California-based covert surveillance firm attempted to criminalize this publication and unmask its sources, court filings reveal
Unsealed filings from Premise Data's settled case against former employees reveal this publication became center of lawsuit; judge referred to targeting of me as "Pentagon Papers all over again."
In a recently unsealed direct message exchange, then-CEO of Premise Data, Delwin Maury Blackman, asked senior director of marketing Allen Chen if head of product David Mendelson had “run off like a little bitch with [senior manager] Alex [Pompe]?” “He’s a bitch. Needs to be fired,” Blackman continued, before adding that: “Fuck him. I’m gonna send his ass packing.”
During the roughly 90 minute period spanning the sporadic exchanges between the two executives on September 4, 2018, Chen also coordinated with Blackman on the next day’s press release regarding Premise’s ill-fated partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Titled “Premise Data Tapped to Collect Ground Truth on Health Facilities Worldwide,” Chen was listed as the press contact, and his LinkedIn profile continues to boast that his marketing work at Premise “generate[d] prominent press placements in major publications such as Reuters, TechCrunch, and Forbes.”
Despite journalist Byron Tau using primary sources to expose the California-based, gig-work information gathering company Premise Data in 2021 as a covert front for intelligence gathering for U.S. Special Operations Forces around the globe, the reporting never captured broad public attention.1 Premise managed to continue landing puff pieces in prestigious outlets such as The Economist even while it was more than four years into litigation against a large number of former employees, particularly against Mr. Pompe for allegedly blowing the whistle on Premise’s intelligence activities to the company’s flagship partner, the Gates Foundation.
Recently unsealed filings from the Santa Clara County litigation reveal that a short article from this humble publication set the proceedings on fire by publishing a police incident reporting detailing Blackman’s arrest for alleged felony domestic violence on the Tuesday night before Christmas 2021, resulting in at least seven document production requests, attempts to forensically unmask my sources, and the judge making an exaggerated claim that the case had become “Pentagon Papers all over again, for those of us old enough to remember that.”
Confirmation of Premise’s classified work with U.S. military and intelligence agencies was inadvertently made public through a statement authored by Mr. Blackman during the proceedings. Premise’s lawyers further falsely disputed that I easily confirmed the details of Mr. Blackman’s arrest through a single, brief phone call to the San Francisco Police Department’s Crime Information Services Unit.
The unsealed documents contain roughly 150 pages from the August 23, 2023 deposition of Mr. Blackman, including him admitting to a sort of recursive phone surveillance by secretly listening to a phone call between two Premise executives who were themselves allegedly listening to a recorded phone call between Blackman and a young female employee who “showed Maury up.” “The fact of the matter is, I listened to the conversation. Don't tell me what I did was wrong,” stated Blackman during his deposition.
In addition to firing / severing the two executives who were laughing at a junior employee criticizing him, head of technology Gary Rudolph and Chief Operating Officer Joanna Lee Shevelenko — a former right-hand employee of former Premise board member and Social+Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya during his time at Facebook — Mr. Blackman also fired the head of human resources, Jeff Umscheid, for allegedly not investigating Mr. Rudolph and Ms. Shevelenko aggressively enough.2
As part of an email sent to Ms. Shevelenko on May 11, 2018 which copied Mr. Blackman, co-founder David Soloff ironically joked to Ms. Shevelenko more than three months before her departure that he knew she wasn’t “tapping [his] phones or reading [his] WhatsApp.” Ms. Shevelenko has since co-founded F7 Ventures, which listed Mr. Umscheid as a member of its ‘operator network’. Ms. Shevelenko did not respond to a request for comment through the firm.
A separate published exchange between Ms. Shevelenko and Mr. Blackman from May 11, 2018 also discussed the possibility of the company expanding Premise’s information collection capabilities into Syria through a partnership with John P. DeBlasio’s “international development contractor” DT Global. Just 29 days prior, Premise publicly announced its partnership with DT on information gathering in Mosul, Iraq, using funding from the United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
Mr. DeBlasio previously ran the private security contractor Sallyport, which he sold to DC Capital Partners for roughly $64.5 million in 2011, and subsequent litigation from his former business partner regarding alleged fraud noted that 19 Sallyport employees were pulled off a bus in Iraq and executed on the side of the road as part of the company’s secretive military contracts, which were reportedly in support of General Dynamics. DT Global’s parent company, Global Peace and Development Charitable Trust, is a major backer of the active, Syria-focused news outlet Syria Direct, which lists Mr. DeBlasio as a chairperson. (Mr. DeBlasio did not respond to a request for comment through DT Global.)
The unsealed legal filings include partially redacted exit interviews from 28 employees, including not only the mid-20’s female employee whose phone call with Blackman led to the firing of Shevelenko and Rudolph, but also of a Business Development Executive (BDE) leaving to join the Central Intelligence Agency. Despite having just joined Premise, the former sales executive referred to joining the CIA as “a once in a lifetime opportunity,” but Blackman claimed during his deposition that the sales executive left after privately telling him “This place is bullshit.” By contrast, a senior Android developer told Premise on November 1, 2018 that they resigned partly because “We collect a whole bunch of data on our users and I feel very concerned about who we're going to work for.”
While not visible in the redacted exit interviews, the separately produced September 24, 2018 email resignation of defendant Kyle Dawkins noted the “MoD” — presumably the UK Ministry of Defence — was visiting Premise’s San Francisco office at the time. After referring to Mr. Dawkins as a “dirt bag,” Blackman joked to Premise co-founder David Soloff that Mr. Palihapitiya was unlikely to care about mass employee concern about the direction of the company, stating “I don’t see Chamath giving a shit about them.”
I was only made aware of the aggressive targeting of my own communications while reading said thousands of pages of recently unsealed filings from the case. The only apparent communications with me from Premise came from a clearly pseudonymous persona of “Christian Erics[s]en,” who claimed to represent Mr. Blackman before offering to bribe me to remove my article on Blackman’s arrest and then, after I refused, submitted a fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown to my cloud provider. Roughly three weeks after publishing an account of the takedown request, I received an anonymous tip that Blackman had been forced to resign, which was confirmed roughly one week later by Mr. Tau. And, despite the trial having been scheduled for March, Premise initiated settlement of the case in early January.
(In a particularly heated section of Mr. Blackman’s deposition regarding former employee Moorea Brega, Blackman had stated that “you know what? I'm telling you right now, there is no way I'm settling this case.”)
Coincidentally, one of the primary lawyers behind the actions and accusations against me, Grellas Shah namesake Dhaivat H. Shah, was simultaneously litigating against Orbital Insight, a satellite surveillance company I exposed as secretly primarily contracting with Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency.3 Just as Mr. Blackman was forced out of Premise, former Orbital CEO Kevin O’Brien jumped ship to Chainalysis after threatening me with a lawsuit for my reporting. As of last week, Orbital was served an eviction notice from its Palo Alto headquarters.
Despite the lack of public appetite, Tau dedicated a chapter to Premise in his recent book, ‘Means of Control’.
According to Mr. Blackman’s deposition, Ms. Shevelenko was paid roughly $150,000 — which he equated to six months of her severance — and both parties agreed through lawyers to not prosecute each other.
Shah was representing former Orbital subtenant Databook Labs regarding Orbital’s failure to pay rent at their Palo Alto headquarters. The discovery of Orbital defaulting on its rent led me down the rabbit hole which eventually exposed the company’s work with Indonesian intelligence and, likely, led to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s space startup Privateer aborting its acquisition of Orbital as the company’s CEO jumped ship to blockchain surveillance company Chainalysis.
This really needs to be made into a limited series t.v. show. It has it all- an arrogant unscrupulous boss, a paranoid and hostile work environment, spite firings, infidelity, arrests, vindictive lawsuits to scare people into keeping quiet, threats to journalists, attempted bribery, and now telephone and dm eavesdropping. You can’t make this stuff up. And the bad guy gets fired in the end. Everyone loves a juicy true story. I’m sorry for the innocent people who got ensnared in this mess, though. If the author doesn’t want to write the screenplay- at least could he shop the idea out to someone else? Maybe the person who wrote, “She Said?”
What date are the unsealed Blackman deposition papers listed under for the SC court site? Having a hard time finding them and my session keeps restarting.
Somewhat related: Sometime in early-mid June 2016 there was a huge conspiracy about Premise Data posted on Reddit. It was largely untrue and had ties to “Pizzagate”, but it garnered thousands of comments and was really a site to behold. There were “internet sleuths” that were hiding behind trees near the Premise office, recording employees entering and leaving. The recorders were claiming they were likely to be “disappeared” by the company— maybe they weren’t too far off! It was deleted some years later, presumably due to a lawsuit, but maybe your search skills can dig something up. It’s a real fun read.