Exclusive: Google-backed startup's main income from Indonesian intelligence tracking West Papuans, former employee says
After the collapse of the commercial cellphone location-tracking market, Orbital Insight pivoted into helping Indonesian intelligence track the phones of West Papuans, according to former employee.
2024-05-06: Reuters confirmed this publication's reporting on Orbital's planned acquisition by Privateer, albeit more than six months later, with no with no credit and no discussion of Orbital’s primary funding source becoming Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency.
Note: Orbital Insight’s CEO, Kevin E. O’Brien, directly threatened the author with two lawsuits in an attempt to prevent publication of this article. Mr. O’Brien’s full threat, as well as the author’s reply, can be found in the appendix. The previously unpublished audio and slide deck from Orbital’s September 7th investor presentation are also included, as they provide primary documentation that the Indonesian government became Orbital’s primary revenue source.
The ongoing collapse of Silicon Valley-based and Google-backed data fusion company Orbital Insight has provided a rare look into the marketplace for mass location-tracking surveillance. Despite its public image of fighting deforestation with namebrand companies such as Unilever, Orbital’s primary revenue source has become a wiretapping partnership supporting the Indonesian government, codenamed “Project Alpha”. According to one former employee, Project Alpha involves “full access, full untethered access” to the cellphone locations of Indonesian citizens, particularly those in the country’s politically contested region of West Papua.
Access to bulk cellphone and vehicle location data can generally be categorized as either ‘front-door’ data hoovered up and resold thanks to lax consumer data privacy laws, or as ‘back-door’ wiretapping partnerships with telecommunications companies. And the signing of Orbital’s wiretapping contract with the Indonesian government in mid-February, which became the company’s largest revenue source, coincided with an emergency $5 million fundraising round after the failure of the company’s ‘front-door’ commercial business.
The existence of Project Alpha was uncovered by the author two weeks ago, but this article is the first to reveal that, according to the combination of sources with direct knowledge and publicly available information, Project Alpha is an effort to supply Indonesian security services with a mass surveillance tool combining wiretaps of cellphone location data with commercial satellite imagery provided by Maxar, a major source for Google Maps which was recently acquired by private equity firm Advent International.
A former participant on Project Alpha described the primary customer as Indonesia’s “FBI/CIA kind of mix”, the State Intelligence Agency also known as the BIN. According to the former participant, much of the discussions with the intelligence agency involved “the Papua island and all of the news that happens along that border, [between] Papua and Papua New Guinea.” One recent report on the region, which the Indonesian government has occupied since 1963, included eyewitness accounts of an April 7th Indonesian special forces raid of a West Papuan village which allegedly resulted in four young boys being “beaten and burnt so badly by their captors that they no longer looked human”.
One of the contributing factors behind Orbital taking on the controversial project was undoubtedly the ongoing financial stress caused by the failure of its commercial business. Two former Orbital employees pointed to the degradation of the cellphone location-tracking data market in 2021, which largely resulted from Apple introducing its App Tracking Transparency requirements for iPhone applications, as well as the family safety company Life360 ending the sale of its users’ locations. While former Orbital employees condemned the ethics of Project Alpha, one was proud that their coworkers refused to continue marketing commercial location data after an internal audit concluded that, regardless of which data broker Orbital reached out to, the location tracks appeared to be ‘recycled’ and ‘re-timestamped’ modifications of months-old Life360 data.
Orbital’s decision to end its usage of commercial cellphone location data had significant financial impact, as the practice was central to the company’s primary commercial service, which consisted of various rebrandings of what intelligence communities refer to as “pattern-of-life analysis”. The basic technique is to chart location histories collected from an individual’s cellphone, vehicle, ship, and/or plane on top of satellite imagery to determine which locations they frequently visit, including their workplace, home, or, perhaps, a covert drone base.
Orbital rebranded the tradecraft as “traceability” as part of its commercial products for mapping customer behavior, “Site Intelligence”, and for monitoring logistical connections, “Supply Chain Intelligence”. Perhaps the company’s flagship supply chain pilot was with the British consumer products conglomerate Unilever in 2020, which advertised “traceability analysis of the palm oil supply chain in Sumatra” as a means of combating deforestation and dependence upon child labor. Orbital similarly published its site intelligence analysis of visitors to Disney’s theme parks, and one former employee described Orbital’s “Disney account” as focused on which parks vacationers visited in the same week as Disney World.
(Neither Unilever nor Disney responded to requests for comment for this article. But, as part of Bloomberg’s 2019 report on the location-tracking capabilities built into Disney’s MagicBand bracelets, the news outlet quipped that Disney World had become “the happiest police state on earth”.)
The deterioration of Orbital’s past Life360 location data was fresh in the minds of participants of Project Alpha, with one describing the new program as: “like Life360 but for everybody in the country. And, almost like full access, full untethered access.” As explained by the former participant, the primary goal of Project Alpha was “to use [Orbital’s TerraScope] platform kind of as a data aggregator for all of [Indonesian intelligence’s] sensors, [including] collecting very precise location on anybody in the country.”
When reached for comment on the analogy, as well as the allegedly central role the company’s data previously played in the commercial location-tracking market, Life360 co-founder and CEO Chris Hulls stated:
“We no longer participate in this traditional data brokerage ecosystem, but we have long required our former partners to abide by strict terms that explicitly do not allow data sharing with law enforcement or government intelligence agencies. We condemn the misuse of consumer data in the strongest terms, and have been open about our support for legislation that would protect consumers from government entities using commercially available data to circumvent legal protections in the US or abroad.”
A former Orbital employee also noted that Indonesia’s primary local corporate partner for Project Alpha is the technology integration company Grandrich, which sells “tactical and surveillance solutions” from its headquarters on the 20th floor of the Samsung Hub skyscraper in Singapore’s downtown core. In addition to publicly listing Orbital and Maxar as members of its “alliance”, Grandrich also disclosed its partnership with at least six separate wiretapping solutions providers, including: the American/Israeli Verint Systems, Dubai-based Trovicor Intelligence, Zurich-based NeoSoft, Singapore-based/Israeli-owned Coralco-Tech, Italian defense giant Leonardo, and British aerospace company Cobham.
Neither Grandrich nor Maxar responded to requests for comment, but fellow satellite imagery company Planet Labs strongly denied involvement in Project Alpha. Planet further expressed surprise that Orbital executives had claimed to be incorporating both Planet and Maxar’s data as part of both Alpha and in proposals to the Qatar Armed Forces and the Israel Defense Forces’ Unit 9900 “geospatial team”. According to a Planet spokesperson:
“While Planet has partnered with Orbital Insight in the past, we do not have an active contract with them to provide our data to this [Project Alpha] or any other customer. Further, Planet’s expired contract with Orbital Insight explicitly barred the use of our data to support defense and intelligence. We are actively inquiring into their marketing and use of our data.”
By contrast, a source with direct knowledge stated that Maxar met with Indonesian intelligence to discuss Project Alpha in Jakarta roughly one year ago.
Indonesia’s ongoing 62-year assault on West Papuans
On December 19th of 1961, Indonesia’s first president, the charismatic Sukarno, issued the People’s Triple Command — better known as “Trikora” — to initiate the invasion of West Papua in response to the Melanesian people having first raised their flag two weeks prior. The now-banned flag would come to be known as the “Morning Star” thanks to its vertical red stripe containing the namesake white star.
The nominal primary objective of Trikora was preventing the Dutch government from forming a puppet state in West Papua, but Indonesia was arguably eager to seize the rich mineral resources of a region which viewed itself as a member of the Pacific rather than Southeast Asia. The Grasberg gold and copper mine in central Papua, which is now operated by both the government of Indonesia and the American company Freeport-McMoRan, is perhaps the second largest in the world.
According to a 2012 history of West Papua published by Eben Kirksey, a professor of anthropology at Oxford University, the Indonesian military’s actions after the 1961 invasion were “arguably genocide”. The brutal occupation stretched through the subsequent 62 years, with eyewitness reports coming out just last month of the Indonesian military’s alleged torture of West Papuan highschool students through “heated up machetes and knives” which were then “pressed…against their skin”. As noted in the exposé by Marni Cordell, a veteran reporter for the region, last year United Nations human rights experts called for access to the region as a result of “shocking abuses against Indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people”.
In January of this year, the New York-based nonprofit Committe to Protect Journalists called for investigations into the bombing of Papuan journalist Victor Mambor’s house, which Mambor alleged to have resulted from his coverage of the long-running conflict between Indonesian security forces and the West Papua National Liberation Army. Mambor’s Twitter account had also been hacked and deleted following a post showing Indonesian security forces allegedly abusing a disabled civilian, and the Indonesian Ministry of Communications publicly justified a West Papuan internet blackout in August 2019 as necessary for preventing “mass actions” in the region. According to reporting from Time magazine, the blackout was in response to protests over the mass arrest of Papuan students in the East Javan city of Surabaya. (Jakarta lies on the opposite, west end of the island.)
Allegations that Indonesian intelligence plans to use Project Alpha’s mass surveillance capabilities in West Papua should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the region. And, given the frequency of eyewitness claims that the Indonesian security services are torturing West Papuans, the immense human rights implications of training Orbital’s “pattern-of-life analysis” on activists are obvious.
Partly as a result of Project Alpha’s alleged support for Indonesian security forces surveilling West Papuans, a former participant told me that their “moral compass could not take any more of it”, and so they left their job at Orbital. Beyond Alpha, their primary concern was that Orbital’s products were “vaporware” fueled by U.S. Government money, and they pointedly referred to Mr. O’Brien as “the most unethical person” they had ever worked for.
Beyond O’Brien, the former participant repeatedly assigned responsibility for Alpha to the former head of Orbital’s Asia Pacific business, Mike Kim.
From freeing North Koreans to wiretapping Indonesians,
by way of Palantir
Mike Kim is not someone many would expect to have supported authoritarian surveillance in Asia. Roughly a decade before taking charge of Orbital’s Asia Pacific business, Mr. Kim was giving high-profile television interviews with comedian Jon Stewart and CNN host Anderson Cooper as part of the book tour for his recently released memoir, Escaping North Korea. Stewart opened the 2009 interview by praising Kim’s time helping North Korean refugees traverse the 6000-mile ‘underground railroad’ from Pyongyang to Bangkok as “one of the most incredible stories of…personal bravery.” According to an op-ed Kim later penned, he operated his Christian ministry under cover on the border between China and North Korea as a Taekwondo student eager to learn from North Korean masters.
Mr. Kim told the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show that “The biggest risk to me was to be captured by the Chinese. The Chinese PSB [Public Security Bureau] was looking for me at one point, their FBI.” But Kim asserted that his “biggest fear” was not Chinese intelligence, but rather “North Korean assassins coming in…there are documented cases where they assassinate and have abducted workers like me there at the border.” After a brief pause, Stewart characteristically balanced out the seriousness of Kim’s story with a deadpan joke about even domestic travel giving him diarrhea.
Mike Kim’s fame arguably peaked with the August 2015 announcement that Daniel Dae Kim, a major cast member of the J.J. Abrams television series Lost, would star as Mike Kim in a feature film adaptation of Escaping North Korea produced through Dae Kim’s production company, 3AD. While 3AD did not return a request for comment, the film appears to have never materialized.
Parallel to his six years in the media, Mike Kim had been building up a relationship with an early employee of billionaire Peter Thiel’s controversial data fusion company, Palantir, which would define the rest of his career. Practically the entire arc, including a vague reference to his role setting up Project Alpha, is publicly listed on the ‘about’ page of Mr. Kim’s firm, Gradient Consulting.
According to a prominent endorsement on the site from Trae Stephens, a partner at Mr. Thiel’s Founders Fund:
“When I [Trae Stephens] first met Mike [Kim] while at Deloitte Consulting in 2010, I was at Palantir and we collaborated for him to lead the first Palantir project at Deloitte which was for the U.S. government. Many years later, I introduced him to the founder of a startup and under Mike’s leadership as the Head of APAC, the Asia Pacific region became the leading region for the company.”
Of course, the unnamed company where Mr. Kim became Head of the Asia Pacific region is Orbital Insight, and Mr. Kim joined the company roughly nine months after the announcement of the ill-fated movie adaptation of his memoir. The website for Mr. Kim’s consulting firm also asserts that, while he was the Asia Pacific head of an unnamed company (Orbital), he was responsible for “Delivery of substantial multi-million USD commercial and government deals, including the largest commercial and government deals in company history.” In addition to leading Orbital’s deal with the Project Alpha-adjacent satellite company Thaicom, a former participant of Project Alpha repeatedly asserted to the author that Mr. Kim was the business development lead of the project — against the wishes of some of his staff — before leaving the company earlier this year.
The relationship between Mr. Kim and Mr. Stephens appears to have also influenced Orbital’s fundraising, as the sixth slide of Orbital’s September 7th pitch to SATIF names both Palantir and Anduril, where Mr. Stephens became executive chairman, as Series F fundraising targets.
Gradient Consulting’s website also lists a testimonial from the country manager of Geodesic, the venture capital firm co-founded by John V. Roos, a former U.S. Ambassador to Japan who has boasted of introducing YouTube’s founders to a venture capital firm while they were still working out of a pizza parlor. YouTube was later acquired by Google, the parent company of Orbital’s largest investor, GV.
According to Geodesic’s Japan country manager, Marcus Otsuji, Geodesic “thoroughly enjoyed working with Mike while he led the Japan and APAC business of one of our portfolio companies [Orbital] and were so impressed to watch him close deals across commercial and government”. (Geodesic maintained a $2.5 million investment into Orbital Insight as of June 30, 2022.)
Mike Kim did not respond to repeated requests for comment, either through Gradient Consulting or the North Korea-focused nonprofit he co-founded in 2003 and continues to lead, Crossing Borders.
A consortium of spyware
Verint Systems is likely the most widely known spyware member of Grandrich’s alliance, primarily due to its aborted merger with the infamous Israeli spyware company NSO Group in 2018, but also due to reports from human rights group Amnesty International that Verint sold phone interception equipment to the security services of South Sudan. In analogy with the conclusions reached by the author for Project Alpha, Amnesty’s report stated that the South Sudanese security services could probably only use Verint’s interception equipment “with collaboration from telecommunication service providers".
Though now headquartered in Dubai, Grandrich’s spyware partner Trovicor Intelligence was part of Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia until spinning out in 2009. As reported by Bloomberg in 2011 in relation to Trovicor’s alleged support for Bahraini intelligence torturing activists, Trovicor’s products have allowed “more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and [Skype] calls”, they have been found to “pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones.” The Times of Israel also reported in January that fellow Grandrich alliance member Coralco-Tech, whose website appears to have ceased functioning, “sold equipment that can monitor cellphones to Bangladesh in 2019”. (Alliance member NeoSoft was likewise reported by Privacy International to have supported the notorious Bangladeshi “death squad”, the Rapid Action Battalion, in 2014.)
A further hint at the willful role of telecommunications providers in the largescale Indonesian spying effort comes from the fine print in a slide presented by Orbital Insight CEO Kevin O’Brien to the SATIF investment group on September 7th. As part of explaining potentially millions in future revenue, the slide stated that the Thai Air Force was the “Primary target of [the] Thai Satellite provider & partner, Thaicom”, and that the “Thaicom CEO [Patombob Suwansiri] wants a rinse / repeat of [Project] Alpha”. Both Orbital and Thaicom announced their strategic agreement last year, but documents revealed by the author on Project Alpha were the first to uncover the military and intelligence dimension of the relationship.
Despite a dozen U.S. lawmakers formally requesting that the Biden administration sanction both Trovicor and NSO Group for “selling powerful surveillance technology to authoritarian governments”, Orbital Insight joined Grandrich’s alliance and began meeting with the Indonesian security services in Jakarta roughly one year ago. In the midst of an emergency fundraising round at the beginning of this year which dramatically decreased Orbital’s valuation, the first Project Alpha contract was signed in mid-February for an initial $13.3 million, but with Orbital CEO Kevin O’Brien telling investors that it could increase to as high as $20 million. Mr. O’Brien also told the investors that Project Alpha was expected to launch in the first half of 2024, with his company’s TerraScope platform serving as the central data aggregator for 12 separate vendors.
Beyond Orbital’s secretive work with Indonesian security services, the author also revealed at the beginning of this month that, as part of Orbital’s attempts to stave off an otherwise impending bankruptcy, the company had entered into the due diligence period for a potential merger with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s space company, Privateer. While the company does not provide a public phone number, when the author phoned Privateer’s Chief Marketing Officer, Diana Klochkova, to ask about the status of the company’s merger with Orbital Insight, she simply hung up.
Orbital’s largest shareholder, Google Ventures, similarly did not respond to a request for comment. And while Orbital’s business has degraded to the point of even its public phone number becoming nonfunctional, Google continues to operate perhaps the world’s most valuable trove of precise, wiretappable cellphone location data.
Appendix
Orbital Insight CEO Kevin E. O’Brien emailed a legal threat to the author in an explicit attempt to suppress publication of this article. The threat, which arrived on Wednesday night at 9:53 p.m. Eastern Standard Time after requests for comment had been sent out, copied two partners and two associates from Fenwick & West, the Silicon Valley law firm which claims credit for registering Apple in 1976. Mr. O’Brien further claimed that, should this article be published, additional legal action would be likely from an unnamed investor, which the author understands to be the Monaco-based SATIF Group.
There is an undeniable appeal to the drama of a once-almost-unicorn Silicon Valley surveillance company attempting to legally bully an independent journalist working from the kitchen table of their cramped apartment. But the activities Orbital Insight is trying to hide are far more concerning.
In order to help underline the care in which I have so far taken in my reporting, I am publishing the full hour of audio for the September 7, 2023 investor meeting between Orbital Insight’s executive team and the Monaco-based late-stage venture capital firm SATIF Group. The initial remarks are from SATIF partner Robert Koenig, who names “the entire executive lineup” of Orbital beginning at the 2:55 timestamp, including Founder and Chairman Jimmy Crawford, CEO Kevin O’Brien, Chief Financial Officer Jim Cook, and Chief Technology Officer Matt Falk.
In addition to verbal discussion of Orbital’s secretive surveillance project with the Indonesian government, codenamed “Project Alpha”, the effort is also referenced in slides: 2, 3, 6, 7, and 10.
Careful readers can compare these documents against my past reporting and then consult the following legal threat from Mr. O’Brien.
(The original text’s usage of underlines for emphasis unfortunately could not be one-to-one translated into italics on this platform, as there were: six instances of underlines extending into whitespace beyond the emphasized phrase, two instances of underlines extending into the preceding space, and one instance of an underline extending past the preceding space and into an apostrophe.)
From: Kevin O’Brien <kevin.obrien@orbitalinsight.com>
To: Jack Poulson <jack.poulson@protonmail.com>
CC: Steven Levine <slevine@fenwick.com>, Mark Ostrau <MOstrau@fenwick.com>, Will Black <wblack@fenwick.com>, John Clancy <jclancy@fenwick.com>, James Crawford <jc@orbitalinsight.com>, Jim Cook <jim.cook@orbitalinsight.com>October 11, 2023
Jack Poulson
Re: Orbital Insight, Inc.
Dear Mr. Poulson:
I'm writing to you regarding your repeated and knowingly erroneous reporting about Orbital Insight, your repeated attempts to induce individual disclosure of Company information under confidential NDAs, and your repeated attempts to contact our investors as well as our employees. Concerning our employees, your persistent actions are viewed as a direct form of intentional obstruction of our employees’ ability to perform their duties and responsibilities without the nuisance and interference your inquiries present.
Your repeated characterizations of our involvement with U.S. Government entities are routinely misleading and incorrect. Furthermore, your hypotheses about the status of legacy lease agreements with long-term real estate partners, which were all open source in the first place, only lead one to the conclusion your intent is purely to cause unnecessary negative impact to our employees, their families, as well as our valued clients and investors.
Your actions lead to the inescapable conclusion that you are seeking to harm Orbital Insight and our business.
Accordingly, we insist that you cease publication of knowingly false and misleading statements based on the number of inaccurate statements you have made as well as contacting our employees and investors.
If you do not, we are prepared to seek immediate legal relief for your interference in our company's operations, as well as for the economic damages they have caused. Our legal counsel is Fenwick & West, LLP, copied on this correspondence. Orbital Insight investors, including their outside counsel, have expressed their desire for you to cease these harmful and knowingly misleading activities and let us know that they are prepared to support us in seeking relief from the damage your insinuations and actions have caused. They may be in contact with you separately.
Very truly yours,
Kevin E. O’Brien
Chief Executive Officer
Orbital Insight, Inc.[A tracker image, which the author chose not to load, was included here.]
My full reply, which was sent at 2:26 p.m. EST on Thursday, but which did not receive a response, follows:
From: Jack Poulson <jack.poulson@protonmail.com>
To: Kevin O’Brien <kevin.obrien@orbitalinsight.com>
CC: Steven Levine <slevine@fenwick.com>, Mark Ostrau <MOstrau@fenwick.com>, Will Black <wblack@fenwick.com>, John Clancy <jclancy@fenwick.com>, James Crawford <jc@orbitalinsight.com>, Jim Cook <jim.cook@orbitalinsight.com>Dear Mr. Kevin E. O'Brien:
I am pleased to make your acquaintance and am thankful that you took the time to personally share your concerns with me. I am deeply committed to accuracy and fairness, which has led to me spending a significant amount of time attempting to reach Orbital Insight for comment, especially over the last month.
I have made both my phone number and email available to Orbital as part of my requests -- the latter of which is made apparent by the message I am responding to -- and yet this is the first official message which I have received from your company.
As you may be aware, the main phone line listed by Orbital on its contact page, 650-353-2060, has not been functioning for at least the last month I have attempted to call it on roughly a daily basis, including this morning. Further, all of my requests for comment emailed to Orbital's official press contact, press@orbitalinsight.com, have gone unacknowledged and unanswered, including those sent on September 18, 2023 and September 30, 2023. As such, I am thankful for the opportunity to finally speak with you via a functioning communications channel.
I have numerous questions to ask you regarding my upcoming article on Orbital Insight's data fusion contract with the Indonesian government, but I want to first respond directly to your stated concerns.
Of particular note is your assertion that I am publishing "knowingly false and misleading statements", as I take my commitment to accuracy very seriously. Indeed, what you have referred to as my "persistent actions" are my attempts to report as fairly and accurately as possible despite Orbital's refusals to respond to, or even acknowledge, my numerous attempts to request comment over the last month.
I further regret that, despite the opportunity of this exchange, your letter did not include any specific instances of alleged factual errors in my reporting -- much less any instances of known factual errors -- and instead makes two vague references to my reporting on Orbital's "involvement with U.S. Government entities" and "the state of legacy lease agreements with long-term real estate partners". I am deeply specialized in reporting on U.S. Government procurement and would appreciate any specifics you would be willing to provide on which components of my past reporting you have taken issue with. I would further appreciate if you could share any specific concerns you have had with respect to my reporting on the December 30, 2017 lease agreement which current Chairman, and then CEO, James Crawford, signed with Hudson Palo Alto Square, LLC and then amended on February 26, 2018.
According to page two of the July 20, 2023 "Complaint for Breach of Lease and Damages" with case number 23CV419347 filed in Santa Clara County Court by the attorneys for Hudson Palo Alto Square, Orbital's monthly "Base Rent" was "at the rate of $371,538.01 per month for the period of July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024", which comports with a conservative description of Orbital's rent at its Palo Alto headquarters as roughly $370,000 per month. As a matter of fairness to Orbital due to a colloquial understanding of "Base Rent" as the true rent, I did not stack on the "Additional Rent" charges Hudson Palo Alto Square listed as $76,607.04, which would bring Orbital's base plus additional rent obligations up to $448,145.05 per month. If Orbital feels that the additional monthly rental fees should be included in concise summaries of its monthly rental obligations, I would be happy to issue such a clarification -- though I worry that if I had originally included the "Additional Rent" charge, Orbital's argument would have gone in the other direction. Issues such as this are part of why I have diligently attempted to seek comment from Orbital Insight, both by email and phone.
Out of respect for what I assume to be your busy schedule, I have included screenshots of the relevant portions of the referenced Hudson Palo Alto Square complaint, which has as its Exhibit A the December 30, 2017 lease signed by Mr. Crawford, as well as an Exhibit H which includes the February 26, 2018 lease amendment also signed by Mr. Crawford. The third page of said complaint further alleges that "As a result of Tenant’s failure to pay Rent owed under the Lease, Landlord delivered a 5 Business Day Notice to Pay Rent or Be in Default (“Default Notice”) on January 26, 2023 for the unpaid Rent owed through the date of that notice in the total combined amount of $437,423.56. That Default Notice was delivered pursuant to the terms of the Lease...and continues to exist as that term is defined in the Lease."
(The originals can also be quickly and freely accessed on Santa Clara County Court's public portal, https://traffic.scscourt.org.)
Regarding the new opportunity to get comment from you on my past and upcoming reporting, I have a number of questions:
1) How would you describe Orbital Insight's Project Alpha, which your past presentation to SATIF Group has asserted to be Orbital's primary source of revenue since the ostensible collapse of your company's commercial business? Particularly, who would you describe as the primary client of Project Alpha, which agencies within the Indonesian government does it involve, what are the data sources which Project Alpha fuses, and which other companies are involved at both the systems integration level and as data suppliers?
According to my sources, the primary systems integrator for Project Alpha is Singapore-based Grandrich Corporation Pte Ltd, which has operated out of the 20th floor of the Samsung Hub, and the primary client is an Indonesian intelligence agency, which I understand to be the State Intelligence Agency. A source with direct knowledge of the program told me that the intelligence agency's goal was "to use [Orbital’s] platform kind of as a data aggregator for all of their sensors, [including] collecting very precise locations of anybody in the country." They went on to assert that said data source "is like cellphone app data…but for everybody in the country. And, almost like full access, full untethered access." They went on to tell me that, as part of Orbital's talks with the Indonesian intelligence agency, "There was a lot of discussion around the Papua island and all of the news that happens along that border, [between West] Papua and Papua New Guinea."
To what degree has Project Alpha discussed, or implemented, the incorporation of cellphone location-tracking data on individuals in Indonesia and/or Papua New Guinea? And can you comment on the source of this data, given that Grandrich's public website lists three separate "lawful interception" -- a.k.a. "wiretapping" -- companies as fellow members of its alliance with Orbital, ostensibly for Project Alpha?
My sources also assert that commercial satellite imagery provider Maxar has been an active participant in meetings with Indonesian intelligence in Jakarta, and one can similarly find Maxar publicly listed on Grandrich's partners page.
Likewise, given that you mentioned Planet's involvement in Project Alpha as part of the investor meeting, how would you describe the scope of Orbital's relationship with Planet? And was the company aware of the details of Project Alpha?
And, what relationship, if any, has Orbital had with the surveillance companies Trovicor Intelligence, NeoSoft, Coralco-Tech, and Verint, which are all listed by Grandrich as alliance partners alongside Orbital? And, given your past statement to SATIF that two Orbital employees were working out of Jakarta on Project Alpha, would you still say that this number is correct?
2) During Orbital's September 7, 2023 meeting with SATIF Group, both you and Orbital's Chief Technology Officer, Matt Falk, spent a significant amount of time describing how Project Alpha had become the primary template for Orbital's pitches to governments and their militaries around the world, particularly in Qatar, Singapore, and Thailand. The fifth slide of your presentation to SATIF Group mentioned that the "Thaicom CEO wants a rinse / repeat of Alpha" for a collaboration involving both Orbital and the Thailand Air Force. Thaicom is the satellite communications subsidiary of Thai telecommunications conglomerate Intouch Holdings, which is also the parent company of Thailand's largest mobile phone operator, Advanced Info Service (AIS). What data has Orbital discussed collecting from telecommunications providers as part of Project Alpha, and to what degree has it involved (phone) location data? And what role has so-called "lawful interception" played in this process?
3) The fifth slide of Orbital's September 7 presentation to SATIF additionally mentions that your company has been attempting to sell its services to the militaries of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to the Israel Defense Forces and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. What is the state of these relationships, and would Orbital Insight plan to help any of these governments to integrate phone or vehicle location data -- and, if so, from what sources?
4) What is the current state of Orbital Insight's usage of commercial cellphone and/or vehicle location-tracking data, and which vendors is it acquired from? According to sources with knowledge of the matter, the 2022 commercial telemetry data "supply chain disruption" you mentioned in your presentation to SATIF on September 7th was the result of Orbital's engineers deciding that it would be unethical to sell what they deemed to be 'recycled', and potentially 're-timestamped', months-old cellphone location data acquired from the family safety application Life360. As you are likely aware, Life360 ceased selling the phone location data of its customers to third parties after the practice was exposed by the nonprofit newsroom The Markup.
And two former employees described Orbital's work with Disney, which appears to have involved "mobile device traffic", according to a notebook published by Orbital on "Theme Park Monitoring". My question is which "mobile device" location data sources were used in Orbital's work with Disney, and specifically did it include commercial cellphone location data and/or the data gathered through MagicBands?
5) According to sources with direct knowledge, you threatened your employees at an all-hands meeting late last year with a lawsuit if they ever spoke critically about the company. One former employee told me that they left Orbital because their "moral compass could not take any more of it", partly due to the activities of Project Alpha. The company's software was also described by an employee as "vaporware", and they told me that, in their opinion, Kevin O'Brien is the "most unethical person" they have ever worked for. Obviously these are strong statements, and so I am happy to be able to receive your comment on them.
6) How many of Orbital's employees exited the company in January and February of this year, and what percentage of the company was it? And what were the equivalent numbers for Orbital's Federal business during the same period? According to a source with direct knowledge, roughly half of the total employees were laid off, and only one member of the federal team remained after February, including through voluntary exits. And, according to Orbital's public sector reseller Carahsoft, they have likewise been unable to contact your company over the last few months, and four of the five employee contacts they provided me are for staff who left Orbital earlier this year.
7) Was there a major change in Orbital's relationship with Sequoia Capital in the last year? And what is Orbital's current relationship with GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), which has at least recently been Orbital's largest investor? And how would you describe the history of Orbital's relationship with In-Q-Tel and the U.S. Intelligence Community since In-Q-Tel announced its investment in August 2015, particularly given the remarks from both you and Mr. Crawford to SATIF regarding Orbital's discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency?
8) How would you describe the scope of Orbital Insight's reported December 2019, $1.79 million subcontract under ECS Federal on Project Maven for high-altitude still imagery multi-spectral models?
9) How would you describe the significant reduction in Orbital's valuation since the beginning of this year, especially in context of the frank discussions which were had with SATIF Group regarding this year's emergency bridge loans and the potential bankruptcy of the company? And what is the state of Orbital's merger talks with Privateer?
10) Given Hudson Palo Alto Square LLC's court filings asserting that Orbital has defaulted on its current rental obligations, what is the current state of the lawsuit? Also, what is the state of the related, ostensibly ongoing lawsuit from Orbital's former fourth floor tenant, Databook Labs?
I apologize for what is a lengthy set of questions, but this is the first response which I have received from Orbital despite having sent my first request for comment more than two years ago. Due to me having repeatedly attempted to reach Orbital by phone and/or email regarding all of these questions over the last month, I would appreciate a response to my questions by the end-of-business Eastern Standard Time tomorrow, and I can be immediately reached both by email and by phone at 646.733.6810. Should you need more time to respond, I would be happy to update any publication with your comments when I receive them.
With Sincere Thanks,
Jack Poulson
Twelve minutes and fifty seconds into the audio recording of Orbital Insight’s meeting with SATIF Group on September 7th, CEO Kevin O’Brien remarked, albeit in a different context: “People have asked, you guys have raised a lot of money, what have you actually used it for? This is exactly what we’ve used it for.”
Jack, your reply to O’Brien's threat is priceless. Made my day.
Is there a phone you recommend? Or some general choices like maybe only using cash? Thanks!