The company locking down military and municipal social media out of an abandoned mall in Oklahoma
The company locking down military and municipal social media out of an abandoned mall in Oklahoma
The military-focused social media startup BaseConnect has expanded into helping city governments suppress public criticism. The ACLU says there could be concerns.
Tony Weedn is quick to note that he is a “visionary”, not a software developer. The self description dates back at least to his time as the founder of GLIP.tv — short for “God’s Love In People, Protocol, Programming, Processes and Property” — which Weedn used to sell search engine optimization services during the latter part of the thirteen years he was active duty in the U.S. Air Force. Though Weedn grew up in the small central Oklahoma town of Chickasha, he would ultimately settle down further north in Enid after spending time stationed at Vance Air Force Base.
Weedn’s connections at Vance Air Force Base became central to the subscription-based, stripped-down social media and emergency communications product, named BaseConnect, which he now sells to various U.S. military bases and — under the brand CityConnect — a few cities. Edin News & Eagle reported that, as of March of last year, “each member from Vance Air Force Base who processes in at the base becomes a verified [BaseConnect] user”.
In an interview yesterday, Weedn explained his aspirations to turn BaseConnect into Oklahoma’s first billion dollar startup, or “unicorn”:
“We’re really trying to become the enterprise communications platform that is the place for the whole Department of Defense. Which is terrifying to be honest…and if you saw my office right now you would laugh. I’m at [Edin’s] Oakwood Mall, but it’s completely abandoned. I have my rollerblades in here and I rollerblade to the mall and I just have this vision of turning it into a tech center some day.”
The social media data leakage problem which Weedn proposes for BaseConnect to solve is real, especially for elite special operations teams such as the Joint Special Operations Command, whose covert operations could easily be blown by a social media post by a member of the military or their family. As previously reported by the author, companies such as Two Six Technologies have had small business innovation research (SBIR) contracts specifically to monitor and counter-act such slip-ups by U.S. Special Operations Forces.
(In fact, Weedn is also a Venture Partner at The Veteran Fund, which advertises its team to include both former JSOC commander Stanley McChrystal, though ‘quantum healing’ pseudoscientist Deepak Chopra is confusingly also listed.)
According to public records, BaseConnect has so far received at least $2.36 million in obligations for providing its software to the U.S. Air Force, including for a secure newsfeed meant to help military bases hide their COVID-19 updates from U.S. competitors.
Listening to Weedn talk, he is clearly passionate about rejuvenating Enid’s struggling economy, which — like much of middle America — has lost out as the U.S. has continued to concentrate its wealth into high technology. Months before the JCPenney outlet next to BaseConnect’s current office closed, Weedn and his wife Haylee made local news for their nonprofit crowdsourcing efforts to restore the city’s drive-in. (Unfortunately the efforts fell short, and the city’s only movie theater — the AMC based out of Oakwood Mall — also closed.)
But the long delays common to U.S. military procurement have led BaseConnect to expand into a variant of its product designed for city governments which are tired of their Facebook broadcasts being drowned out by complaints from their ostensible citizens. When asked about CityConnect.org pitching such a feature, Weedn told me that, after attending a city management conference, he learned:
“[City government officials were] so sick of posting something publicly…you can name anything…'We need to replace the water line on 12th and Main’…and then there’s five hundred comments of ‘When are you going to replace our water line?’ And ‘blah blah blah blah’ …And negative actually goes more viral than positive…And so we don’t allow likes, we don’t allow comments, we don’t allow shares.”
When asked why city officials don’t just turn off Facebook comments, Weedn acknowledged past first amendment controveries from such actions and stated:
“The problems with cities [turning off Facebook comments] is they can get in a lot of trouble for that. Because then it tries to show that they’re limiting freedom of speech. And so there’s all these laws around social media. And cities are flat out sick of dealing with public social media. And they’re craving and looking for something different. And I hope we can bring them that.”
Vera Eidelman, a Staff Attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project who has worked on similar issues in the past, noted that:
“If the government has created a public forum on its social media account, the First Amendment prohibits it from blocking users from viewing that account, or commenting on its posts, based on their views—including, perhaps especially, views that are critical of the government.”
Just as BaseConnect began out of Enid’s Vance Air Force Base, one of CityConnect’s first two pilots has been with Enid’s city government. Weedn told me that he is working on eight additional cities at the moment, and that two major SBIRs — one with the Air Force and one with the Air National Guard — are currently in the works.
BaseConnect is likely to see further traction as a result of the recent massive U.S. national security leaks through Discord — for which The New York Times played the leading role in hunting down the alleged source, 21 year-old National Guard airman Jack Teixeira. In what is par for the course in U.S. defense contracting, BaseConnect has been tapping former Air National Guard Brigadier General Dave Fountain to help close a contract with the Air National Guard. (Weedn asserted that neither Fountain nor retired Air Force Major General Tim Zadalis has received any form of compensation for their ‘strategic advisory’ work with BaseConnect.)
But the most prominent affiliate of BaseConnect is undoubtedly the French-born entrepreneur Nicolas Chaillan, who made headlines in 2021 for resigning in protest from his job as the chief software officer of the U.S. Air Force. According to Chaillan, poor software development practices have been causing the U.S. to fall behind China in the militarization of artificial intelligence. And in a bright red slide in BaseConnect’s pitch deck, Chaillan is quoted stating that “Current social media is an existential threat to our national security.”
Weedn has privately advertised to his investors that Chaillan is a non-public advisor, though — when reached for comment — Chaillan asserted that “I’m not on any [of] their board[s] (I don’t work for free and I’ve never been paid or have any equity or anything)…certainly nothing formal..I did have a few meetings with them to see if I could help a veteran as I do with hundreds of companies… nothing special”.
In perhaps his first major commercial move since resigning from the Air Force roughly a year and a half ago, Chaillan recently published a video demonstrating how his new artificial intelligence startup, Ask Sage, can help the U.S. government automate tasks such as summarizing résumés of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members:
“What really got me excited is when we had this dataset with Chinese résumés of the CCP teams…And if you put this on Google Translate, you get 150 fields and your brain is not able to really understand who this person is. It’s just too much information…So, simply by asking [ChatGPT] to translate and summarize — and that’s really where I decided to make this a company — is seeing the immense value where now GPT is able to give us a clear rundown of who this person is in plain English. And that was really mind-boggling.”
While Weedn is attempting to mitigate U.S. military from disclosing operational details on social media, Chaillan is selling a system to allow government officials to input Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) into the latest artificial intelligence craze.