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Hello, I'm Matthew Price. This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.

Every day we ask one big question about one big story.

Today, could Cambridge Analytica happen again?

Do you remember when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke? There were photos of a young

guy with glasses and short-cropped dyed pink hair? Well that was Christopher Wiley, a 30-year-old

Canadian data specialist who moved to London a few years back,

started working in political campaigns, and then found himself intricately involved in two of the biggest political events of his lifetime,

the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump.

He worked at Cambridge Analytica, the company that was caught harvesting data from

millions of Facebook accounts

and then using it for political advertising purposes.

Of course we'd been warned for years that this could happen,

but it was the first time we saw how data could be used and weaponised to win an election.

Now we're told there could be an election in Britain in the coming months, an election

that Boris Johnson is confident that he can win, partly because the man who sits next to him in Downing Street, Dominic Cummings, has learned how to harness the power of data, just like Chris Wiley did.

When I was in school, in middle school, back in Canada, at the time I used a wheelchair because

I have a hidden disability so so you can't see it. So that meant that I wouldn't

necessarily spend lots of time on the playground and you know it can be also quite isolating an other ring when you're sitting in a wheelchair.

And so spending time in a computer lab and playing around with computers

started to interest me.

And one of the things that I found

...