Where data journalism meets information warfare against China
For-profit 'Open Sanctions' spin-out of OCCRP is subcontractor on classified U.S. military intelligence program MORTAL MINT, run by the Secretary of the Air Force's "Office of Competitive Activities."
Last updated on March 5, 2025 at 11:24 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
A for-profit spin-out of the prominent U.S. Government-backed investigative journalism organization OCCRP which focuses on curating sanctions-related data was disclosed by the U.S. Government as a subcontractor for a classified U.S. military intelligence program known as MORTAL MINT.
The company, whose legal name is OpenSanctions Datenbanken GmbH, describes itself as "an international database of persons and companies of political, criminal, or economic interest” and is listed as receiving a $54,280 payout — intermediated by Deloitte Consulting with an October 9, 2024 subaward description of “MORTAL MINT” — from the secretive Office of Competitive Activities (OC) arm of the U.S. Air Force, which was created early last year to oversee “sensitive” programs against China, often at a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information level.
OpenSanctions does not disclose its relationship to U.S. military intelligence on its website and did not respond to a detailed request for comment on the matter despite a week’s notice. According to the company’s 'About' page, the funding for OpenSanctions is derived from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, as well as from the closely affiliated Prototype Fund, which supports open source projects.
Following publication of this article, OpenSanctions provided a receipt for its subcontract with Deloitte, for a one year “OEM data license for the OpenSanctions database,” listing the prime contract’s procurement instrument identifier (PIID) of FA7146-19-D-0720. OpenSanctions further stated that this article “was a surreal experience in that we obviously have no idea what MORTAL MINT is, [as the CEO] is not a US national” and provided a screenshot showing that Google’s email service Gmail had flagged the author’s request for comment as possibly dangerous.
Founded by Friedrich Lindenberg, who led OCCRP’s data team from 2016 to 2021 and initiated creation of its ‘Aleph’ open source data platform — which also powers the ‘Library of Leaks’ project of the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets — OpenSanctions publicly notes that its scrapers were maintained from 2017 to 2019 by then-OCCRP staffer Tarashish Mishra. Roughly three months ago, OCCRP was exposed through a series of investigations simultaneously published by a consortium of independent newsrooms as having secretly received its first $1.7 million in funding from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), albeit routed through the recently hobbled U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), resulting in USAID having the right to veto OCCRP’s key hiring decisions.
USAID official Mike Henning’s explanation of his agency’s funding for OCCRP was widely quoted by the consortium, with Henning arguing “that people will talk maybe more to a journalist than to a government official. […] So law enforcement is happy to have other external actors do that kind of work.”
Beyond a web of contractors and subcontractors for MORTAL MINT being revealed through public procurement databases — including the “cryptocurrency compliance” firm Elliptic and the Tampa office of the “financial network analytics” company FNA — little appears to have been disclosed about the program’s scope. However, a fiscal year 2023 budget estimate for “Drug Interdiction and Counter-Drug Activities” published by the U.S. Defense Department described a program with the name MORTAL MINT, which started at roughly the same time period as the one listed in procurement records, as an “enterprise-wide intelligence program” focused on “advanced analytics,” but with further details religated to a classified appendix.
There is precedent for U.S. military intelligence agencies using advanced analytics for counter-narcotics purposes. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) previously ran a counter-fentanyl program named SABLE SPEAR, with the military artificial intelligence company Rhombus Power building the initial prototype. According to an official description of the program, SABLE SPEAR “ingests large datasets residing on the Internet, looks for indicators of illegal or suspicious activity, and surfaces military, diplomatic, and law enforcement opportunities to abate the threat.” (The “SABLE SPEAR” name can also be found in subaward descriptions from two separate contracts to the defense tech company now known as SMX, which announced former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as a board member on November 15, 2023.)
Despite detailed discussions over the phone and by email with the U.S. Air Force Office of Public Affairs, the Air Force would eventually only state that it had forwarded the author’s questions regarding the scope of MORTAL MINT to the appropriate “subject matter experts” and could not provide an estimated response date.
***
One of the ‘tectonic’ shifts in U.S. national security posture over the last decade — to adopt the parlance of former CIA director Michael Hayden — is the transition back to so-called ‘Great Power Competition’ from the post-9/11 Global War on Terror (GWOT), which is to say, re-focusing on China and Russia following more than a decade of combat operations in Afghanistan. You could perhaps date the pivot to a November 2014 speech given by then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at the Reagan National Defense Forum, where he emphasized the need to adopt “cutting-edge technology” from the commercial sector. The International Security Assistance Force which led the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, known as Operation Enduring Freedom, dissolved at the end of the next month, though the U.S. only withdrew from the country nearly seven years later.
The ideology underpinning Hagel’s remarks, known as the “Third Offset Strategy,” is sometimes traced to an early 2001 article authored by Hagel’s successor, the late physicist Ashton Carter. Despite being published the year after the 2000 “dot-com” crash, Carter jokingly referred to the Pentagon’s response to an era of commercial leadership in technology as “Offset-Strategy.com.” Far from the 1950s-birthed ‘first offset’ strategy of training special operations forces to demolish sites such as Cuban dams by parachuting and scuba-diving with mini-Hiroshima nuclear weapons developed by national laboratories, and the 1980s-era ‘second offset’ strategy of GPS-guided missiles and airborne radars, the ‘third offset’ would focus on accelerating the pace of war through efficient commercial data analytics and artificial intelligence.
An underreported offshoot of the ‘third offset’ strategy is the U.S. military’s incorporation of commercial analytics as part of offensive information warfare, often using seemingly bland tools such as corporate records network analysis in more provocative manners when shielded by classification, such as for the target generation phase of “computer network operations,” a preferred euphimism for government hacking. One such provider has been the In-Q-Tel-backed Sayari Analytics, a for-profit de facto spin-out of the sanctions-focused nonprofit The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), which has itself maintained close ties to the U.S. intelligence and special operations community since its formation and been primarily funded by the U.S. government.
Sayari is itself a provider for MORTAL MINT, with the defense technology reseller Thundercat Technology receiving at least $3.8 million to supply Sayari’s graph analytics platform to the program, beginning in October 2022.
(C4ADS has nevertheless leveraged its sophisticated corporate records analysis system to influence sanctions enforcement coverage in the most prestigious domestic newspapers, especially regarding China. C4ADS has also for years maintained close relationships with investigatory arms of human rights organizations through its mirroring of AIS and ADS-B location data, and the author was pitched by a staff member of a prominent international digital rights organization to make use of C4ADS corporate records as recently as last week.)
In a private advertisement to potential SOCOM clients published by the author two years ago, Sayari named the Sixteenth Airforce’s 67th Cyberspace Operations Group — perhaps the principal offensive cyber arm of the U.S. Air Force — as one of its many military intelligence clients, further noting that, “Many of our IC [Intelligence Community] and DOD [Department of Defense] clientele use our data and platform for a variety of offensive cyber operations, I can put you in touch with them on JWICS [Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System] to have that conversation.” (The point of contact for the pitch, Brian Kesecker, subsequently moved to the maritime intelligence firm Kpler and then to the risk management firm Exiger.)
Nearly a decade into the U.S. pivot into the Third Offset Strategy, on February 12, 2024, U.S. Air Force secretary Frank Kendall announced a restructuring of his department towards Great Power Competition which would prove to be a highlight of his recently ended tenure. (One week ago, Kendall published a New York Times editorial calling Donald Trump a “rogue president” for firing Gen. Charles Q. Brown.) Buried in the details of the associated fact sheet for the reorg was a directive to “combine disparate efforts to create the Office of Competitive Activities to oversee and coordinate sensitive activities.”
In August, Scoop News Group’s DefenseScoop reported that the secretive Office of Competitive Activities (OC) would be closely collaborating with the information warfare operations cell of the 616th Operations Center of the Sixteenth Air Force, with China as the implied focus. One of the goals of the collaboration, according to Defense Scoop, would be “looking at how to expose adversary activity and disrupt it via information warfare.”
(In contrast to this framing, Reuters reported in June that the Pentagon had engaged in an “anti-vax” disinformation campaign from the spring of 2020 into mid-2021, attempting to convince Filipino civilians that China’s Sinovac vaccine was dangerous. The same two Reuters journalists reported three months prior that the CIA launched a clandestine social media campaign in 2019 which was aimed at discrediting Chinese government officials while “leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets.”)
A job posting last year for a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) contracting position supporting the OC by the Reston-based firm BlueSky Innovators went further, stating that the candidate would “leverage advanced targeting skills and experience in identifying vulnerabilities within networks for exploitation,” as well as “provide comprehensive all-source information collection and analysis in support of information operations initiatives,” including through the usage of “intelligence tools/databases.”
One of the “disparate efforts” absorbed into the OC was the Intelligence Systems Support Office (ISSO), a niche organization falling under the Secretary of the Air Force and providing analytical support to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security (OUSD-I&S), which has oversight of four of the ‘Big Five’ U.S. intelligence agencies: the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
A sources sought notice for the ISSO published in January requested support for “interactive mapping of large quantities of data on the order of 2 million points visualized in an interactive, zoomable, pannable map created by Leaflet and deck.gl, utilizing GeoArrow,” with users being noted to span the “Defense Intelligence Enterprise.”
Prior to the 2024 Air Force Great Power Competition reorganization, at least as of January 2020, the ISSO lived within the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF) Office of Concepts Development and Management (CDM) Advanced Analytics and Technology Investments unit (CDMA), with an organizational description as either the ISSO office of SAF/CDMA, or CDMI for short. Following the reorg, ISSO became part of the Office of Competitive Activities, SAF/OC, and has been associated with the shorthand of SAF/OC/CDMR, of which the author is unclear on the meaning of the ‘R’.
Procurement records also show that CDM and its Office of Commercial & Economic Analysis (OCEA) — whose website was live until at least December — formally became one of the “disparate efforts” merged into the OC, with the name of the underlying office code simply being changed to reflect the reorg. Months before the reorg, in October 2023, OCEA senior executive Dwayne Florenzie was scheduled to give a virtual presentation at the 12th Annual Pacific Information Operations & Electromagnetic Warfare Symposium, entitled, “China's Quest for Information Communication Technology (ICT) Dominance and Proposed Department of the Air Force Countermeasures.”
Sponsors for the conference included a bevy of information warfare contractors, including some who have pretended not to engage in such activities, such as the San Francisco-based gig-work intelligence collection company Premise Data — a USAID contractor whose now-fired CEO waged an unsuccessful legal campaign to sue the author for $25 million in damages. Other sponsors included the prominent “tactical information warfare” contractor Two Six Technologies and the consulting arm of ‘Big Four’ accounting firm Deloitte.
Deloitte Consulting had already signed a nine-year, $950 million ceiling contract in September 2019 with what is now the Office of Competitive Activities, already paying out more than $72 million with transaction descriptions including “supply chain analytics” and “advancing commercially enabled intelligence (CEI).” Roughly $6 million of that payout has so far come from a potentially $19 million child task order signed last March, specifically for MORTAL MINT. The task order’s $52,480 payout to OpenSanctions came seven months later.
Updated on March 5, 2025 at 11:24 a.m. Eastern Standard Time to note OpenSanctions providing a screenshot of Google’s Gmail flagging the author’s request for comment email as dangerous.
Updated on March 4, 2025 at 11:15 a.m. to note Sayari’s participation on MORTAL MINT.
Updated on March 4, 2025 at 10:02 a.m. to incorporate post-publication comment from OpenSanctions.