Foreign weapons acquirer purchases gig-work polling firm and its covert information warfare subsidiary
The Alexandria-based Culmen International announced its acquisition of the San Francisco-based gig-work firm Premise Data and its covert Texas-based subsidiary Madison Springfield, Inc. this month.
“Founded in 2004, Culmen specializes in the acquisition of foreign weapons that can be sent to the U.S. for analysis,” reported the French news outlet Intelligence Online in 2012. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, the defense and logistics contractor subsequently landed tens of millions of dollars in contracts directly with U.S. Special Operations Command, with public summaries including “foreign weapons and ammunition” and “foreign ammunition,” including linked, armor-piercing incendiary 14.5 mm rounds.
Culmen’s chief strategy officer, Mark Dumas, was also reported to have been an early investor in the cellphone location-tracking data broker X-Mode Social (now Outlogic) and was the head of the Tysons Corner-based federal business division of PlanetRisk during a period in which it was paid roughly $1.5 million by the Southern Poverty Law Center between 2015 and 2017 for a “big data platform and customization.” According to a book on data brokers published last year by the investigative journalist Byron Tau, following the killing of Heather Hyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, “PlanetRisk was able to geofence the statue of Robert E. Lee and see whose phones were present at the infamous torch-lit rally,” and the company was able to “follow those protesters back to their homes around the country.”
A pair of acquisition announcements from Culmen this month provides closure to the multi-year downward spiral of the San Francisco-based gig-work polling and surveillance firm Premise Data, whose intelligence-collection work with U.S. Special Operations Command was revealed in a 2021 investigation by Tau. Premise’s covert, mid-2022 “reverse-triangular merger” with the Texas-based information warfare contractor Madison Springfield, Inc. was exclusively revealed by this publication through the legal filings from three separate lawsuits earlier this month — ten days before Culmen announced its acquisition of Premise, and 23 days before announcing its acquisition of MSI.
Like Premise and Culmen, MSI is also a contractor with U.S. Special Operations Forces, with one such one-year contract between MSI and U.S. Army Special Operations Command in South America being publicly summarized as a “Guyana Ghost Men Assessment.”
Despite being extensively documented in public legal filings by several former executives with direct knowledge, Premise’s mid-2022 acquisition of MSI has been pointedly kept outside of press releases, and Culmen International did not respond to a request for comment on the subject, or regarding whether Culmen’s two recent acquisitions relate to allegations that Premise Data was in the process of negotiating with venture capitalists on how to foreclose due to financial difficulties.
Premise Data’s chief technology officer, Gezhi “Paul” Huang, departed the company in May to become a machine learning software engineer at the social media giant Meta, according to his LinkedIn profile, with chief product officer David Bischof taking over in an acting capacity. (Premise similarly recently took down its leadership page, which previously listed its senior management.)
As revealed through a trio of lawsuits resulting from Premise’s acquisition of Madison Springfield, the company was formed as offshoot of a collaboration between the American information warfare contractor Archimedes Global and its British subcontractor, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), which is generally publicly known as a result of the massive 2018 U.S. political scandal involving its then-American branch, Cambridge Analytica. SCL’s director of operations, Alexis Everington, had helped lead the company’s Middle East influence operations and intelligence collection subcontracts under Archimedes, with chief operating officer Timothy J. Riesen serving as the point man.
Riesen and Everington in 2011 quietly arranged to set up their own operation, originally in the form of Everington registering the United Arab Emirates-based firm International Advisory Services (IAS), but with Riesen ultimately forcing Everington and his new firm back into a subcontracting role with Riesen’s own new company, the Texas-based Madison Springfield, Inc.
The details of the contested relationship between Everington, Riesen, and — ultimately — Premise Data were exposed over roughly the last year through a trio of lawsuits filed by Everington, Riesen, and MSI’s president-turned-whistleblower, Ingrid de la Fuente. Premise Data’s secretive acquisition of MSI in mid-2022 was central to all three lawsuits, especially in the case of Everington being kept in the dark regarding the sale price of MSI, despite owning 25% of the company’s stock.
The financial details of Culmen’s recent acquisition of Premise and MSI have similarly been withheld, and it is unclear if MSI will remain a subsidiary of Premise. According to a recent filing from Everington’s lawsuit against Riesen in Florida, the two executives remained at “an impasse” as of August 11, one day before the public announcement of Culmen’s acquisition of Premise.
According to a job posting on ClearanceJobs.net on Monday for “a Data Engineer to support Culmen’s Premise Data Platform,” the new position will entail “building data pipelines, creating data quality checks, devising data marts that house insights and trends from the data, and developing back-end systems or applications to build a robust data platform with an opportunity to integrate LLMs into data pipelines.”
In addition to the lawsuits between Premise, MSI, and IAS, this publication was itself drawn into Premise Data’s multi-year lawsuit against an alleged former Premise whistleblower, Alex Pompe, who, like Mr. Huang, subsequently moved to Meta. After uncovering the felony domestic violence arrest of Premise Data’s then-CEO Maury Blackman in December 2021 — six months before the company’s secretive acquisition of MSI — the company’s general counsel hired the private investigation firm Whitestar Group to attempt to unmask this publication’s sources and filed six discovery demands for all communications with this publication within the lawsuit.
The author was subjected to a $25 million Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) from Blackman — originally as a “John Doe” — which ultimately resulted in the fired executive being ordered to pay more than $411,000 in lawyers’ fees. An exploit allowing third parties to silently delist journalism from Google Search results was also found to have been used to suppress this publication’s reporting on the subject.
Culmen International’s firesale acquisition of Premise Data’s surveillance network — whose intelligence contracts were acknowledged by Blackman in a court declaration to place the company’s gig-workers at risk — is a fitting bookend to Premise and Blackman’s multi-year intimidation campaign against this publication’s journalism.
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