Ministers have received a new warning not to allow Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union to jeopardise the Good Friday agreement. As the Press Association reports, the Elders - a group of senior world figures originally brought together by Nelson Mandela - have expressed concern that the return of a “hard” border between Northern Ireland and the Republic could undermine the peace process. The group’s chairman, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, said:

The Good Friday agreement has served Northern Ireland, the rest of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland very well for the past 20 years. It was painstakingly achieved after complex negotiations and difficult compromises on all sides. Amid the wider political and economic uncertainty caused by Brexit, all stakeholders should place the preservation of peace and security as a high priority.

And Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and a member of the group, said:

Peace in Northern Ireland was hard-won and needs to be protected.

The Elders welcome the assertion by UK Prime Minister Theresa May of the paramountcy of the Good Friday agreement, and the importance of ensuring that nothing should be done to allow the reimposition of a hard border. All governments and parties in all parts of the UK and Ireland must work to make this promise a reality.

Newspaper executives have been giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about hate crime. On Twitter newspaper journalists don’t seem to be giving it a lot of attention, but BuzzFeed’s Mark Di Stefano has been tweeting the highlights. He has a good thread starting here.

Matthew Butcher, who works for the Green MP Caroline Lucas, points out that Clarence Mitchell stood against her as a Conservative candidate in the 2015 general election.

My colleague Dan Sabbagh has posted his verdict on the Clarence Mitchell/Cambridge Analytica press conference. (See 3.18pm.)

Q: How did the company come to workers in the Nigerian elections?

Mitchell says the questioner (my colleague Carole Cadwalladr) is stating as fact things that are assertions. These allegations are being investigated by the inquiry set up, he says.

Q: Why are you speaking and not anyone from the company?

Mitchell says that Alexander Nix would normally be taking questions but he has been suspended. Other company officials have been dealing with clients. They don’t necessarily have the experience to face the press like this. So Mitchell says he is doing that on their behalf.

Mitchell says Alexander Nix, the Cambridge Analytica CEO, who is currently suspended, is not refusing to give evidence to the culture committee. He has just asked for his evidence session to be postponed pending the ongoing inquiries into his conduct.

Business secretary Greg Clark has waved through the sale of one Britain’s oldest engineering firms to a controversial investment group. As the Press Association reports, Clark dismissed claims of a “predatory” takeover as he confirmed the sale of GKN to Melrose Industries in the Commons. Labour had called for the sale to be blocked on national security grounds, as the company provides many Ministry of Defence contracts, but this was rejected. Explaining the decision Mr Clark told MPs of the numerous assurances given by Melrose as part of the 8.1 billion takeover deal. He said:

The MoD has completed its detailed analysis and has agreed with Melrose a series of undertakings specifically to ensure that the government is informed in advance of any plans to divest a business, a component of the business or assets which engage in activities that the Ministry of Defence considers to have national security implications.

And here is the story on the hearing from my colleagues Alex Hern and Jim Waterson.

Here is Ryan Mac, BuzzFeed’s tech reporter, with an assessment of Aleksandr Kogan’s evidence to the culture committee.

Summary of key points coming up soon.

That’s it. The hearing is now over.

I will post a summary soon.

Q: Who funded the work in St Petersburg?

Kogan says it was the Russian government.

Kogan asks why that is relevant. Damian Collins asks whether the Russians wanted to stop cyberbullying, or to get better at it.

Kogan says there is a long history of the American government interfering in foreign elections.

He says he is dubious about the moral activities of powerful governments.

But he is not equating the US and Russia, he says.

But if people are suggesting that the Russians were funding academic research for political motives, you would have to ask if the UK was doing the same, he suggests.

(Then, annoyingly, the audio feed from the committee goes down.)

Q: Was your non-disclosure agreement signed before or after the data breach?

Kogan says he cannot answer that.

Kogan says he comes from Moldova. But he moved to the US when he was seven.

Q: While at Cambridge you also worked at the University of St Petersburg, didn’t you?

Kogan says some of his friends when there. He says it is a hard place to visit if you don’t speak Russian, but he can speak Russian. He says his friends applied for a grant. They included his name on their funding application. He went out there for some meetings, but his involvement was very limited.

His friends were working on cyberbullying. It was between 2014 and 2016.

He cleared this with Cambridge University, he says.

Q: We have been investigating Russia as well. Is it possible that people in Russia could have gained access to this data? Was it on your laptop?

Kogan says you do not travel with this data. It is on a server in Portland. The idea that it could have been accessed like that is “ridiculous”.

Kogan says his research showed how, in a state like New York, kinder people did not tend to be happier.

But in a state like Utah, kinder people did tend to be happier than average.

He cites that as an example of how his research can be useful.

Kogan goes on:

If the goal is for you to run Facebook ads, the friends data is useless.

Q: Why was Facebook data so important to you?

Kogan says, as a social psychologist, he is interested in understanding people. But researchers tend to focus on undergraduate psychology students. That is cheap. But they are not representatives.

He says Facebook offered two advantages. He says they has a relatively open API (application programming interface). And he says the sample was representative. It covered most of the population.

Damian Collins goes next.

Q: Can you tell us about your work with AggregateIQ?

There is nothing to tell, says Kogan. He says he had not heard of them until about a month ago.

Q: How many companies did you share the data with?

Kogan says it went to SCL, to Christopher Wylie’s company Eunoia (which he says received the largest amount of data), to Cambridge University (which just got an anonymised version) and to a researcher at the University of Toronto (who just got a derivative dataset.)

Kogan says he thinks he has deleted the Facebook data.

But he is checking to make sure that some data has not been missed. For example, in a summary file.

But he says you cannot stop people putting data on a hard drive and putting it under a mattress.

He says this has been a painful process. Facebook was a close ally, he says. He says what has happened has been damaging to his career.

Q: Were you the only one under a non-disclosure agreement from Facebook? Or were your directors covered too?

Kogan says they will have to ask Facebook.

Q: When was it signed?

Kogan says he cannot say.

He says that parliamentary privilege (which protects people speaking in parliament from legal action) does not extend to the US.

Q: And can you confirm that you don’t have any Facebook data any more?

Kogan says that is correct, as far as he is aware.

Kogan says by March 2015 his firm had begun to suspect that Christopher Wyle, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, “might not be the most reputable person in the world”.

He says Wylie had not been a reliable partner.

Labour’s Paul Farrelly asks about an interview that Kogan gave to 60 Minutes in the US.

Q: You accept that you broke Facebook’s terms and conditions?

No, says Kogan. He says, to break a policy, it has to exist. You cannot describe what was in the Facebook document as a policy.

I would agree my actions were inconsistent with the language of this document. But that is slightly different.

• Kogan says he does not accept he broke Facebook’s terms and conditions.

Kogan challenges Farrelly. Is Farrelly on Facebook? Yes, the MP says. And did he read the terms and conditions first? No, says Farrelly.

Kogan says that he accepts he failed in drawing up the user terms and conditions for his app.

He should have made it clear that the information might be used for political purposes, he says.

And, in his written statement (pdf), Kogan also says that Facebook can run targeted ads without the need for his data.

A second point of confusion is whether the data we collected would be useful for micro-targeting ads on Facebook. I believe the project we did makes little to no sense if the goal is to run targeted ads on Facebook. The Facebook ads platform provides tools and capability to run targeted ads with little need for our work—in fact, the platform’s tools provide companies a far more effective pathway to target people based on their personalities than using scores from users from our work.

Kogan says he did not know what candidates in America SCL was working for. He says he rarely has strong opinions about election candidates. He goes on:

Most folks are trying to do what they think is right.

Damian Collins puts to Kogan some of the things Alexander Nix, the Cambridge Analytica CEO (currently suspended) told the committee when he gave evidence.

Q: Nix said he did not get any data from GSR. He said no. Is that true?

That’s “a fabrication”, says Kogan.

Q: Nix said you did not supply him with data.

That’s a “total fabrication”, says Kogan.

Q: Nix says his datasets are not based on what you supplied.

Kogan says that could be true. He does not know what is in the SCL datasets now. But they did have his data originally.

Q: So as far as you are concerned Nix lied to the committee?

Absolutely, says Kogan.

And here is more from Kogan’s written statement (pdf) about the data GSR supplied to SCL.

In late 2014, GSR provided SCL with the data and analyses called for by the Agreement. This consisted of (i) demographic information for survey participants and their friends in the 11 specified states; and (ii) personality scores and a limited number of predictions for survey participants and friends based on the collected data.

SCL later requested that we provide data and analysis for survey participants and their friends for all 50 states. In early 2015, we provided the additional data requested by SCL. This second set of data contained the same types of demographic information, survey responses, but fewer personality analyses than those that had been provided for the original 11 states that had been turned over pursuant to the Agreement. In addition, for the second set of data, SCL requested information on whether the friends and survey participants had “likes” for about 500 pages specified by SCL, which included some political figures and celebrities. GSR provided this additional “like” data, which amounted to about four percent of each friend’s “likes.” SCL also requested and received information on who people were friends with (social network connections). In return for the second set of data, SCL paid GSR £230,000. These funds were used by GSR for research, development, administrative costs, and professional services. I did not receive any salary from GSR at any point during its operation.

Kogan says he thinks it is unlikely that SCL used Facebook data on the Trump campaign.

He says he thought the Ted Cruz campaign were unhappy with the data that SCL were using. So he does not think SCL would have gone on to use that data on the Trump campaign.

Damian Collins goes next.

Q: Facebook said you had lied to them and misused their data. Do those comments apply to Joseph Chancellor, who worked with you?

Yes, says Kogan.

Q: But that’s odd, because Chancellor went on to work for them.

Kogan says that might not be odd in Facebook land.

He says Facebook was in “PR crisis mode” when it put out statements criticising his fole in the affair. He goes on:

I don’t believe they think these things.

He says he thinks Facebook knows their platformed had been mined by others too.

Kogan says, after Christopher Wylie left SCL, he tried to get Kogan to work with his new company.

But he says Wylie did not honour his side of the agreement, and their agreement broke down.

Q: Were you paid personally by SCL?

No, says Kogan.

Q: And what is the status of GSR now?

It has been closed, says Kogan.

Q: Why was the company dissolved?

Kogan says, when he set it up, he was not interested in making money. He wanted to set up a not-for-profit. But Wylie advised him to set up a for-profit company.

He says he had no business experience himself.

Kogan is now explaining how he got involved with SCL.

He covers this in his written statement (pdf). Here is an extract.

I was first introduced to SCL through a PhD student at U of Cambridge in February 2014. He introduced me to Chris Wylie, who represented SCL at the time. Our conversations began with Mr Wylie detailing his experiences working for the Obama campaign, and the desire to share commercial datasets with academics. He asked me to potentially provide survey-consulting services to SCL. Eventually the conversation turned towards personality and Facebook, and at that point I introduced Mr Wylie to David Stillwell, who had collected a large Facebook personality dataset called myPersonality. Mr Wylie was interested in acquiring the myPersonality dataset from Dr Stillwell, but after considering the proposition for a few months, Dr Stillwell decided against it on the grounds that he had collected the data for academic purposes—and that is what he warranted to his users. At this time, Dr Stillwell, Dr Michal Kosinski (a close collaborator of Dr Stillwell’s), and I proposed making personality predictions for SCL. Dr Stillwell and Kosinski had already developed a model to make predictions from likes, and I had experience using the Facebook login app from my previous. This idea of predicting personality from page likes became the foundation of the project that I did with SCL. Eventually, Dr. Stillwell and Kosinski were removed from the project because they requested $500,000 to work on the models—a request SCL ultimately felt was unreasonable given the unproven commercial nature of the models. And so I was asked to handle both the data collection and modeling.

To do the project, a fellow University of Cambridge research psychologist and I registered a company, Global Science Research (“GSR”). In June 2014, GSR entered into a data and technology subscription agreement with SCL Elections Limited (“SCL”) (the “Agreement”). GSR agreed to provide SCL with specified demographic and personality data for individuals in 11 US states. In return, SCL agreed to pay the cost of collecting the data, which consisted chiefly of fees paid to survey participants (about three to four dollars per participant). SCL’s payments under the Agreement, made directly to the Qualtrics, amounted to about $800,000. During the Summer of 2014, Qualtrics recruited between 200,000 and 300,000 participants to take a survey developed for the purpose of collecting particular data.

In the hearing Kogan repeats the point about the $800,000 payment being used to pay people taking part in the surveys. Only a small sum went directly to the company to allow it to maintain its servers, he says.

Q: How did you first meet SCL?

Kogan says he was introduced by a PhD student who was doing part-time consulting for SCL. He met the firm in January or February 2014, and discussed collaborating and providing them with datasets.

Q: Was your decision to set up GSR (Global Science Research) connected with the meeting with SCL?

Kogan says he did set up GSR to work with SCL. But that came a bit later.

Q: On the Cambridge University website you are named as Aleksandr Kogan and Aleksandr Spectre. Why is that?

Kogan says, when he got married, he did not want to take his wife’s name and she did not want to take his name. They wanted a new name. They wanted something related to light. His father was ill at the time and was being treated by a Jason Spectre. They liked the name. It reminded them of the word spectrum.

Q: Spectre is also the name of the evil organisation in James Bond films.

Kogan says that is “an unfortunate coincidence”.

Q: Did you know that at the time?

No, says Kogan.

This is from my colleague Carole Cadwalladr, who has led the Observer’s coverage of Cambridge Analytica.

And this is from the Independent’s Rob Merrick.

Kogan says he never had a contract with Cambridge Analytica.

He says he met Alexander Nix, the Cambridge Analytica boss, a few times.

He interacted with SCL Elections, he says.

But he says he was never sure what the distinction was between SCL Elections and Cambridge Analytica.

Q: What came first? The academic research, or the idea that you could make money from this?

The academic research, says Kogan.

Q: And when did you think you could make money from this?

Kogan says he originally created his app, the CPW app, and used it to collect Facebook data. This was in 2013. It was when he was introduced to SCL in 2014 that he thought about making money from it.

Q: So it was SCL that put the idea of making money into your mind?

Kogan says it was a bit more nuanced than that.

Q: Did you sell that data?

Kogan says he never sold his data. That would be a serious breach of ethics. That data never left his servers, he says. He says academics used it for research.

He also says he did not collect names.

But when he worked with SCL, he collected new data, he says, under new terms of service.

He says the thisisyourdigitallife app was not the app used for the project with SCL. It was only used by a couple of hundred people. That data was not given to SCL.

The other app was called the GSR app. In 2014, when it was decided to do the project commercially, the name of the app was changed to the GSR app, he says. Chrisopher Wylie provided commercial terms of service. At that point it was separate from the university. And it was hooked up to a different dataset, he says.

The data was never in the same place, and never mixed up.

Q: Was the technical side of the app the same?

Yes, says Kogan.

Kogan says after 2015 Facebook asked him to destroy the dataset he had been using. He did that, he says.

Q: What was Facebook trying to achieve from your research?

Kogan says it made Facebook employees happy. It stimulated them.

Q: So Facebook let its employees give data to academics and let them play with it?

Yes, says Kogan.

Collins tells Kogan that he (Kogan) was presented as a rogue operator. But Kogan was actually working with Facebook, he says.

Kogan smiles approvingly.

The committee has published three documents on its website relating to this inquiry.

Aleksandr Kogan’s personal statement (pdf)

Some PowerPoint slides from Kogan (pdf)

A supplementary statement from Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower (pdf)

Collins says the committee has published a statement from Kogan (pdf) on its website.

Kogan starts by saying he had information from Facebook about all friendship groups created in the world.

The hearing is starting now.

Damian Collins, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, opens by saying there are three main issues they want to address.

First, the Facebook data breach.

Then the use Cambridge Analytica made of that research.

And finally, the committee would like to learn more about Kogan’s work generally, Collins says.

We’re still waiting for the hearing to start.

In the meantime, here is the Observer story that first revealed how Facebook data was being used by Cambridge Analytica.

And this is how it starts.

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on” ...

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals ...

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert Mueller which stated they had used the platform to perpetrate “information warfare” against the US.

A Holocaust survivor has said Jeremy Corbyn must lay out concrete actions to expel antisemites from Labour, ahead of a crunch meeting between the party leader and the two largest Jewish organisations, my colleague Jessica Elgot reports.

The Scottish National party is facing fresh questions over its contact with the data firm Cambridge Analytica after the SNP’s former new media strategist admitted he had met the firm in February 2016.

Kirk Torrance, the son of a former SNP councillor and a digital campaigning specialist, confirmed he met Cambridge Analytica after his identity was revealed by the pro-independence news website CommonSpace.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, has come under intense criticism for dismissing complaints about that meeting, since her MPs have been amongst the most vociferous critics of Conservative and pro-Brexit campaign dealings with CA and its parent company SCL.

SNP MPs were left red-faced after these contacts were disclosed last week by Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica director, during a Westminster committee hearing. Peter Murrell, the SNP’s chief executive and Sturgeon’s husband, had kept it secret even from his own party’s MPs.

In a tweet, Torrance, now a digital strategy consultant, complimented the SNP for its “professionalism and decency” in not outing him. He added: “I would like to take this opportunity to repeat what I said about #CambridgeAnalytica at the time ... ‘They are a bunch of snake oil-selling cowboys!’”

Yet the SNP and Torrance still refuse to say why he met the firm. Press reports have cited claims from within the company it was linked to the EU referendum in June 2016; it also coincided with the 2016 Holyrood election in May, when the SNP faced significant losses at the hands of the Tories.

A pioneer of digital political campaigning in the UK, Torrance has vigorously defended the SNP’s heavy use of social media, including Facebook, which has allowed the party to expertly target its message at voters and to sidestep the mainstream media.

Neil Findlay, Scottish Labour’s campaigns spokesman, said:

Now that it’s been revealed that former SNP digital guru Kirk Torrance met with Cambridge Analytica on the party’s behalf, it is time for the SNP to come clean on this whole murky affair.

Paddy Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader, posted this on Twitter this morning. It would be fair to say that it does not read like a vote of confidence in the person currently doing his old job, Sir Vince Cable.