"Steve Bannon believes that politics is downstream from culture. They were seeking out companies to build an arsenal of weapons to fight a culture war," he explained at another point in the session. He suggested questions on the nature of those weapons, and the specifics of any potential race-based voter suppression tactics, to be directed to Bannon.

That such a system might work, however, he did address.

"How specifically, then, did they target African American voters," Sen. Harris had asked, "understanding as you do that the African American population is not a monolith? How did they then decipher and determine who was African American so they would target them in their intent to suppress the vote?"

"Racial characteristics can be modeled and I'm not sure about the studies that my colleague here was referencing but we were able to get an AUC score, which is a way of measuring accuracy for race that was .89 I believe," Wylie answered.

AUC, he then explained, stands for "Area under the receiving operations characteristic. It's a way of measuring precision, which [the .89 figure] means it's very high."

In other words, black voters could be identified based on their social media presence and other factors, despite the fact that the black community is, obviously, far from homogeneous.