Mai Tais, More Eyes, and Mercenaries
How a crowdsourcing project rooted in humanitarian aid evolved into a tactical information warfare network buying phone-tracking data from execs who profited from the training of Khashoggi's killers.
[May 12, 2023, 2:00pm ET] After the publication of this article, Flashpoint scrubbed at least two of the posts on its website describing their commercial surveillance of protestors. The article was updated to link to the Wayback machine caches that the author proactively saved.
[January 22, 2024] A note was added regarding the attempt to reach Todd Huffman prior to publication.
Largely as a result of its iconic Tiki Bar, The Tajmahal Guest House in Jalalabad, Afghanistan became the standard set piece for the efforts of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) during the Global War on Terror. According to a blog post from one of the bar’s former owners, "The Taj Tiki Bar has been featured in 3 thriller novels, 2 non fiction books, several magazines and websites and ABC news.”
Tech Inquiry is revealing the history of how digital-era human intelligence techniques in current use by U.S. Special Operations Forces were conceived at ‘The Taj’ as part of DARPA’s “More Eyes” crowdsourcing program and then transferred into a company run by one of the officials behind the effort. Two months after co-authoring a report on the More Eyes program, he would leave DARPA and begin pitching his company as a successor.
Beyond publishing said report and pitch documents, we are also publishing a final report submitted to the Department of Defense on the experiment at The Taj and a contract detailing how 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) is using the techniques developed in More Eyes for “tactical information warfare”.
And we are revealing that “open source intelligence” subcontractors in the ongoing information warfare operations include a firm which helps corporations infiltrate and surveil “anti-pollution” protestors, as well as a firm tied to the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (Further, we are revealing that these two subcontractors have integrated their software together.)
The core of the ongoing tactical information warfare operations is the Pulse platform of Two Six Technologies — originally owned by former DARPA official Ryan Paterson through the preceding company IST Research— and the subcontractors are respectively Flashpoint and Creative Radicals. Paterson is currently the President of Unplugged, a controversial secure phone company infamously promoted by billionaire Erik Prince.
Prince was the founder of the private security contracting firm Blackwater, whose successor merged with a competitor once chaired by the former CEO of Creative Radicals, former Delta Force operative Lee Van Arsdale. Van Arsdale and Cerberus Capital Managing Directors Louis Bremer and Paul H. Miller have led the boards of both Creative Radicals and Tier 1 Group, the latter of which reportedly trained the Saudi operatives in the Rapid Intervention Force which assassinated Khashoggi under the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Further, we are revealing that IST has sold “mobile geolocation data” to U.S. Special Forces through their ‘Pulse Focus’ product, as well as the names of two current officials within the Biden administration who were previously employed or funded by IST Research.
“All Counterinsurgency is Local”
A decade before his public oath to the conspiracy theory QAnon, pardoned former National Security Advisor Michael Thomas Flynn took the unusual step of releasing a military intelligence directive as a public report through a national security think tank which was particularly influential within the Obama administration — the Center for a New American Security.
Co-authored in January 2010 with Matthew Pottinger — a former journalist who later resigned as Trump’s deputy national security advisor after the January 6th riot — Flynn’s ‘Fixing Intel’ report hammered in the long-standing failures resulting from the tendency of intelligence analysts to focus on lethal targeting analysis at the expense of understanding basic logistical and political context. As part of his reorientation of intelligence collection priorities, Flynn centered his analysis around the categorization of intelligence collection in Afghanistan as either:
Red: intelligence focused on enemy insurgents, such as that collected from drone surveillance or classified signals or human intelligence,
Green: intelligence on security forces or civilian officials from the host government, or
White: intelligence relating to civilian populations, organizations, and infrastructure, typically from unclassified sources.1
‘Fixing Intel’ would also indirectly help kickstart an industry of open-source intelligence contractors, demanding that:
“[Analysts] must embrace open-source, population-centric information as the lifeblood of their analytical work…The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché….“Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.””2
Flynn underscored the failings of traditional “top-down” analysis — “Analysts’ Cold War habit of sitting back and waiting for information to fall into their laps does not work in today’s warfare and must end.” — and instead encouraged a willingness to manually collect information in a manner similar to a journalist. The directive further appealed to the manner in which journalists are assigned beats in order to re-orient intelligence assignments away from “vertical slices” such as governance towards geographic focuses.
In a candid example of success by the Fifth Marine Regiment in exploiting “white” information to subvert the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, the report stated:
“In the earliest days of the operation, many…questions dealt with basic logistical matters, such as the location and conditions of roads, bridges, mosques, markets, wells, and other key terrain. Once these were answered, however, the focus shifted to local residents and their perceptions. What do locals think about the insurgents? Do they feel safer or less safe with us around? What disputes exist between villages or tribes? As the picture sharpened, the focus honed in on identifying what the battalion called “anchor points” — local personalities and local grievances that, if skillfully exploited, could drive a wedge between insurgents and the greater population. In other words, anchor points represented the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities.”
The challenge for the pivot of counterinsurgency intelligence collection was then how to develop the civilian source networks necessary for “white” and “green” information to flow into analyst hands — so that further “anchor points” could be discovered.
Due to the protections granted to humanitarian organizations in conflict zones, their collaborations with militaries are inherently sensitive. Nevertheless, in 1996, the current president of the influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass, penned an op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that the United States should roll back any protections against the Central Intelligence Agency using Peace Corps, religious, and journalistic organizations as cover for its operations.
Despite immediate pushback from the Peace Corps — via a reply in The Washington Post entitled “Don’t Spook the Peace Corps” — JSOC’s SEAL Team Six would exploit humanitarian protections on July 10, 1997 by posing as Red Cross personnel during its capture of Milan Kovačević in Bosnia.3
Despite the tensions inherent in exploiting non-governmental organizations for intelligence collection — which were further exacerbated by Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan circa 2004 — one of the primary pilot projects for the new era of “white” intelligence was closely built on top of the social networks established by the humanitarian organization Rotary International and its closely affiliated Sister City program between San Diego, California and Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
The keys to defense contractors mitigating civilian concerns would be the framing of the information collection in terms of “crowdsourcing” and the Burning Man ethos. (Free-flowing alcohol and internet access also played a major role.)
Synergy Strike Force and Sister Cities
Dr. Dave Warner is perhaps the most fascinating contributor to counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. A former Army drill sergeant turned MD PhD, Warner first rose to prominence in the ‘90s as a result of his work on virtual reality therapy for the disabled — even being profiled by Peter Jennings. But the playful personality which came to define Warner’s later work was more apparent in an interview with CNN centered around the Center for Really Neat Research, which Warner ran out of a refurbished fraternity house in Syracuse, New York.
Partly as a result of the attention raised by the Center’s work on virtual reality, and partly due to the dearth of funding for his work supporting the disabled, Warner was put in touch with DARPA through mutual acquaintances. As a result, Warner won a series of subcontracts developing prototypes such as a “Wearable Air Ground Station” — essentially a virtual reality system complete with a glove for piloting drones. Continuing under the same legal entity which housed his virtual reality work with the disabled — MindTel, LLC — Warner would further pivot into disaster-response efforts and form a volunteer-led organization for “civil-military medical operations” known as the “Synergy Strike Force”.4
In response to problems seen with humanitarian responses to refugees from Kosovo, Timor, and Haiti, the first major operation of the Synergy Strike Force took place in June 2000 near a simulated refugee camp on Hawaii’s Big Island, a couple miles south of Waimea, just west of Highway 190. The experiment, known as Strong Angel, was an offshoot of the biennial international naval exercise known as RIMPAC and tested the potential benefits of a medical operations center which was open to both civilians and the military.
The Strong Angel “shadow” exercise in civil-military cooperation underneath RIMPAC 2000 would serve as the template for Warner’s work in Afghanistan. And a variant of the logo Warner designed for Strong Angel — a globe floating in front of the silhouette of an angel — would be adapted for the Synergy Strike Force.5
In the subsequent years, the Synergy Strike Force participated in shadow operations underneath the three consecutive Burning Mans starting in 2002, Super Bowl 2003, and the first DARPA Grand Challenge in March 2004. But the primary turning point was the November 28, 2005 signing of Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, which elevated civil-military cooperation in “stability operations” — “activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to maintain order in States and regions” — to the same priority level as combat operations.
Thanks to the existence of a Sister City Program between San Diego, California and Jalalabad run by members of the La Jolla Rotary Club since 2002, Warner was able to join Rotarians Steve Brown and Fary Moini on one of their assessment missions in Jalalabad in Spring 2006. With the support of Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Network and Information Integration Linton Wells II, the idea was for Warner to scout out a location where the Sister City program could serve as a “neutral institutional platform” for the Synergy Strike Force to seed its social networks for “white” information collection.6
Partly due to the Rotary Club having two ongoing programs operating under permission of the Taliban (Afghan Youth Connect and Teaching English Through Technology), one of the delicate issues remains whether Synergy Strike Force had any financial relationship with the U.S. military. Despite being primarily volunteer led, the team was sponsored by Warner’s MindTel, which was in turn funded by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and by DARPA through a subcontract underneath intelligence contractor ManTech.
But Warner found that he learned more useful information in one night of informal conversations at the bar of a guest house operated by Australian contractors with the United Nations than he had from a week of formal meetings. And so the next year Warner would partner with former Marine turned security contractor Tim Lynch to take over the now infamous Tajmahal Guest House from its previous UN occupants. And Warner would start his now-famous “Beer for Data” program there.
‘The Taj’
While recounting his difficulties reintegrating after his time in Afghanistan running The Taj guest house, Tim Lynch’s voice became audibly emotional. After the manager of the guest house, Mehrab Saraj, was murdered by the Taliban on August 11, 2012, Lynch and other Americans were forced to abandon the compound due to its bar and its swimming pool, which had both frequently been full of Western women.7
“I think a guy from WIRED came by and took pictures of the old bar and abandoned pool in 2012 and put ‘em up. Yea. Make you cry…I don’t like talking about it much, but I was homeless for like six months. I was fixin’ to walk across the country because I didn’t want to tell anybody I was homeless. I wanted to tell them I was walking across the country.”
As part of his interview with military publication Stars and Stripes, Lynch further recounted fond memories of his early days in Jalalabad at The Taj, where he ran a prominent blog, freerangeinternational.com, on his experiences contracting near the border with Pakistan.
Much of the initial publicity around The Taj, as well as Lynch’s enthusiasm, would center around its May 2008 installation of a “fabrication laboratory” — essentially a hacker space — which was run by a long-time Lockheed Martin engineer under MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms using funding from the National Science Foundation.
According to a segment of Lynch’s interview with Stars and Stripes — which Warner at least partially disputes — the lab’s internet access was also distributed to local schools and hospitals:
“DARPA funded the fat pipe internet that ran all of the equipment in the MIT Fab Lab that was shot out to the teaching hospital, Nangahar University, the local schools. That fat pipe internet came through…an expeditionary GATR ball…its like a gigantic green beach ball with a microwave antenna that’s pointed up. So they put a proxy server in, which they of course looked at…So the girls go down to the proxy server and log in…’Wanna see what everybody’s lookin’ at?’ Porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn…Then you do the same when you lit up Nangarhar University. Jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad. Holy smokes, you know, it took weeks before anybody at that teaching hospital was looking for anything relating to medicine on that thing.”
(Warner asserts that the GATR ball was not funded by DARPA, whose involvement it predates, but rather a separate U.S. Government agency primarily involved in lethal targeting which he was not at liberty to name. He stated that the sensitivity arose due to the creative manner in which government bureaucracy was overcome in order to acquire funds for hardware not used for lethal purposes.)
Todd Huffman had been volunteering with the Synergy Strike Force in the United States since 2007 and, through his ties to both the network of MIT students involved in the Fab Labs and with longtime participants in Burning Man, Huffman remotely helped with the installation of The Taj’s Fab Lab. According to Warner, Huffman’s associates “were core burners and I had burned with them a few times…so I trusted that they could handle the [austere] environments of [Jalalabad] and not have meltdowns....Burning Man was a great place to stress test tech and people before deployment to disaster zones.”
As part of a partnership between USAID, Google, and the Synergy Strike Force, Huffman also helped with the deployment of the crowdsourced mapping platform Ushahidi alongside the humanitarian messaging service FrontlineSMS as part of a monitoring effort for Afghanistan’s 2009 election called Alive in Afghanistan. Huffman then used similar technologies for the humanitarian response to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.8
Beyond his work with the Synergy Strike Force, in 2010 Huffman was also Chief Scientist of Sofcoast, which was founded by former Navy SEAL John Surmount to produce affordable helium surveillance aerostats. Surmount had deployed in Afghanistan in 2002 as part of Task Force K-BAR and then later helped lead Naval Special Warfare Command’s drone program.9
In response to a March 2010 request from USAID for DARPA to develop better techniques for “white” data collection, both Huffman and the Deputy Director of DARPA’s Advanced Execution Office, Ryan Paterson, embarked upon a roughly year-and-a-half-long effort for piloting crowdsourced — or “white” — intelligence gathering. And after its conclusion in late 2011, the effort continued through a company Paterson had founded in 2008, and Huffman became its Chief Crowdsourcing Architect.10
The author was unable to reach Mr. Huffman for comment before publication of this article. A detailed request was sent to the author’s best guess for an email address at E11 Bio, but the author was informed in late January 2024 of the correct handle, despite the initial email not bouncing. Mr. Huffman strongly objected to the manner in which the original subtitle of the article alluded to Tier 1 Group’s training of the Saudi operatives who killed Khashoggi. While Mr. Huffman did not dispute that Tier 1 trained Khashoggi’s assassins, that Creative Radicals and Tier 1 have been led by three of the same Cerberus-affiliated executives — Bremer, Miller, and Van Arsdale — or that Creative Radicals has sold its services to Two Six as part of U.S. Special Operations Forces deploying the Pulse platform, he objected to Tier 1’s training of the assassins being succinctly described as linked to the information warfare network led by Two Six.
More Eyes and the beginnings of Pulse
Ryan Paterson is an applied mathematician who spent 12 years in the Marine Corps, including as a Science & Technology Analyst. After nearly three years as a DARPA Program Manager and then a brief stint at British defense contractor BAE Systems, Paterson founded a company called Information Science Technology Research — legally IST Research, LLC — on March 19, 2008. IST would initially support the Pentagon’s “Federated Nodes” intelligence and surveillance sharing effort within the Counter-IED Operations Center of the Pentagon program then known as the Joint IED Defeat Organization.
(Paterson did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
While IST Research was financially ‘hanging on by the skin of its teeth’, Paterson rejoined DARPA as the number two in their Adaptive Execution Office the same month that Flynn publicly released his ‘Fixing Intel’ directive. According to a blog post Paterson published a decade later, the USAID employee that picked him up at the airport in Kabul on his first arrival was Neilesh Shelat, who later spend the bulk of 2020 as a Director of IST before reaching his current position as Deputy Director of USAID’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization.11
During Paterson’s second stint at DARPA starting in 2010, IST received a small piece of a $30 billion FBI IT contract called “IT Triple S” through its partnership with the predecessor to a company which ultimately merged into Jacobs Engineering.1213 (And IST would begin an anti-trafficking relationship with the FBI four years later, in parternship with DARPA.)
In sync with Flynn’s critique of an over-reliance on “red” intelligence gathering for counter-IED efforts, Paterson worked alongside Huffman and several other MindTel contractors on numerous forms of “white” intelligence gathering techniques. (Paterson credits the inspiration for the effort to his collaboration with Huffman at The Taj. But Warner insists that, despite MindTel’s close involvement, Synergy Strike Force never technically took part in More Eyes.)
In a previously unpublished May 2011 report entitled ‘Getting “More Eyes” in Afghanistan’ — which Paterson co-authored with Huffman and two others — he detailed how the Ushahidi and SMS crowdsourcing techniques previously used in Haiti could be applied to local humanitarian efforts in order to aid U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. (The contents of Paterson’s whitepaper were first reported in Weinberger’s book, The Imagineers of War.)
The most successful pilot would be the ‘ConnectJalalabad’ program, which “collected over 12,000 SMS messages” through a partnership with the nearby non-profit radio station, SAFA FM. But the program also piloted a data collection program with Nangarhar province midwives and agricultural initiatives, as well as integrated with a USAID database run by a now disgraced contractor and tasked local citizens to “passively observe and report” information to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
A separate More Eyes contractor — which has had a unique relationship with Google adapting Google Earth for use by U.S. Special Operations Forces — publicly reported that crowdsourcing techniques were a “logical extension” of traditional “all source intelligence” and that “intercepting cellular calls” was “just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done through cooperative techniques such as crowdsourcing”.14
During roughly the same time period as the first year of More Eyes, the transparency organization WikiLeaks published numerous leaked documents which deeply embarrassed the U.S. government, such as: the “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. Apache helicopter executing two Reuters journalists (April 2010), the “Afghan War Logs” (July 2010), the “Iraq War Logs” (October 2010), and the first 250,000 cables of what would make up “Cablegate” (November 2010). As a result, a report published by the Defense Science Board in February 2011 on counterinsurgency intelligence collection lamented that “The need for information sharing is challenged by recent experience with information releases by WikiLeaks.” (The eventual U.S. response would be to continuously surveil both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his journalistic visitors, though the possibility of assassinating him within London was discussed at the highest levels of the CIA.)
Nevertheless, as detailed in a separate September 30, 2011 update document on More Eyes, three contractors with MindTel went on to collaborate with the 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division on a Psychological Operation (PSYOP). Eight separate Radio-in-a-Box (RIAB) locations near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan were chosen, and open-ended questions such as “what is the biggest threat to your village?” were broadcast to Afghan citizens twice a day, along with a phone number for answering. An obvious potential upside to developing source networks near the border with Pakistan would be increased knowledge about insurgents crossing over into Afghanistan.
At the end of his report, Paterson recommended that DARPA “Transition More Eyes to an organization that can logically employ its capabilities”. Two months later, Paterson left DARPA, and in a previously unpublished flyer dated September 2012, his company described in detail how it had expanded upon the techniques its members pioneered in More Eyes and how they were needed by ongoing USAID and DARPA programs. (Paterson would later refer to this as using “the full spectrum of the information environment.”)
By May 2012, IST had advertised its win of a contract with the Combined Joint Psychological Operations Task Force-Afghanistan (CJPOTF-A) whose goal was “a platform to deliver tailored messages to target audiences via SMS text messaging…to generate data about local populations, attitudes and views”, including producing “heat maps of the local populace” and tracking coverage of “CJPOTF billboards, magazines, [Rapport Building Items] and radio messages”.
And by December, IST had won a position on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “Solutions for Intelligence Analysis II” contract — or SIA II — which Lockheed Martin described as “provid[ing] [DIA] personnel with the information they need, when they need it”.
One of the core technologies was an EnvayaSMS text-messaging gateway — a permissively-licensed open-source package which has since been succeeded by Telerivet — and IST's flyer noted its deployment of gateways in both Afghanistan and Colombia. The flyer would also advertise the usage of IST’s gateways in South America by SOUTHCOM’s Military Information Support Teams (MIST), which historically operated out of the U.S. embassy in Bogota and, since 9/11, focused on counter narco-terrorism.15
The open-ended question approach of the More Eyes Radio-in-a-Box psychological operation and the earlier ConnectJalalabad pilot serves as useful templates for IST’s approach. But, instead of limiting broadcasts to radio stations, IST expanded into print media and social media such as Facebook. And instead of limiting responses to phone calls and text messages, they would also intake directly from Facebook and online surveys.
In many respects, IST was following through in Flynn’s recommendation that intelligence analysts conduct their influence operations from the perspective of a political campaign. Just as campaigns had expanded to social media, so had information warfare. But rather than simply attempting to win a vote, the open-ended questions would also be used to develop informant networks and map the ‘human terrain’.
Years later, Paterson publicly explained that, depending upon the sensitivity of conversations, IST would use different communication mediums. And when sensitivity was at its highest, IST used the end-to-end encrypted messaging application Signal. Paterson also noted that:
“some of our [larger] campaigns get shut down really quickly, because, from WhatsApp’s perspective, it looks like spam…”
Kony 2012 and Eeben Barlow
Two years before the nonprofit Invisible Children released its viral video on the the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony — known as Kony 2012 — it was helping to organize a contract between the infamous South African mercenary Eeben Barlow and Bridgeway Foundation, the nonprofit arm of a Texas hedge fund.
Kony 2012 would go on to receive more than 103 million views on YouTube alone, and its creator, James Russell, suffered a prominent public meltdown.
As detailed in an exposé by David Guavey Herbert in Foreign Policy, Invisible Children co-founder Laren Poole traveled with the CEO of Bridgeway to Kampala to meet with a Ugandan general and help finalize Bridgeway’s deal with STTEP International, Barlow’s then company. Bridgeway also provided Invisible Children $135,000 to help set up a “village-to-village warning system” which turned into an intelligence collection system for the Uganda People’s Defense Forces. The nonprofit would go on to “supply civilians with high-frequency radios to track rebel movements across a 61,000-square-mile expanse of Congo and the Central African Republic”.
Herbert would further report that Invisible Children’s director of programs met frequently with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) leaders in both Dungu and Stuttgart, as well as produced ‘come home’ propaganda leaflets for AFRICOM which were dropped over Obo between 2011 and 2014. And, according to some military advisors based in the Central African Republic, Invisible Children’s early-warning network was providing more than 70 percent of their intelligence on Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
Due to struggles in fundraising, Invisible Children underwent a significant downsizing of its U.S. operations in 2014, though the organization asserts that its Central African programs were mostly preserved. The next year, Ryan Paterson publicly boasted that the deployment of Pulse in Uganda led to “contact” with “numerous populations in cities within Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic”.
Paterson went on:
“The purpose of our mission in these countries is to understand and identify the scope of the problems associated with the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony. The LRA gained international media coverage in 2012 through Invisible Children’s public information campaign which drew global attention to the atrocities being committed by the LRA, including the violent conscription of child soldiers.”
While Tech Inquiry is not releasing the former employee’s name, a public LinkedIn profile ostensibly documents the April 2018 movement of an Obo-based Regional Program Manager at Invisible Children into a position as Regional Program Coordinator for IST Research focused on the Central African Republic.
(Invisible Children did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
Memex and the Open Data Threat
On the second Sunday in February 2015, 60 Minutes published a soft-ball overview of DARPA’s Memex project, which focused on building investigatory software and techniques for combatting both ISIS and human trafficking. The name ‘Memex’ was an homage to a 1945 essay from Vannevar Bush which influenced the creation of the world wide web, and the team’s pitch was that their search engine was better than Google’s because it could also monitor the ‘dark web’ — i.e., Tor hidden services. But more balanced reporting from Slate would emphasize that one of the project’s primary investigatory techniques was geolocating internet users.
The head of Memex at the time of the 60 Minutes program, Chris White, had received less than favorable press coverage over his past work on a ‘computational counterinsurgency’ sibling project to More Eyes known as Nexus 7. While More Eyes had concentrated on manual relationship-building — whether through partnerships with radio stations, midwives, or Army PSYOP units — Nexus 7 got much of its data directly from the National Security Agency’s intercepts.
Nexus 7’s close collaboration with the NSA echoed the agency’s previous quiet takeover of DARPA’s controversial Total Information Awareness program. Perhaps to preempt similar critique, the Memex program was preemptively endorsed by the Obama administration in May 2014 as a careful balance between law enforcement and civil liberties in a document which also touted Nexus 7 as a major success of ‘Big Data’ analysis.
In a July 2011 exclusive in WIRED, one of White’s collaborators from Kabul working on Nexus 7 the previous summer was quoted saying “This guy doesn’t know anything” and “Couldn’t define a goal. Couldn’t say what cooperation means, what data sharing means. He artfully weaseled his way out of everything.” Another analyst dismissed the entire program: “There's no such thing as Nexus 7 data. There's no Nexus 7 analytics. No computing. No cloud; just five dudes with laptops.”16
One of the contractors which began working on Memex in September 2014 was IST Research, which would receive roughly $7.8 million from the project by the end of 2017. And the CEO of IST, Ryan Paterson, was in the 60 Minutes spotlight alongside White.
(Disclosure: The author of this piece was in 2014 a new assistant professor working next door to Memex, then from Georgia Tech and later from Stanford, on a less controversial program also run by White — an open source data analytics program known as XDATA.)
IST used its spotlight from Memex to advertise the further deployment of its SMS gateways in Iraq and Syria. And reporters explained IST’s informant development techniques with the euphemism that “Distributing devices helps IST ask questions to trusted individuals and find out what is happening on the ground during military and other crises.”
Later blog posts from Paterson promoted Pulse’s “anonymous, text-message-based tip line[s]” for collecting “specific, actionable intelligence” and asserted Pulse was “unique in its ability to gather information from eager sources that have no other outlet for sharing what they know.”
IST’s work on Memex was also funding the technology think tank Data & Society, which had recently been founded by a Microsoft researcher — and fellow burner — using money provided by Microsoft. IST’s Memex funding came in through Mark Latonero, who was then head of Data & Society’s Data & Human Rights team.17
In a statement emailed to Tech Inquiry, Data & Society confirmed its funding from Memex through Latonero and stated that “The subcontract from IST Research LLC ran from September 15, 2014 for one year through September 2015…by 2016, Data & Society made the decision not to take contract work going forward. Government funding since then has come from the National Science Foundation.”
But much less attention was paid to a nearly million-dollar DARPA contract which IST worked on roughly parallel to its time on Memex. Originally designed to detect accidental U.S. disclosure of sensitive national security information through social media, IST’s “Open Data Threat” would pivot into building an all-source intelligence fusion platform which resembled an anti-trafficking analogue of Nexus 7. And its data sources ranged from billions of geotagged tweets (obtained through Gnip), to Facebook posts, to satellite imagery from companies such as Maxar and Planet. The ongoing product of this data fusion platform would be daily intelligence reports on ISIS.18
In 2015, Chris White left his position as head of Memex and XDATA to become a General Manager at Microsoft, which Nexus 7 creator Peter Lee had joined five years earlier. Fellow Memex shepherd Dan Kaufman similarly moved to Google in 2015.19
On December 1, 2016, IST Research announced its acquisition of the Y Combinator backed anti-trafficking startup Rescue Forensics with the promise of extending its Pulse platform “to comprehensively pursue myriad human security problems”, “specifically transnational crime and global extremist terrorism”.20
IST’s Principal Investigator for Memex, Emily Wyatt, left the company circa April 2017 and then picked the Memex effort back up in 2018 as the Co-Chair of the TellFinder Alliance, which is led by Uncharted Software and the New York District Attorney. TellFinder became the official torchbearer of the Memex technology, and it would become public that Paterson and IST Research’s close collaboration with the FBI during Memex led to more than a dozen “FBI-led sting operations”, two indictments from a federal grand jury, and the seizure of SupermatchEscort.com.
A final report from Carnegie Mellon’s work on Memex — which included an AI system for approximately geolocating and running facial search on photos — would note its “hands-on support of intelligence-gathering and sting operations, such as those during [Super Bowl 2017 in Houston]”. These sting operations would be performed in close collaboration with Marinus Analytics, a spin-out of Carnegie Mellon which produces the popular Traffic Jam counter-human trafficking software.21
Fellow Memex contractor Giant Oak, whose CEO Gary M. Shiffman had previously worked on Nexus 7 and as chief of staff of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, would apply the same social media surveillance techniques used on Memex to win contracts surveilling immigrants for ICE — under the administrations of Obama, Trump, and Biden.22
As of February of this year, IST’s Memex subcontractor, Mark Latonero, became Deputy Director of the Biden White House’s National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office — the home of ai.gov. The office was launched at the end of the Trump administration and “is charged with overseeing and implementing the United States national AI strategy and will serve as the central hub for…AI research and policymaking across the government, as well as with private sector, academia, and other stakeholders.”
Towards the end of IST’s work on Memex, the company received interesting “Phase I” and “Phase II” Small Business Innovation Research awards (SBIRs) which formally contributed towards their 2020 receipt of a “Phase III” tactical information warfare contract with Joint Special Operations Command and 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne).
The first was a roughly $150,000 feasibility study with U.S. Special Operations Command on a tool to monitor the accidental disclosure of operational security information on social media, the Managing Operations Security Tool (MOST). It promised “tactics, techniques and tools to conduct counter campaigns that [would] obfuscate these open data vulnerabilities”.
The second was a direct-to-Phase-II award of $994,000 under DARPA’s Next Generation Social Science program (NGS2) for a proposal entitled “Pulse for Social Science”, or PS2. IST promised to “revolutionize social science” by “enabl[ing] researchers to access large particpant [sic] samples around the world (including remote areas and conflict zones), to present experimental stimuli and collect behavioral data in sufficient volume to support diverse modeling”.
The motivation was that “U.S. national security interests increasingly rely on strategies and tactics that require a deep and accurate understanding of human behavior across the full range of contexts and cultures found across the globe.”
IST’s Chief Scientist during the early months of its Pulse for Social Science effort, Victoria Romero, soon transitioned to Chief Behavioral Scientist at defense and intelligence contractor CACI International. CACI is perhaps still best known for its role in the 2004 Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which led to then CACI CEO J. Phillip London publishing a book in 2008 designed to refute the allegations.
When reached for comment on her work at IST, Romero noted that “In my current role at CACI, company policy prohibits me from participating in most interviews.” However, in a lengthy interview Romero conducted on “The Psychology of Influence and Persuasion” in 2020, she explained her background as a psychology professor — where her advisor criticized her as a “dilettante” — before transitioning into marketing, where she was then recruited into counterinsurgency. As retold by Romero:
“At that time, which was about 2008, there was a growing intersection between marketing and national security. There was a realization that persuasion and influence and, what at the time was called ‘the war for hearts and minds’, was as important as building weapons for the battlefield. And national security experts were beginning to reach out to the marketing world.”
Disinformation and the Night Vision Directorate
On the second day of 2018, Ryan Paterson published excerpts from a semi-private paper produced by two employees of his company, entitled “Social Chat at Scale: Countering the Next Wave of Disinformation Campaigns”. The basic argument was that the cat-and-mouse game between content moderators and information operators was incentivizing nations to shift from broadcast media such as Facebook and Twitter into “one-to-one and one-to-few” messaging applications, whose custodians have little-to-no insight into the conversations conducted on their platforms. (The logos of Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram were all visible in the title image for the post.)
The excerpt would open with an admission that increased attention on disinformation campaigns would result in further scrutiny of “US and allied virtual operations, including information operations and intelligence activities”. But while the publicized section of the paper was intended to serve as a warning on the nefarious ways in which Russia could use private messaging applications to conduct influence operations, it would seem to inadvertently expose precisely the concerns citizens might have with the methods employed within Pulse.
The IST employees noted:
“Though social chat does not have the broadcast power of social media, what it lacks in quantity and reach it makes up for with quality of interaction. One-on-one and small group interactions allow the influencer targeted opportunities to tailor the messages to individuals and manipulate small-group dynamics. Tactics like reciprocity (or similar quid pro quo manipulation) may also be more effective in smaller scale engagements.
…Social media is used to recruit members of the target audience who can serve as proxies; these potential conduits are invited to engage in small groups on social chat, where the influencer can organize and supply them with the content and tactics required to achieve operational effects.”
Perhaps as a pitch of its own semi-automated conversational capabilities, the paper would lament “the existing shortage of skilled [U.S. Government] operators”, who are “therefore more effectively tasked on social media, where their message can reach a broader audience”.
Eight months later, IST Research announced its receipt of “a $48.3 million, 5-year contract by the Department of the Army to purchase IST Research’s Pulse Platform”. The contract was significantly larger than anything the company had publicly received to date.
While not mentioned in the press release, the contract was through the Army C5ISR Center’s Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD), “The Army's Sensor Developer”, whose duties include “exploit[ing] sensors” to “See, acquire, and target opposing forces, day or night, under adverse battlefield environments”. And the proactively-disclosed contract requirement includes “rapid, dynamic and mission-focused engagement with indigenous communities on the edge by combining Content Discovery and Social Listening capabilities (CDSL) with Population Engagement (PE) techniques…[which allow] for the systematic delivery of high-volume SMS messages to pre-loaded contacts…”
That is to say, IST Research was awarded a five year contract worth nearly $50 million to help a military unit responsible for targeting enemy forces to surveil social media and develop informant networks.
Project Maven
In April of the same year, a major New York Time story broke on a leaked letter which was signed by thousands of Google employees and addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai in opposition to the company’s work on U.S. military drone surveillance. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”, the letter would state.
(Disclosure: The author was a research scientist at Google at the time.)
The impacts of the letter would perhaps be more pronounced externally than within the company itself. Google agreed — at least temporarily — to not design custom artificial intelligence for drone warfare, but it would continue to sell its cloud computing to the project through an unnamed company. Two years later the company would be reported as one of the five recipients of the CIA’s potentially ten billion dollar Commercial Cloud Environment contract and then in December 2022 was announced as one of four recipients of the Department of Defense’s $9 billion ceiling Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability effort.23
But as a result of the Pentagon’s unfounded fears of a domino effect of other Silicon Valley companies refusing military work, the Eric Schmidt-chaired Defense Innovation Board mirrored Google’s recently released AI Principles by drafting its own, and then the also Schmidt-chaired National Security Commission on AI would lay out recommendations for their operationalization.24 And the U.S. Intelligence Community would follow suit.
Google’s role on Project Maven would dominate public discourse despite the fact that no record of it ever appeared in public procurement during the 2018-2021 timeframe. The author’s previous analysis of public records in fact revealed Microsoft, Clarifai, Palantir, and Amazon to be the largest subcontractors under the main contractor, ECS Federal.
But the more interesting consequence of studying public procurement records — particularly subaward descriptions — is an appreciation for Project Maven being an all-source intelligence fusion project rather than simply focused upon applying artificial intelligence to drone footage. Just as IST Research’s daily intelligence reports on ISIS through its Open Data Threat DARPA project would blend surveillance of geotagged social media with satellite imagery, so too would Maven. And it would further experiment with Synthetic Aperture Radar, Captured Enemy Materials, and facial recognition.
And on January 22, 2020, IST Research received a $1.7 million subaward on Maven through ECS Federal to “examine data and develop algorithms”. In fact, the sub award would reunite IST Research with the company that produced the “gigantic green beach ball with a microwave antenna” which supplied the internet to The Taj and its surrounding schools and hospitals. Roughly four months before IST’s sub award, GATR Technologies would receive nearly $1.9 million to “integrate cloud-ready version of the Maven appliances into [Amazon’s Secret Cloud Compute Service], including [Full Motion Video]”.25
Tactical Information Warfare and Mobile Geolocation Data
A footnote tagged on the 278th page of the March 2021 Final Report of the National Security Commission on AI states:
“Recently published reports on countering malign influence have issued wide-ranging recommendations including: deploying special operations forces to areas “vulnerable to political warfare,” building “rapid-reaction information cells to track and counter” malign influence operations, and promoting civil society to “combine the values of accurate media with engagement skills and an understanding of how propagandists prey on polarization, inflaming divides.” These recommendations are already being put into action by Special Operations Command in Africa, using commercially available services to combat and attribute malign information operations about COVID-19 and other issues on the continent. The General Services Administration has awarded IST Research a Phase III SBIR contract to “support operations in the information environment for the special operations and Federal Government community.” Additionally, the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command have contracted with Primer to “automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation” using ML technology.”
The footnote’s analysis was based upon IST’s July 2020 press release, which in turn described the contract as a “a five-year, $66 million contract…[where various] Government customers will use the company’s innovative Pulse Platform to conduct large-scale citizen engagement around the world, with the goal of giving a voice to some of its most marginalized populations…beginning with the support of [Special Operations Command Africa].”
Thanks to a responsive Freedom of Information request, Tech Inquiry is revealing that this contract — despite its public framing as countering disinformation — includes the sale of a “Tactical Information Warfare Kit” with “disruption capability” along with one year of “mobile geolocation data” to U.S. Special Operations Forces.
An analysis of public procurement records demonstrates that the contract was signed one month earlier that the press release, with a ceiling of roughly $316 million rather than the advertised $66 million. And, as of current public records, $55.4 million from the potential $316 million pot have so far been obligated to IST Research.
Further, while the press release only named usage by Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA), child awards now exist to: Army Europe and Africa, Special Operations Command Pacific, Army Special Operations Command Europe (through two awards), and, within the Southern Command area of operations — the Navy, Special Operations, and (through two awards) Army Special Operations.
IST’s contract also child awards to the some of the most elite combat organizations within the U.S. military, including:
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC),
1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) — aka 1st SFC(A), and
And in the information, cyber, and space domains, there are further child awards to:
1st Information Operations Command (Land) — aka 1st IO CMD (through three separate awards),
The Marine Corps Information Operations Center (MCIOC),
91st Cyberspace Operations Wing — aka the “Demon Chasers”, and
Further, thanks to a response from a Freedom of Information request for the 1st SFC(A) contract, we know that Pulse is being supplied to the following subordinate units of 1st SFC(A):
4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) ,
8th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne),
95th Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne), and
The 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 10th Special Forces Groups (Airborne).
Of these units, the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 10th SFG(A)s are part of Army Special Forces — the “Green Berets” — whereas the PSYOP and Civil Affairs units are peers within 1st SFC(A). While not all of these Special Forces Groups have strict areas of operations, we can roughly think of 1st SFG(A) as Pacific Command, 3rd as Africa, 5th as Central, 7th as Southern, and 10th as Europe and Africa.
The roles of PSYOP and Civil Affairs are typically poorly understood by the public and their units are sometimes referred to as the ‘red headed stepchildren’ of Special Operations Forces. To some degree Civil Affairs is the closest military analogue of the work performed by the Synergy Strike Force: providing humanitarian aid in order to support the local objectives of the U.S. military. Whereas PSYOP units such as the 8th Psychological Operations Group — aka the “Phantom Knights” — describe their work as “conduct[ing] influence activities to target psychological vulnerabilities and create or intensify fissures, confusion, and doubt in adversary organizations. We use all available means of dissemination – from sensitive and high tech, to low-tech, to no-tech, and methods from overt, to clandestine, to deception.”
Despite the defensive ‘counter-disinformation’ framing of reporting on IST’s contract, the proactively disclosed contract descriptions repeatedly state that the work is built upon IST’s previous awards. Numerous descriptions include the procurement identifiers for IST’s ‘Managing Operations Security Tool’, which planned to “obfuscate” accidental operational details released by SOCOM on social media through “counter campaigns”, and ‘Pulse for Social Science’, which promised to “revolutionize social science” through digital behavioral experiments in conflict zones in support of U.S. national security decision-making. (Not to mention one award going to the US’s most elite combat unit — Joint Special Operations Command — and the usage of “mobile geolocation data” as part of what IST itself described as “Tactical Information Warfare”.)
In a rare case of critical reporting on IST, the respected outlet ‘Intelligence Online’ described the Special Operations contract as focused on maintaining contact with local populations in the ‘dead zones’ formed by military withdrawals.
And two of the companies which IST formally subcontracted to underneath this nominally ‘counter disinformation’ award, Flashpoint and Creative Radicals, raise their own concerns due to Flashpoint’s sale of commercial surveillance and subversion of environmental protestors and Creative Radicals’ close ties to the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Meanwhile, IST’s Paterson would publicly advertise on June 4, 2020 that Microsoft — through former Memex manager and Nexus 7 participant Chris White — had invited IST to collaborate on monitoring COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation through its “social listening” tool. “We think it’s easy to detect.”
The Delta Force Rickroll
Lee Van Arsdale is perhaps most famous as the head of the elite Delta Force assault troop which handcuffed General Manuel Noriega on the night of January 3, 1990, several weeks into the U.S. invasion of Panama. As recounted in a commentary in War on the Rocks, during the more than week in which Noriega was surrounded, members of the 4th Psychological Operations Group taunted Noriega with loud rock music chosen for its ironic lyrics, such as Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go” and Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”.
The PSYOP team would also serenade Noriega with Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” — effectively Rickrolling him nearly twenty years before it would become a meme. (The same PSYOP unit, “Dark Horse”, is now being supplied with IST’s Pulse.)
Three years later, Van Arsdale was a member of Task Force Ranger during the Battle of Mogadishu — commonly known as ‘Black Hawk Down’ as a result of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters being shot down and 17 American soldiers being killed in action. Van Arsdale would medically retire form the U.S. military in 1999, and then, succeeding the founder and ‘Doomsday prepper’ Barrett Moore from 2005 to 2009, he led the private security contracting firm Triple Canopy as CEO.
Van Arsdale has boasted that, in 2009, Triple Canopy “was the largest American security company in Iraq”. The next year the company responded to the earthquake in Haiti by “rushing aid and supplies to the struggling country”. And in June 2014, it merged with the successor to Erik Prince’s Blackwater underneath Triple Canopy’s holding company, Constellis.
Van Arsdale would again help lead private security firms in 2017, becoming a director of Constellis competitor DynCorp International that January and Chairman of Tier 1 Group in June.
In October of the next year, the Saudi Arabian Royal Guard’s Rapid Intervention Force assassinated Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and reporting would emerge — based upon warnings from the CIA — that the hit squad had been trained in the United States, likely by Tier 1 Group. But the spotlight fell on Louis Bremer, a former Navy SEAL and fellow director of Tier 1 Group who had become a Managing Director at Cerberus Capital.26
Both Van Arsdale and Bremer — along with fellow Cerberus Managing Director Paul H. Miller — were also simultaneously leading the board of the “publicly available information” surveillance contractor Creative Radicals — with Van Arsdale pivoting from CEO to Co-Chair, and Bremer serving as Chair until, according to his LinkedIn, July 2019. Miller then took over as Chair in August.
Creative Radicals is best known for its OpenIO product, which the company describes as “a search, extract, and organize tool that utilizes open-source and proprietary data sets to perform powerful searches on individual entities, user-defined geographic areas, and specific key terms and topics”. The U.S. military, especially Special Operations Forces, became frequent customers of OpenIO, including on a data fusion project underneath ECS Federal which was closely tied to Project Maven and — according to financial allocations — de facto led by Palantir.
One of Creative Radicals’ fellow subcontractors on this effort, Flashpoint — as well as its soon to be acquiree Echosec — subsequently integrated its products with OpenIO. And both companies subcontracted underneath IST Research on its ongoing global Tactical Information Warfare campaigns.
Creative Radicals did not respond to a request for comment.
The ‘Doogie Howser of Terrorism’ Surveils Pipeline Protestors
Evan François Kohlmann’s reputation perhaps never recovered from a December 2010 New York magazine profile which called attention to his nickname as the “Doogie Howser of Terrorism” and cited a constitutional-law professor’s opinion that he was “grown hydroponically in the basement of the Bush Justice Department.”
Scrutiny of Kohlmann — a longtime Terrorism Analyst with NBC News — would persist for years, including of his classified relationship with the FBI. But much less attention would be paid to the social media and chatroom surveillance technology being developed alongside the analysis Kohlmann was posting to flashpoint-intel.com.
While founded in early 2010 essentially as a one-man-show for Kohlmann’s terrorism expertise, over the subsequent few years Kohlmann would bring in Josh Lefkowitz and Josh Devon as co-founders. Lefkowitz and Devon would rebrand the organization as a counter-extremism technology company and — as of June of last year — sideline Kohlmann entirely.27
Before their time at Flashpoint, Kohlmann and Lefkowitz were authoring articles in the conservative magazine National Review, such as “Axis of Evil” and “Al Qaeda’s Death Train?”, through their affiliations with The Investigative Project on Terrorism, or IPT. Founded in 1995 by another former reporter, Steve Emerson, the organization would go undercover at Islamic events — behavior which would lead the New York Attorney General Letitia James to issue a cease and desist letter to Emerson and IPT in April of last year. A 2006 article in The New Yorker quoted Kohlmann admitting that, as a result of his undercover work with IPT, his family “thought we were nuts”. (Devon similarly co-founded SITE Intelligence Group alongside Emerson acolyte Rita Katz.)
In keeping with Kohlmann and Lefkowitz’s histories of FBI collaboration and undercover subversion of Muslim communities, Tech Inquiry is calling attention to Flashpoint having publicly advertised its commercial services for surveilling and subverting “anti-pollution” and “oil pipeline” protestors. One section, headlined as ‘Activism’, stated:
“Over the past several years, various groups initiated campaigns against the aviation industry that ranged from anti-pollution and runway expansion protests to demonstrations against deportations. Demonstration tactics included the blocking of runways, demonstrators chaining themselves to aircraft, concourse "die ins" in which protesters lie on the floor as though deceased, and general gatherings to disrupt business operations. In the past, these demonstrations in which participants impeded flight operations, by causing runway or terminal shutdowns, resulted in global flight delays and ultimately a financial impact to individual airline carriers.
By monitoring the situation and assessing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP’s), Flashpoint was able to assess the impact of upcoming protests, and determine that these groups would likely continue to protest and attempt to impede airport construction and expansion projects through direct action. Other assessments included which protests were likely to include vandalism, economic impacts like disruption of business, and if their campaigns were gaining or losing momentum. Based on this information, Flashpoint customers were able to take actions to help control the impact to business operations, and to ensure the safety of their employees and facilities as well as the safety of those protesting.”
Another vignette strongly suggests that Flashpoint was paid to help subvert the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors. And a third discusses the surveillance of “extreme far-left and anarchist groups” planning actions outside of the 2017 G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany.
Flashpoint’s product is now integrated with Creative Radicals’ OpenIO. And both products have been purchased alongside “mobile geolocation data” as part of a global “Tactical Information Warfare” campaign by U.S. Special Operations Forces which has largely been painted as a defense against Chinese disinformation.
This Monday, Flashpoint announced the expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud:
“The upcoming release of Flashpoint’s conversational intelligence capability will expand upon Flashpoint’s use of Google Cloud Vertex AI services such as Vision AI and Translation AI to provide industry-leading AI-driven intelligence innovations, including the processing and contextualizing of images and videos through optical character recognition (OCR) and in-platform video search, as well as the use of Google’s BigQuery and Looker to accelerate enrichment, analysis, and visualizations within the Flashpoint platform.”
Flashpoint did not respond to a request for comment.
Paterson’s Exit
A little more than six months into its global Tactical Information Warfare contract with U.S. Special Operations Forces, it was announced that IST Research had been acquired by the infamous private investment firm The Carlyle Group and merged with another company to form Two Six Technologies.28 Two Six retained the “Double Helix Development” branding from IST Research in its logo, but Paterson would be phased out by September.
One month after the February 2021 public formation of Two Six Technologies, the company announced the appointment of Mike McConnell to its board — a former Director of the NSA who was also Director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush and Obama.
By May of 2022, Two Six had acquired the counter-disinformation company Thresher Ventures, which was founded by former CIA Officer Rebecca Fair. Thresher’s main product, the Media Manipulation Monitor (M3), promised to “reverse engineer” the “crisis communications playbooks” of U.S. adversaries, with one contract asserting that “M3 is based on the principle that advanced censorship regimes designed to control the flow of information convey a great deal about their governments and leaders”. Another contract put it more bluntly: “As authoritarian leaders take action to control online content, they leave behind an outline of their priorities”.
In August of 2022, Paterson would reappear in the public eye as part of widespread criticism of a secure phone being promoted by Erik Prince which had secondary ties to the NSO Group. Despite being the President of the company, Paterson was largely left in the background. According to his LinkedIn, Paterson had the previous month joined the board of a company claiming to ‘redefine camouflage on the modern battlefield’.
Paterson’s fellow co-founder from The Taj, Todd Huffman, is now the co-founder of a ‘neuroscience moonshot’ company largely funded by billionaires Eric Schmidt and Ken Griffin.
After the Taliban murdered the manager of The Taj in August 2012, Warner told me that he used his life savings to keep the guest house running until the end of the year. Over the following years, he would return on his own to help women’s programs, but felt that his presence was endangering others. Warner has since focused on remotely collaborating with his former network in Afghanistan — now primarily through the San Diego / Jalalabad Sister City Program — but, he says, “for obvious reasons we are very very quiet about what we are doing...”
Flynn’s color-coding categorization of intelligence gathering was not without its critics. A hypothetical example of the confusing overlap between the categories was provided within the 2012 RAND report “Military Intelligence Fusion for Complex Operations”: “A tribal leader (white) is also a member of the part-time district council (sometimes green) and a part-time insurgent financier (kind of red, sometimes).”
According to reporting from WIRED, the same year Flynn would supply “dozens of Palantir servers to troops throughout Afghanistan...mostly Special Forces and Marines” through a Joint Operations Needs Statement submitted to the Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office. The main subject of this article, IST Research, would receive a contract supporting the Marine Corps Information Operations Center through the same office seven years later.
And in 2011, The New York Times would report on the CIA’s use of a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as part of its hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Later communications between MindTel staff and the Department of Defense argue that successful civil-military operations require the combination of a “facilitator”, who functions within the government bureaucracy to provide resources, and a “synergist”, who operates outside of the bureaucracy and is skilled at blending communities. Warner’s email signature generally refers to him as the “ARCH Synergist”.
A July 2013 report co-authored by Wells, which thanks Warner for his input, is perhaps the most important public reference for what would subsequently transpire. And, according to Warner, he and Wells also jointly attended Burning Man under the moniker “The PseudoFeds of the Playagon”. One variant of the Synergy Strike Force logo posted to the webpage for the group superimposes the logos of the CIA, DIA, National Reconnaissance Office, DHS, and DoD on top of itself.
Lynch’s son funded his first year of college by tending bar at The Taj for a summer.
The organization that originally ran Alive in Afghanistan, Small World News, was rebranded as Fasila, Inc. in 2019. And the Alive in Afghanistan program relaunched in 2021.
Surmount would later become the protagonist of an investigation resulting from a psychotic breakdown he suffered in 2017, seemingly as a result of a controversial Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment program provided by University of California San Diego.
The experiment at The Taj would separately inspire a counterinsurgency program called UnityNet, which planned to deploy “white” intelligence gathering techniques in at least five sites throughout Afghanistan. However, the intelligence funding from the Pentagon’s J-2 Directorate led UnityNet into exploiting the social networks for both “green” and “red” intelligence, which led to “concerns that associating with [UnityNet] could jeopardize people in the field who had intended to support only population-centric information-sharing”.
These concerns would lead to the official termination of UnityNet in 2011 as well as the creation of a follow-on project — “Jade-A” — whose name was meant to prevent any confusion about the collection of both “white” and “green” intelligence.
According to his LinkedIn, Shelat embedded with U.S. Special Operations Forces in Syria during his previous role at USAID as a Senior Stabilization Advisor. Shelat described the embedding “as part of an eight-person interagency team, managing the provision of humanitarian assistance and the restoration of essential services in areas liberated from ISIS in support of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR).”
The counter-disinformation think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the ‘cultural intelligence consultancy’ sparks & honey would in 2016 subcontract under the same firm through the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command.
The Administrator of USAID when it requested DARPA initiate the More Eyes program, Rajiv Shah, was later a public advisor to gigwork military intelligence contractor Premise Data and is currently a member of the Defense Policy Board. The Wall Street Journal exposed Premise’s misleading framing as a purely humanitarian organization by publishing an internal slide deck which described the company as “A Dynamically Re-taskable, Global System for Persistent Ground [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance]”. Premise and IST Research are in fact both subcontracting with JSOC under the same ongoing prime contract.
Though, in 1997, Occidental Petroleum successfully lobbied Congress into directing MIST-Colombia to protect a pipeline.
And while White was identified as a graduate student in the piece, a fawning 2016 Popular Science profile of White would later clarify that he was a post-doc at Harvard during his time in Kabul.
The Department of Justice also published a schedule from a February 11, 2015 meeting which lists Latonero as a member of a lunch panel on anti-trafficking technology alongside then IST VP Todd Huffman and employees from Palantir, Google.org, and Ashton Kutcher’s Thorn.
Within its final report on Open Data Threat, IST described its design process as “Double Helix Development” due to its “tight coupling of operators and technologists”. The imagery of this co-design process would remain in the company’s logo even after its 2021 acquisition by The Carlyle Group and subsequent merger with Two Six Labs into Two Six Technologies.
The DARPA program manager which replaced White on Memex and XDATA, Wade Shen, also helped lead IST’s Open Data Threat work. And the author also briefly worked under Shen on XDATA.
Rescue Forensics had already begun providing its evidence collection platform to numerous law enforcement agencies. Its founder, attorney Ryan Dalton, would — according to his own bios — spend the four years after the acquisition as a Special Agent with the U.S. State Department’s Office of Mobile Security Deployments before returning in May 2020 as a Senior Project Manager with Two Six Technologies.
Marinus boasts that it is one of only three organizations exempt from Amazon’s moratorium on the use of its Rekognition facial recognition software by U.S. law enforcement.
In 2020, Shiffman and Giant Oak formed the financial intelligence company Consilient in partnership with K2 Intelligence, a private intelligence firm run by the father of comedian Nick Kroll which became infamous as one of the firms hired by convicted rapist and former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to silence whistleblowers.
As first reported by Tech Inquiry, Google resumed selling artificial intelligence to the Pentagon for processing aerial imagery through a $400,000 contract in September of 2022, albeit in partnership with the Army National Guard.
Along the way, Google Cloud would hire the Executive Director of the Defense Innovation Board, Joshua Marcuse.
The focus on Bremer was perhaps due to Trump having recently considered Bremer for a position overseeing U.S. special operations forces.
Flashpoint is legally named EJ2 Communications, Inc., ostensibly after the first letters of the three founders’ first names.
The Carlyle Group formed Two Six Technologies from the merger of IST Research with Two Six Labs, a spin-off of a Sophos acquisition.