The dirty tricks of reputation management: from PI firms to sabotaging Google Search
How exposing the arrest of a Bay Area surveillance CEO led to an ex-cop attempting to unmask this publication's sources and the end of a secret technique for removing journalism from Google Search.
“Confirming that we’ve rolled out a fix to prevent this type of abuse of the Refresh Outdated Content tool,” wrote Google spokesperson Davis Thompson in an email to the author and the Freedom of the Press Foundation earlier this month. “We won’t be able to share anymore on this,” he added.
The email confirmed the demise of the latest variant of a surprisingly simple technique which allowed anyone to quickly and anonymously remove essentially any webpage — including journalism — from Google search results. An executive from a major U.S. publication, who was granted anonymity to prevent possible retribution against their paper from Google, recalled being shocked that they were able to deindex an old New York Times article as a test, after noticing “hundreds of removals” of their own publication’s articles.
A series of attacks on three publications regarding the behavior of Delwin Maurice Blackman, the now-former CEO of the San Francisco gig-work data collection firm Premise Data, were discovered to have taken place between the February 4 dismissal of his $25 million lawsuit against this publication, and the more than $411,000 in lawyers’ costs and fees he was on Tuesday tentatively ruled to have to pay as a consequence. (Substack was awarded $225,809 in costs and fees, the Electronic Frontier Foundation $145,362, and Susan Seager $40,280.)
Premise Data originally rose to prominence in June 2021, following The Wall Street Journal publishing the company’s slide deck pitch as a covert, global intelligence collection platform for U.S. Special Operations Command. Prominent board members have included Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Palantir’s first employee, Alex Moore. (Former USAID administrator Rajiv Shah has also been an advisor, and Premise was revealed by this publication to have provided its surveillance services to the ‘Discovery’ product of McNally Capital’s Orbis Operations, which was reportedly the launching point of former CIA special activities chief Philip F. Reilly’s security firm Safe Reach Solutions and its public face, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.)
More than a year after Blackman’s dismissal from Premise Data in late 2023, he in January became CEO of “The Transparency Company,” a rebranding of Curtis Boyd’s for-pay takedown service for business reviews, Objection Co. According to a claim for damages Blackman submitted to the City of San Francisco on September 12, 2024, his previous salary was $5 million per year.
The author discovered earlier this year that his September 2023 exposure of Blackman’s sealed arrest for felony domestic violence in December 2021 was no longer appearing in Google search results, even when searched by exact title, despite previously being prominent. Freedom of the Press Foundation deputy director of audience Ahmed Zidan was subsequently able to determine the precise mechanism for an identical and simultaneous attack on their own coverage of Blackman’s past censorship attempts.
(Freedom of the Press Foundation separately published its new findings at the same time as this article.)
According to logs from Google Search Console, a tool for website owners to manage how Google indexes their content, three separate articles regarding Blackman — two from this publication and one from Freedom of the Press — had been simultaneously maliciously “refreshed” from May 7 to June 23 with random capitalizations of the URLs, which, when accessed, returned an error page instead of the original content.
A previous, and simpler, variant of the attack vector against journalism was documented on Google’s help forum for the search console, beginning in May 2023, albeit with misleading answers suggesting that the attack was not real. At the time, it was possible to deindex content from Google Search simply by flagging the URL as outdated, using the “Remove Outdated Content” tool. Rather than involving a direct request for the removal of a URL’s content, the more recent censorship technique relied upon different capitalizations of a URL producing an error page.
The previous variant of the vulnerability had been widely exploited to deindex content from major publications, with an emphasis on sponsored articles, according to a source with direct knowledge.
Open source information regarding Blackman published by the author’s volunteer-run nonprofit Tech Inquiry separately remains blocked from Google searches due to a fraudulent DMCA takedown request from Jules Enterprises LLP under Danish jurisdiction, allegedly due to violating the copyright of an unrelated 2017 article in The New Yorker regarding hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen.
Every fraudulent DMCA takedown request and Google Search deindexing attack against both this publication and Tech Inquiry has targeted information regarding Mr. Blackman.
Censor-ception
One of the three targeted Blackman-related articles was itself an overview of previous attempts by Blackman and others to censor this publication’s journalism, entitled “Anatomy of a censorship campaign.” Beyond a $25 million “John Doe” lawsuit against both the author of this publication and his public records nonprofit, Tech Inquiry, as well as against Substack and Amazon Web Services, the article documented some of the myriad censorship tactics, which more broadly ranged from fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests to an outright attempt at bribery.
Following the dismissal of Blackman’s suit as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), he proceeded to sue the City of San Francisco for $7 million in April. The public docket for the suit contains several interesting revelations and further demonstrates the city’s attorneys expressing a newfound respect for this publication’s first amendment rights, following their previous, unconstitutional demands for the retraction of truthful reporting.
Exhibits submitted by counsel for San Francisco Police Department’s Diane Bryan, a senior clerk in the Crime Information Services Unit, reveal that Premise Data’s then-general counsel, Jeffrey C. Tung, quickly hired former police from the California-based private investigation firm Whitestar Group. This included former Santa Rose Lieutenant Rick Kohut being tasked to attempt to forensically unmask the author’s source for the police incident report of Blackman’s sealed arrest. (Tung left Premise two months later and became acting general counsel of Estrella Immunopharma, according to his LinkedIn profile.)
Whitestar’s publicly advertised services also include “high-definition video” surveillance, which they depict as being discreetly collected from within parked cars.
Filings from Premise’s previous, multi-year lawsuit against Alex Pompe — who allegedly revealed the company’s covert work with U.S. intelligence agencies — included the transcript of an August 25, 2023 deposition of Blackman. During the extensive questioning, Blackman stated that former Premise director of operations Cameron Leigh Scherer had secretly regularly informed management — through her direct manager, COO David Bischof — of the contents of discussions between organizing rank-and-file workers on their private Slack, known as “Dark Slack.” Whitestar Group’s investigation led to at least six discovery requests in the trial for any communications with this publication.
Scherer, a former program associate for the U.S. Government-backed Internews Network who now works for Adobe and promotes the Democratic Party’s ‘Abundance Agenda,’ went on to sign a January 14 declaration supporting Blackman’s lawsuit against this author, grossly misrepresenting factual claims from his reporting on Premise and its partners.
An exhibit from a July 14 filing reveals that, as a result of Whitestar’s investigation, Blackman hired Jesse R. Binnall — a self-described “America first” lawyer who has represented President Trump, as well as former CIA paramilitary officer Dale Bendler in his recent unregistered foreign agent guilty plea — to threaten a $7.5 million lawsuit against a lawyer for allegedly serving as a tertiary source for this publication. The May 24, 2024 legal threat was also signed by Binnall Law Group counsel John C. Sullivan — former general counsel for Project Veritas — and political operative and lawyer Lanny Davis, who also represented the convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein.
The author has never, through any communications medium, spoken to or interacted with the targeted lawyer. This publication’s actual source for the police report on Blackman’s arrest remains protected to this day, despite more than $30 million in lawsuits regarding a roughly 600-word article.
(Potential sources for this publication should take heed and avoid emailing the author; please directly reach out on Signal from a personal device through the username @poulson.01 — with an ‘o’ not an ‘a’ — with the disappearing messages timer set to one week or less.)
Maury Blackman, Jeffrey C. Tung, and Whitestar Group did not respond to requests for comment.
(Disclosure: The author worked at Google as a research scientist from roughly May 2016 until his resignation in late 2018 but had no experience with the practicalities of search engine optimization prior to this investigation.)
I've been with All-Source since the beginning and remember quite well the brouhaha the author stirred up by exposing Blackman for the vile individual he is. Hitting women is pretty low. Great, great journalism.