Google-affiliated military AI expo cracks down on journalists amid Code Pink disruptions
Critical journalists at former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's military AI expo in DC were repeatedly harassed this week, amidst talks from U.S.-backed dissidents promoting "regime change" in Iran and Cuba.
“Are you looking for flags?” I asked, amidst my backpack being searched by the security staff outside of a talk in D.C. on Wednesday entitled “Battleground AI,” hosted by the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). “Yes!” the security guard laughed, having initiated the new security procedure, despite having confirmed my status as press, to help prevent what would be at least the sixth disruption of the conference by the anti-war group Code Pink and the Palestine-focused group No Tech for Apartheid.
As the last substantive panel during the second annual, three-day militarized artificial intelligence expo of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), security guards had been given new instructions by SCSP chief operating officer Michael Gable roughly thirty minutes prior, as well as discussing specifics of how to tighten security next year, while standing roughly two feet away from the author in line at Ben’s Chili Bowl in the food court of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
Code Pink had managed to sneak numerous protestors on stage, sometimes more than once through different registrations, to raise awareness of mass killings of civilians by the U.S. and Israeli militaries during talks featuring Schmidt himself, former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and former U.S. Congressman Mike Gallagher in his role as head of defense of the military artificial intelligence contractor Palantir. Code Pink and No Tech for Apartheid also published footage on social media of their demonstration in front of Google’s booth regarding the company’s cloud support for the Israeli military, through Project Nimbus.
On Tuesday, three staff from Palantir, including head of strategic engagement Eliano A. Younes and security analyst Taylor Campbell, successfully demanded that security guards remove myself and fellow journalist Max Blumenthal from the main exposition hall for the offense of filming Palantir’s removal of a third journalist, FRANCE 24 correspondent Jessica Le Masurier. Ms. Le Masurier’s offense was doggedly questioning Palantir on camera about its $30 million April contract modification with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dubbed ‘ImmigrationOS,’ after being refused the opportunity at Mr. Younes’s talk earlier that day. Despite public pretenses towards transparency, SCSP insisted that any filming at the event without explicit permission was a violation of the rules of attendance. (Journalist Caroline Haskins, who covered the expo for The Guardian last year, was similarly intimidated by Palantir staff this year.)
After negotiating our way back into the conference by promising to only film with permission, Mr. Blumenthal was permanently ejected roughly an hour later for asking former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin — whose think tank MIND Israel shared a booth at the event with the Israeli embassy — a question about his role in loosening restrictions on the killing of Palestinian civilians. The footage of an attendee aggressively confronting Mr. Blumenthal over his now largely uncontroversial description of the Israeli military’s mass killings of tens of thousands of Gazan women and children as ‘genocide’ was widely shared on social media.
As perhaps the only critical journalist still at the event on Wednesday, SCSP staffers stepped in to newly prevent my presence near the stage of former U.S. national security advisor H. R. McMaster’s keynote, and, in a talk immediately prior, a woman promising to “throw tomatoes” at any protestor pointedly followed me around the room.
“You’re using AI to commit genocide! Free, free Palestine!” stated a lone Code Pink protestor, before two pre-positioned security guards quickly dragged him out of a Wednesday morning panel focused on the strategic AI alliance between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, featuring former U.S. cybersecurity official Anne Neuberger. “I’m scared, because there was no security walking in here, and I’m a visible proud American Jew,” Ms. Neuberger subsequently told the audience.
Despite the conference’s antagonism to critical journalism and opposition to discussions of mass civilian killings by the U.S. and Israeli militaries, a pair of panels featuring the “regime change” advocacy organization World Liberty Congress used a human rights framing to emphasize the necessity of U.S. tech companies partnering with U.S. national security organizations and U.S.-backed dissidents to “control the conversation” regarding U.S. adversaries. “And what we have to lead on is an ability to control the conversation. That’s going to involve the government, companies, corporate America, but also the voices of the dissident community,” stated former USAID deputy administrator Bonnie Glick — whose journalist sister Caroline became international affairs advisor to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February — during a World Liberty Congress panel she moderated on Monday.
“Don’t be allergic of regime change, be allergic of dictators,” stated World Liberty Congress founder and former Voice of America Persian contractor Masih Alinejad later in the panel. According to a leaked U.S. Embassy London cable from 2009, 09LONDON929, Alinejad was a strictly confidential source for the U.S. State Department while working as a journalist for a newspaper run by Iranian politician Mehdi Karroubi.
During the panel, World Liberty Congress Academy director Félix Maradiaga — a former secretary general of Nicaragua’s Ministry of Defense and a trustee of the U.S. Government-backed nonprofit Freedom House — told the audience that the siloes between activism, the private sector, and national security were successfully being broken down. In another panel on Wednesday morning hosted by Maradiaga, his wife, Nicaraguan journalist and World Liberty Congress Bitcoin education lead Berta Valle, advocated that U.S.-aligned activists make use of Bitcoin to evade the Russian government’s foreign agent registration laws. Other participants, including Uriel Epshtein, the CEO of Russian dissident Garry Kasparov’s nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative, discussed ongoing work towards creating AI-powered chatbots to represent their political targets, such as Russian president Vladimir Putin. (Albert Cevallos of the U.S.-funded nonviolent activism group CANVAS warned that there were novel, undiscussed privacy and broader legal issues associated with such AI agents.)
The anti-communist Cuban activist Mario Félix Lleonart similarly told the World Liberty Congress panel that, “I can only assure you one thing, just as my N70 Nokia saved me [through Twitter], with the help of AI, we will overthrow the anachronic [inaudible] dictator of the 20th century, the one that is in Cuba.” Lleonart stated that his anti-Castro colleagues would overcome government restrictions through the use of “satellite connections to start with, apps such as Delta Chat, or digital currencies such as Bitcoin.”
But the unambiguous focus of the conference was mobilizing the artificial intelligence capabilities of the U.S. and its allies against the Chinese Communist Party, including through information operations, such as through the Ambient product of the conference’s primary sponsor, Rhombus Power, which was promoted in dialogue with Philippines secretary of defense Gilberto Teodoro, Jr. on Wednesday morning. The British advertising agency and defense contractor M+C Saatchi Group similarly passed out flyers advertising their capabilities for exposing “state-sponsored criminal syndicates supplying fentanyl precursor and other drug paraphernalia to the global market.”
Rhombus previously led the development of such capabilities for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency through its Sable Spear program, and the author recently exposed the counternarcotics focus of the U.S. Air Force Office of Competitive Activities MORTAL MINT data analytics program. Similarly, the defense contractor arm of the China-focused media company of former New York Times Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza, WireScreen, pitched its products from a booth directly next to the U.S. intelligence community-backed corporate records firm Sayari, a company which the author exposed through a U.S. Special Operations Command leak to secretly collaborate with the Pentagon on offensive information operations. (The AI-based offensive cyber company Dreadnode also had a nearby booth.)
At the end of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies panel on Wednesday in which I was searched for a Palestinian flag, I contested an assertion from retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery that the U.S. had unilaterally disarmed from information operations, citing a public contracting summary of an ongoing, five-year, $500 million ceiling information operations contract between Joint Special Operations Command and General Dynamics Information Technology. (Nevermind the primary sponsor of the event, Rhombus Power, having advertised its ongoing counter-China information operations in a keynote earlier that morning.)
“There’s a difference between spending money on something and doing something, and I’d say the U.S. military is pretty kickass at that. We can spend money on things and produce nothing with ease,” responded Mr. Montgomery, adding that, “I don’t doubt that there is a $500 million contract out there, I would doubt that there is $5 million worth of product out there.” Montgomery further recounted his unsuccessful attempts at conducting covert propaganda against China, “Covert is where we do something — probably the contracts you’re talking about — where we tell the truth about America but you don’t know it’s us.” He continued that, “I tried to do these campaigns when the Chinese were doing island building in the South China Sea. I couldn’t convince our government to pay people to write stories about what a disaster this was to South China Sea fishing and marine life conditions … There will be 300 stories about a U.S. Navy ship clipping three meters of reef off in Hawaii and zero stories at the same time about the Chinese destroying the South China Sea, so we can’t do covert.”
“The final thing is clandestine, it’s not done by the military, it’s done by other people, it’s where we say something that’s not the truth and you hopefully don’t figure out that it’s done by us. And if we’re doing that, we’re doing a terrible job at it,” Montgomery added, before recounting the Soviet Union’s Operation Denver disinformation campaign against the U.S. relationship with the African National Congress. According to reporting from Reuters last year, both the Pentagon and the CIA have run disinformation campaigns against China in recent years, with the Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign in the Philippines being led by General Dynamics IT.
When Code Pink was reached for comment regarding their repeated interruptions of the military artificial intelligence event, organizer Olivia DiNucci stated that one of Code Pink’s goals was “to welcome the people who are newer to the industry, who are looking for jobs, that they don’t need to be committing their lives to research and innovation for death and destruction, but instead for life affirming things and social needs.”
Updated 2025-06-06: Reference to the author’s previous reporting on the MORTAL MINT U.S. military intelligence program was corrected to specify its housing in the U.S. Air Force Office of Competitive Activities.
Maybe we guys should found CODE BLUE. Thank you and Max and Code Pink for your courage.