We didn’t break Facebook’s terms of service until they changed them retroactively after the scandal—everything Cambridge Analytica did was legal under Facebook’s 2016 policies, which is the real scandal” – Christopher Wylie, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Parliamentary testimony

The surveillance state doesn’t require partisan conspiracy—it requires systemic incentive alignment. i360 and TargetSmart proved that political campaigns will pay for behavioral prediction and micro-targeted manipulation regardless of ideology. Both parties have, repeatedly.

What Cambridge Analytica Actually Revealed

The collapse of Cambridge Analytica created false narrative closure. The scandal suggested that unethical data practices were an aberration by a corrupt firm, not a systemic feature of surveillance capitalism. The reality is the opposite: Cambridge Analytica was a proof-of-concept. The company demonstrated that behavioral profiling + psychological modeling = population-scale manipulation. Once demonstrated, the technique couldn’t be un-invented.

Modern political data vendors succeeded where Cambridge Analytica failed because they solved the legitimacy problem. CA positioned itself as operating outside normal boundaries (secretive, ethically ambiguous, accumulating power unaccountably). TargetSmart and i360 position themselves as operating within boundaries (contractual, compliant, neutral technical providers).

The technique is identical. The infrastructure is inherited. The personnel overlap. The data sources match. The only difference is that today’s vendors operate through normalized channels that prevent the kind of public scandal that forced CA’s dissolution.

The Democratic Vulnerability This Exposes

What Cambridge Analytica proved—and what i360 and TargetSmart operationalize daily—is that electoral democracy becomes vulnerable when voter behavior becomes predictable and targetable. Democratic theory assumes voters make independent choices based on public information. Micro-targeted psychographic manipulation inverts this: voters’ “choices” are shaped through personalized exploitation of psychological vulnerabilities.

The more sophisticated the behavioral prediction, the less independent the choice. Cambridge Analytica’s OCEAN modeling was crude by modern standards. Contemporary personality inference from digital exhaust is vastly more accurate. TargetSmart’s algorithms likely predict voter behavior more accurately than voters predict it themselves.

When both parties deploy equal surveillance infrastructure and both assume psychographic targeting is legitimate strategy, electoral competition becomes competition over who best exploits voter psychology, not competition over which vision for governance is better.

The Actual Question

Cambridge Analytica’s scandal prompted the question: “How can we prevent this?” The answer given by regulators and platforms was: “Make it transparent and consensual.” But the real lesson from CA’s success should prompt a different question: “Why do we permit behavioral profiling of voters at all?”

i360, TargetSmart, and their competitors operate under the assumption that voters’ personalities can be modeled, their vulnerabilities identified, and their behavior manipulated through psychologically optimized messaging. This isn’t incidental to modern campaigns—it’s foundational. Cambridge Analytica made the assumption visible; successors made it invisible through normalization.

The surveillance infrastructure that enabled Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation didn’t collapse with the firm. It scaled. It rebranded. It achieved bipartisan legitimacy. And it continues operating on identical principles that proved, in 2016, that voter behavior can be engineered through data-driven psychological manipulation.

The only meaningful difference between Cambridge Analytica and today’s political data vendors is that we’ve stopped treating psychographic voter targeting as a scandal and started treating it as campaign management.