Former Vancouver resident Christopher Wylie at centre of international uproar over Facebook data mining

This past weekend, the Guardian  published an exclusive interview with a young man who claims to have created Steve Bannon's psychological warfare tool.

Christopher Wylie is a 28-year-old from Vancouver who's attracting headlines around the world for blowing the whistle on sophisticated data mining by Cambridge Analytica.

The consulting company played a vital role in the Brexit referendum and in helping Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.

According to the article posted on the Guardian website, Wylie figured out how to plumb the data of millions of U.S. Facebook users while studying for a PhD in England.

In another interview on Channel 4 News in the U.K., he said that records on 50 million Facebook users was collected in a couple of months.

This Cambridge Analytica–compiled research helped the Trump campaign craft ads that spoke to their psychological makeup.

"Facebook could see it was happening,” Wylie told journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

However, he maintained that a Cambridge University researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, told the social-media giant that this was being done for academic purposes.

Cambridge Analytics was financed by the billionaire Mercer family, which bankrolled Bannon and Brietbart News. Wylie was the company's director of research.

The Mercers also donated data analytics to former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.

As a teenager, Wylie was a data cruncher working on former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion's campaign, and later he worked for the Liberal Democrats in the U.K.