Gig-work surveillance firm settles case against alleged whistleblower
Lawyers from Premise Data declared on Friday that they have conditionally settled their lawsuit against former employee Alex Pompe, who allegedly exposed the company's covert surveillance.
Update, 2024-02-22: Lawyers for Premise filed a request today for the entire case to be dismissed with prejudice.
The covert gig-work surveillance firm Premise Data has settled its nearly five-year lawsuit against former employee Alex Pompe, according to a notice of partial settlement filed on Friday by lawyers representing Premise. While the notice is clear that “unsettled claims remain pending against several other defendants”, Mr. Pompe was the primary defendant in the original April 2019 complaint. One of the central allegations from the lawsuit was that Mr. Pompe alerted Premise’s flagship client, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as to the conflict between Premise’s humanitarian work and the company’s covert intelligence collection for the U.S. military, which was originally exposed by The Wall Street Journal.
Premise’s global network of hundreds of thousands of data collection contractors, which operates as a sort of boutique Uber-for-informaton-gathering, was secretly repurposed for military intelligence purposes as early as 2018. The surveillance work apparently followed the replacement of Premise’s original CEO, former punk-rock drummer David Soloff, with Delwin “Maury” Blackman, a government technology executive who was then a board member of a company later purchased by the gunshot detection company ShotSpotter / SoundThinking. Premise’s settlement of its longstanding case against Mr. Pompe took place one month after the company’s removal of Mr. Blackman as CEO.
Mr. Blackman’s exit from Premise followed months of bizarre behavior relating to the author’s publication of a San Francisco Police Department incident report which detailed Blackman’s arrest for alleged felony domestic violence after a company Christmas party on December 21, 2021. A pseudonymous account claiming to represent Mr. Blackman, which operated under the name “Christian Erics[s]en”, subsequently attempted to bribe the author to remove the police report and then, after failing, committed perjury through the submission of a fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claim against the document.
The now-settled case against Mr. Pompe was scheduled for trial in Santa Clara County in March.
Interesting that the lawsuit had been going on for years but when Mr Blackman “resigned”, the case is now settling less than a month later. I wonder if the lawsuit was more a personal vendetta by the former CEO and now that he is gone, the new Board is not interested.
Could Premise show that Pompe 'damaged' its relationship with the Gates Foundation? Doesn't sound like it. Do you have any of the settlement details?