National Security
Barring Speakers Under U.S. Sanctions Puts Ideas Off-Limits, Say Free Speech Advocates
A lawsuit filed Wednesday says the U.S. government violated the First Amendment when it prevented a U.S.-based organization from hosting people sanctioned by the U.S. as speakers at a conference earlier this year. The suit, if successful, could have far-reaching implications for placing federal limits on freedom of speech when sanctioned or otherwise designated people or groups are involved.
The complaint, filed by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, argues that the decision made by the Office of Foreign Assets Control could have consequences for public discourse, including whether news outlets could publish interviews with individuals designated under U.S. sanctions law.
For the lawyers bringing the suit, the current curtailment of speech based on sanctions amounts to the policing of thought.
“The question at the core of the case is what control the U.S. government has over the American mind and whether it can effectively insulate Americans from ideas and people who it decides are off-limits,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight Institute. “That is an extraordinarily dangerous authority.”
In January, the Foundation for Global Political Exchange, a U.S. nonprofit that organizes small-group discussions across the political spectrum in the Middle East, held an event in Beirut aimed at fostering political dialogue about Lebanon.
The Foundation sought to include five influential political figures in Lebanon who were either sanctioned by the U.S. government or were members of a designated organization. Two of the potential speakers were members of the Lebanese Parliament, one was a senior representative of the sanctioned Palestinian militant group Hamas, and two others were members of Hezbollah, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization but remains a major political party within Lebanon.
“The public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”
Out of prudence, the Foundation informed OFAC, the agency that regulates sanctions, that some of the participants were on the sanctions list or affiliated with sanctioned groups. The agency was categorical in its response: Any event held by Americans with designated individuals was prohibited and risked civil or criminal penalties. OFAC claimed that inviting any of the five people — even those who were members of sanctioned organizations but not themselves listed as individuals — would violate the law by giving them “a platform for them to speak” that would provide a “service,” according to the lawsuit. (OFAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The lawsuit argues that OFAC has no legal authority to prevent Americans from engaging in conversation with people on the sanctions list. The Foundation’s event was specifically protected by legal and regulatory exemptions on the exchange of information and ideas, it claims.
“OFAC is assuming the authority to control whom Americans get to hear from and by extension what views Americans hold,” Anna Diakun, a staff attorney at the Knight Institute, told The Intercept. “But the public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”
OFAC is part of the U.S. Treasury Department and administers and regulates sanctions against individuals and organizations abroad. U.S. sanctions often shift based on political conditions. Given the Foundation’s mission to promote political dialogue, particularly in conflict-stricken regions, the decision to restrict the event in Beirut could be at odds with U.S. political goals, the suit argues.
“While the government sometimes has legitimate interests in imposing sanctions on groups that are hostile to the United States or engaged in human rights abuses,” the complaint states, “prohibiting the Foundation from engaging in political dialogue with designated individuals undermines rather than serves those interests.”
On its face, the case deals with the specific situation of an American organization hosting people on the U.S. sanctions list at events. But the lawsuit argues that OFAC’s decision could be applied to political speech more broadly, making it effectively illegal for Americans to speak with people out of favor with the U.S. government, including restricting journalists from publishing interviews with sanctioned individuals, which is often necessary when reporting on conflicts abroad.
“OFAC legal theory would allow it to criminalize journalists who want to engage with ideas and individuals that the U.S. government disfavors,” Abdo said. “That is a tool of autocracy, not democracy where people get to decide which ideas to engage with.”
The post Barring Speakers Under U.S. Sanctions Puts Ideas Off-Limits, Say Free Speech Advocates appeared first on The Intercept.
Harvard Endowment Investor and Other Business Leaders Take a Solidarity Trip to Israel
Dozens of prominent investors and business leaders traveled to Israel this week to show solidarity with Israel amid its war on Hamas, according to documents from the junket obtained by The Intercept.
The trip included top officials from private equity firms like Bain Capital; leaders from the tech industry, like a Patreon executive; and a managing director at the endowment investment firm of Harvard University, a school riven by political clashes around the Israeli war on Gaza.
“In every war there are multiple fronts. The attendees of this mission are here to help counter the war’s economic disruption.”
The documents, which include an itinerary and list of attendees, provide details about the weeklong meeting taking place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, called the Israel Tech Mission. Beginning on Sunday, the meeting includes panels like “Tech in the Trenches: Supporting an ecosystem during wartime.”
Participants will hold meetings with top Israeli officials, like President Isaac Herzog, along with opposition leader and former military chief of staff Benny Gantz, who joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet after the October 7 attack.
Shoring up investor confidence would be welcome news in Israel. The Israeli stock exchange — whose chair Tech Mission participants are slated to meet with on Thursday — suffered billions in losses after the Hamas attack on October 7, though it has gradually recovered. The market losses came in the wake of the reported withdrawal from Israel of some foreign investors when the country was roiled by Netanyahu’s controversial attempt to roll back judicial independence.
The Israel Tech Mission is explicit in its support for the Israeli war effort.
“In every war there are multiple fronts,” Ron Miasnik, a co-organizer of the Israel Tech Mission who invests for Bain Capital, told the Israeli business website CTech. “The attendees of this mission are here to help counter the war’s economic disruption. We are focused on supporting and helping rebuild Israel’s world-class tech industry.”
According to an online application for the trip, a screenshot of which was obtained by The Intercept, attendees on the trip will have to pay their own way. “Attendees will organize their own travel,” the application says. “Participants will cover their own trip cost.”
Israel Defense Forces and Right-Wing Politicians
On the trip, the delegation will spend time with Israel’s senior political leadership as well as military figures. The online trip application says attendees will “receive confidential military and political briefings from former Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, as well as current Members of Knesset and senior military leaders.”
The group, according to the itinerary, is scheduled to meet with Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, soldiers on Tuesday before taking part in a “solidarity tech reception” drawing on figures as diverse as the Israeli NBA player and venture capitalist Omri Casspi to the CEO of Goldman Sachs Israel. (In response to a request for comment, Goldman Sach’s U.K. office said it had not heard back from its Israeli office.)
The Israel Tech Mission appears to have been organized by Itrek, a nonprofit based in New York whose logo appears on the itinerary and list of attendees. Itrek sponsors weeklong “Israel Treks” to build “appreciation for Israel among present and future leaders” so they can understand its “complex reality,” according to the group’s website. (Itrek did not respond to a request for comment.)
Israel boasts a robust tech sector. While pro-Israel figures have long touted the country’s reputation as a “start-up nation,” criticisms have emerged in recent years pointing to the role of Israel’s defense sector in creating talent and funding research that becomes the locus of tech projects — effectively profiting off Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The cyber specialists of the Israeli army’s Unit 8200, for instance, are known for creating successful start-ups, sometimes involved in security work and even alleged rights abuses.
Close relationships between Israel’s security state, its tech sector, and the U.S. technology community are common. Tesla CEO Elon Musk met with Netanyahu and top IDF officials last month to discuss “the security aspects of artificial intelligence,” according to a readout of the conversation. The Israeli–Palestinian magazine +972 reported last month that advances in artificial intelligence have allowed the Israeli military to generate targets more rapidly than ever before.
Israel Tech Mission attendees, for their part, are looking to support Israel’s tech sector.
“After October 7th, we feel it is critical for venture capital and technology business leaders to stand with Israel,” David Siegel, CEO of Meetup and co-organizer of the mission, said in a press release. “Our trip was oversubscribed for attendees. The technology community recognizes the heightened need for support as many Israeli entrepreneurs and their workforces are on the front lines as reservists.”
Harvard’s Massive Endowment
The attendee list for the Israel Tech Mission includes a diverse roster of investors and business leaders. Among those listed are top officials at companies working in stock trading such as Vstock Transfer, a stock transfer firm, and TIFIN, a financial technology investment firm that employs artificial intelligence. Investors from private equity funds like Apollo Global Management and Entrepreneur Partners are also slated to participate.
The attendee list also includes business officials like Ariel Boyman, a vice president at Mastercard; Steve Miller, chief financial officer at the glasses retailer Warby Parker; Michael Kohen, who leads the autonomy and automation platform at John Deere; and Jeffrey Swartz, the former CEO of Timberland. (Vstock, TIFIN, Apollo, Entrepreneur Partners, Mastercard, Warby Parker, John Deere, and Swartz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Israel’s War on Gaza
Also listed as an attendee is Adam Goldstein, managing director at Harvard Management Company, which helps oversee Harvard University’s over $50 billion endowment — the largest on Earth. The endowment investment fund has been accused in the past of investing nearly $200 million in companies that profit off Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. (The Harvard Management Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Elite Ivy League colleges have become a flash point in the U.S. debate about Israel’s war on Gaza. Harvard has faced a backlash from donors. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, for instance, has become a strident critic of pro-Palestine students and what he says is the school’s lackluster response to them — a battle fueled by years of resentment. And Harvard President Claudine Gay has faced, and resisted, calls to resign because of her response to pro-Palestinian activism and alleged antisemitism on campus.
In recent years, the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has gained steam at the university. Last year, the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, faced a backlash for its endorsement of the BDS campaign — which, if successful, would see Goldstein’s Harvard Management Company divest from Israel.
While Israel Tech Mission delegates are looking to boost the tech sector in Israel, the Israeli war on Gaza is also being used as a pitch for tech firms like NSO Group to improve their image back in the United States. The company was blacklisted by the U.S. when its phone-hacking software Pegasus was shown to be involved in rights abuses.
Lobbyists in Washington working for the company, which has faced cash shortages, have been using the Israeli war on Gaza to refurbish the company’s reputation. In November, the NSO lobbyists wrote to the U.S. State Department to make the case for “the importance of cyber intelligence technology in the wake of the grave security threats posed by the recent Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath.”
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Advocates Demand Compensation for U.S. Drone Strike Victims in Somalia
Two Dozen human rights organizations called on the Pentagon Monday to make amends to a Somali family following an investigation by The Intercept of a 2018 U.S. drone strike that killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.
The 14 Somali groups and 10 international organizations devoted to the protection of civilians urged Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to take immediate action. The family is seeking an explanation, an apology, and compensation.
“New reporting illustrates how in multiple cases of civilian harm in Somalia confirmed by the U.S. government, civilian victims, survivors, and their families have yet to receive answers, acknowledgement, and amends despite their sustained efforts to reach authorities over several years,” reads the open letter, which was shared with The Intercept.
The April 1, 2018, attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. A U.S. military investigation acknowledged the deaths of a woman and child but concluded their identities might never be known. This reporter traveled to Somalia and spoke with seven of their relatives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable,” said Abdi Dahir Mohammed, one of Luul’s brothers. “We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”
The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle, according to a report obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act after multiple requests, appeals, and a lawsuit. The U.S. task force members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male and killed Luul and Mariam in a follow-up strike as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the attack — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths.
The human rights advocates’ letter asks Austin to “take immediate steps to address the requests of families whose loved ones were killed or injured by U.S. airstrikes in Somalia” after the U.S. military ignored repeated attempts by another of Luul’s brothers, 38-year-old Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, to contact U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM.
“For more than five years, we have tried to make sure the identities of Luul and Mariam are known to the U.S.,” Abubakar wrote in a recent op-ed for The Continent. “I now know that the U.S. military has admitted not only to killing Luul and Mariam, but doing so even after they survived the first strike. It killed them as Luul fled the car. … The U.S. has said this in its reports, and individual officers have spoken to journalists. But it has never said this to us. No one has contacted us at all.”
Congress appropriates millions of dollars annually for the Defense Department to compensate families of civilians killed or injured in U.S. attacks, but the Pentagon has shown an aversion to confronting its mistakes and rarely makes compensation payments, even in cases as clear cut as this one.
“The U.S. response thus far stands in stark contrast to this administration’s stated priorities of mitigating, responding to, and learning from civilian harm,” reads the letter. “We urge the Department of Defense to urgently make long-overdue amends in consultation with Abubakar’s family and their representatives, including condolence payments and an explanation for why their demands appear to have been ignored until now.”
When asked if Luul’s family deserves compensation and if an apology and amends would be offered, the Office of the Secretary of Defense replied, “We do not have anything to provide for you on this right now.” AFRICOM also failed to answer The Intercept’s questions about contacting Luul’s family and providing compensation.
Last year, in response to increasing public reporting on America’s killing of civilians; underreporting of noncombatant casualties; failures of accountability; and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, known in Washington as the CHMR-AP, provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths, but lacks mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm.
“Although the CHMR-AP does not specifically provide for a re-examination of past incidents, nothing in the CHMR-AP prevents review of incidents in light of new information and appropriate reconsideration of past assessments and decisions under the improved processes and practices that the CHMR-AP seeks to establish,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence wrote in an email response to The Intercept’s questions.
“Making good on the Defense Department’s commitments to improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm must include reckoning with the harms of the last 20-plus years of U.S. operations,” said Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, one of the signatories of the letter. “The U.S. has at its disposal at least $3 million annually to make condolence payments to civilian victims and survivors — payments that we know provide both tangible assistance and symbolic meaning for families grieving and rebuilding from unimaginable loss. In this case and in others in Somalia and around the world, the U.S. owes it to survivors to make amends in whatever way is most meaningful for them — be that a formal apology, answers about what happened to their loved ones and why, condolence payments, or other assistance.”
The letter was also signed by Airwars, Amnesty International USA, the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (USA), Caddalaad Doon, Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders, Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, Hiraan Women Development and Family Care, Human Rights Watch, Juba Aid for Peace and Development Organization, Jubaland Youth Leaders, Kalkal Human Rights Development Organization, Marginalized Community Advocacy Network, PAX, People’s Aspiration and Human Rights Organization, Reprieve US, Resilience Hope Foundation, Somali Awareness and Social Development Organization, Somali Legal Action Network, Victim Advocates International, Waamo, Women and Child Support Organization, Youth Initiative and Human Rights Advocacy, and Zomia Center. In addition to the 2018 strike investigated by The Intercept, the letter mentions several other cases in which U.S. attacks in Somalia harmed civilians, including a 2020 drone strike that killed a teenage girl as she was sitting down to dinner with her family. Her relatives have also been trying for years to contact the U.S. in search of an explanation but have received no response, the letter says.
Advocates say that the deaths of Luul and Mariam provide the Pentagon with a unique opportunity to make good on long-standing promises to improve its mitigation of civilian harm and learn from past mistakes. A drone pilot and analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the attack was no anomaly. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention. It was like, ‘We can do whatever we want,’” he told The Intercept. When he counted the civilians he knew the U.S. had killed and compared that tally with publicly announced figures, he said, “the numbers just didn’t add up.”
“Our clients in this case began attempting to contact AFRICOM and the DoD in the immediate days after Luul and Mariam were killed and have followed every procedure these institutions have made available,” said Clare Brown, the deputy director of Victim Advocates International, an organization that supports victims of serious international crimes, including war crimes, and is now representing Luul’s family. “We are in the process of compiling a case which we intend to transmit to the U.S. through every possible portal, in the hope of finally getting a response. The family has the same ask they have been making for the past five and a half years — for both compensation and to be told, face to face, what happened to their sister and her daughter on that day in April 2018.”
Luul’s family was traumatized by the airstrike and has suffered for more than half a decade. Her brothers say their elderly father — who died earlier this month — never recovered from his daughter’s sudden death. Luul’s 6-year-old son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, constantly asks why Luul left him and is terrified of being alone. If he sees or hears a drone, he hides beneath a tree.
“Since the strike, our family has been broken apart. It has been more than five years since it happened, but we have not been able to move on,” Abubakar wrote. “But in all that time, even as we have contacted [the U.S. government] in every way we know how, we have never been able to even start a process of getting justice. The U.S. has never even acknowledged our existence.”
The post Advocates Demand Compensation for U.S. Drone Strike Victims in Somalia appeared first on The Intercept.
The Hamas Terrorist Who Wasn’t
How’s the backyard, Jason? Is there somewhere we can talk?”
It was May 20, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and an FBI SWAT team had raided the house Jason Fong shared with his parents in Orange County, California. Fong, a 24-year-old Chinese American who, until recently, had been a U.S. Marine Corps reservist, sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser outside.
“Just a couple of chairs at the back table,” he told the Irvine police detective and FBI agent questioning him.
Fong led the two lawmen to the backyard, where all three sat at a table near the pool. A body camera worn by FBI Special Agent Thuan Ngo recorded the conversation. Fong, still handcuffed, wore a blue button-down shirt and a white face mask. The family dog wandered around, happily wagging its tail.
“How long have you had this dog?” the detective, Michael Moore, asked.
“Since I was 16,” Fong answered.
Moore read Fong his Miranda rights; Ngo advised him that making a false statement to a federal agent is a felony.
“Let’s back up a little bit,” Moore said. “What are some big changes that have occurred in your life? You converted to Islam?”
“Yeah,” Fong answered.
The detective asked Fong how he became a Muslim, how many guns he owned, and how he used social media.
“I followed a couple of pages that were just mainly Muslim, like, shitposting, kinda just like —”
“Muslim what?” Ngo interrupted, apparently stumped by the word “shitposting.” “I’m sorry?”
“Kind of just, like, meme pages,” Fong answered. “A lot of them make jokes about stupid stuff, like extremism and all that stuff — things I do not condone. … They make memes about extremism in a joking manner.”
Fong described how he communicated with like-minded people on the internet, mostly in the joking or ironic ways of the extremely online. “It’s just satire,” he said, adding that he tried to dissuade anyone who appeared to take a genuine interest in extremist ideologies and groups.
But the federal agent kept pushing. He asked if anyone Fong knew via the chat group claimed to support terrorists. He asked for usernames.
“You’re saying you don’t support any of these groups, right?” Ngo asked.
“I do not,” Fong said.
“You don’t believe in any of these groups at all?”
“I don’t.”
Fong’s case represents a new and increasingly common form of terrorism sting conducted primarily online, in which federal investigators and prosecutors must navigate the often obscure boundary between protected speech and evidence of crime.
The detective and the FBI agent knew more than they were letting on that day in 2020. Hundreds of pages of New York Police Department and FBI internal reports, months’ worth of chat logs, and hours of recordings obtained by The Intercept reveal how the investigation of Fong began thousands of miles away in an NYPD intelligence unit. These internal documents and recordings also demonstrate how the FBI is coopting local law enforcement resources in its ever-expanding search for potential terrorists. Neither the NYPD nor the FBI responded to a list of questions from The Intercept.
Since February 2020, when the NYPD first introduced an undercover employee to Fong in a private group chat, the FBI had been secretly monitoring his online activity. Fong’s supposed chat group friends included at least two government agents — one from the NYPD and another from the FBI. As violent crime spiked in New York City during the pandemic, a division of America’s largest and oldest municipal police department was catfishing a California man who had no connections to New York and no plans to travel there.
Jason Fong prays with “Daniel,” an undercover NYPD employee, in a California hotel room during the pandemic.
Screenshot from NYPD undercover video
Following the backyard interrogation, the Justice Department charged Fong with four counts of providing material support to terrorists, alleging that he shared in the group chat military training documents he’d found online and believed could be used to aid Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a Syrian militant group, and that he tried to raise money for Hamas by sharing a website for Al Qassam Brigades, the Hamas militant wing responsible for the October 7 attack in Israel.
“This looks pretty terrible because it’s in a group full of Muslims,” Fong said of the evidence in his case. “Muslims, guns, bombs — automatically you have the word-picture association of terrorists, right? But go on an average Discord Christian server and see how many people justify the carpet-bombing of Gaza. Or go and look at any pro-Zionist group chat and see all the heinous things they say about people there. I’m sure that most of them are not serious.”
A Secret Life Online
Fong had been interested in firearms and military techniques since he was a teenager. He joined the Marine Corps as a reservist in 2014, right out of high school, signing his papers at a strip mall military recruiting office in Santa Ana, California.
His job assignment in the Marine Corps found him. Based on aptitude tests, Fong became an avionics maintenance technician for unmanned aerial vehicles, “UAVs” in military parlance — or drones. “I didn’t exactly hate my job as a UAV avionics maintenance technician, but I just didn’t really have much passion for it,” Fong told The Intercept, sitting in the living room of the house the FBI had raided three years earlier. “I didn’t feel like I joined the military to do this.”
As a sergeant, Fong applied multiple times to join the ranks of counterintelligence officers. He didn’t get the jobs because of background check concerns, he was told. “For some undisclosed reason, I could not actually be qualified for the job,” Fong said. He applied for other positions: Marine reconnaissance, Special Operations Command, anything that could be considered, in his words, “hardcore stuff.” Denied, denied, denied. The Marines appeared to want Fong where he was: fixing drones.
Diagnosed with autism, Fong has an impressive knack for languages. He grew up speaking English and Mandarin Chinese, and he began learning Russian on his own time while in the Marines, with the help of a pen pal in the predominantly Muslim region of Tatarstan. He’d visited her in 2017, to practice his Russian and see the country, and to this day, he wonders whether that compromised his military background checks.
By 2019, Fong wanted out of the Marines. “I pretty much spent my time just looking for civilian work,” he said. Fong had worked various jobs — as a personal trainer, an unarmed security guard, and a safety official at a shooting range — while he continued to live in his parents’ home in Orange County. And no matter where he was, he was always online, exploring his various curiosities.
“I spent a lot of time on social media, very mobile online life,” Fong said. “And that’s when I kind of got acquainted with people of the boogaloo movement. And these people, they started out as libertarians, and then they kind of degenerated into anti-state anarchy. But, I mean, we had a lot of things in common: [strong feelings about] constitutional rights, firearms especially, free speech, and fighting against tyranny.”
The so-called boogaloo movement refers to a loosely linked group of people who subscribe to an antigovernment ideology heavily invested in memes, guns, and the prospect of imminent civil war. In headline-grabbing cases, some adherents have been involved in murder, illegal firearms possession, violent plots, and even an FBI sting centering on a supposed conspiracy to support Hamas. But most so-called boogaloo boys are preppers with unimpressive levels of ambition, juvenile senses of humor, and fast internet connections.
Fong was intrigued by the boogaloo, whose members he followed on Instagram, but he struggled to take them seriously. “It’s just an online community of gun enthusiasts,” Fong said. “I wouldn’t really even describe them as an organized movement.”
The boogaloo followers Fong met online encouraged him not to reenlist in the Marine Corps: Don’t support the military-industrial complex, they told him. And Fong agreed. He knew he needed a change. “My life was rinse, wash, repeat,” he said. But the boogaloo boys couldn’t constrain Fong’s intellectual wanderings. “I dissociated, unfollowed all the pages,” he said.
Meme Streak
As 2019 gave way to 2020, and the coronavirus began to spread globally, Fong was spending even more time online, including following Russian-language accounts. He started noticing Instagram accounts that promoted Islam but had the same meme-oriented humor he’d enjoyed in the boogaloo movement. “It’s the same kind of humor but just different audiences, different subjects,” he said. The memes on the Instagram accounts had a common theme: poking fun at the idea that all Muslims are terrorists.
Fong had been raised in Chinese Christian churches, but he’d long been curious about Islam, and in January 2020, he converted and began attending a mosque in Southern California — a decision his parents couldn’t understand.
After interacting with the commentators on Islam-focused Instagram pages, Fong received an invitation to a private group of about 30 people; he was then invited into a subset of that group, which operated on WhatsApp. “So what happened was, a disagreement occurred,” Fong recalled. The more moderate members of the group, including Fong, were apoplectic that other members had shared in the chat propaganda videos from the Islamic State group, or ISIS.
The disagreements turned into arguments. Fong told the group that he was enlisted as a reservist in the Marines, prompting others to say that he couldn’t be a true Muslim. “They were calling me a heretic just for having served,” he said. Eventually, the group disbanded.
Fong focused his energies on a new meme-oriented Instagram page about Islam, which eventually birthed a new chat group on Signal. Fong, the administrator of this new group, called it “Mujahideen in America.” He wanted the group’s discussions to involve Islam, guns, and training.
“We’re going to go over here to talk about self-defense,” Fong, who went by the username asian_ghazi, said, describing what he viewed as topics for the group chat. “Boogaloo stuff, like kind of guerrilla tactics, but mostly for hypothetical scenarios, mostly self-defense, weapons safety, firearms.”
Fong had curated the group’s membership. There was Daniel, a Russian speaker Fong first met in the WhatsApp group that had fractured. There was also James, a teenager and recent convert to Islam who shared Fong’s ironic sense of humor. James had brought someone named Moussa into the group.
Moussa, pushy and boisterous, started to bring up terrorist groups in the chat. Daniel joined in, giving his opinions about Islamist movements in Chechnya and other parts of Russia.
“Their talks about this kind of stuff would be here and there,” Fong said.
Fong didn’t know what to do. Should he kick these guys out? He’d already seen one internet group fall apart. But he struggled to tell if this discussion went beyond harmless intellectual curiosity and debate.
Daniel and Moussa weren’t who they claimed to be. Daniel was working undercover for the NYPD. Moussa was an FBI informant, known in the bureau’s parlance as a “confidential human source.” They’d been tasked to find and secretly investigate potential terrorists online.
Members of the NYPD counter terrorism unit deploy during a Palestinian solidarity march on Oct. 13, 2023, in Manhattan.
Photo: Barry Williams/Getty Images
“Online Covert Employee”
Terrorism stings in the post-9/11 era, intended to catch would-be violent actors before they harm anyone, once played out exclusively in the real world: An FBI informant would meet a loudmouth at a mosque and offer that person a bomb, resulting in a high-profile arrest and raising questions about whether the FBI had manufactured the crime.
As the world moved online, so did sting operations. Instead of finding targets at mosques and engaging in conversations at coffee shops, counterterrorism agents now often pose as extremists online to lure in their targets. It’s catfishing, but under the color of law.
In 2018, a Tennessee woman named Georgianna Giampietro chatted online with two undercover FBI agents who claimed to be a married couple looking for help traveling to Syria to join a terrorist group. Giampietro offered instructions on how to avoid law enforcement detection and provided a Telegram username for an alleged contact in Syria. She pleaded guilty to material support charges and is serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence, even though the agents never intended to travel to Syria. Cases like Giampietro’s are increasingly common, with examples of FBI agents and informants posing online as supporters or members of ISIS and other terrorist groups.
But the FBI isn’t the only agency trying to catfish terrorists. The NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau, which earned a reputation as one of the most aggressive and wide-ranging law enforcement agencies of the post-9/11 era, has also evolved from crawling mosques to crawling the internet.
In early 2016, the NYPD launched an online investigation of Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, who was living more than 1,500 miles away in Jamaica. A detective sent Faisal a flattering message. That message blossomed into an online relationship, spanning nearly two years, which resulted in Faisal sharing ISIS propaganda and encouraging the undercover detective to travel to Syria. Faisal was extradited from Jamaica, convicted at trial in New York state court, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. The NYPD has also monitored the online activities of Muslim organizations in the northeastern U.S. and built online cases for the Justice Department against terrorism suspects in the U.S. as well as militants based overseas, such as a former Brooklynite who went to Syria to be a weapons trainer for ISIS.
The NYPD’s online activities are as much about capturing federal funding as they are about netting alleged terrorists. The department’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau receives more than $160 million annually from the federal government, most of it in the form of Department of Homeland Security grants. This partnership is part of the decadeslong, nationwide effort to expand collaboration and intelligence-sharing among law enforcement agencies. “Law enforcement in this country can no longer be content with merely focusing on activity in their own jurisdictions,” John Miller, then the NYPD’s deputy commissioner, told a House committee in 2019.
The NYPD’s online activities are as much about capturing federal funding as they are about netting alleged terrorists.
The investigation of Fong began on February 24, 2020, with a memo that circulated in the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. The memo described how an NYPD officer known as “OCE 1,” for “online covert employee 1,” had been added to Fong’s chat group. OCE 1 was “Daniel,” who spoke Russian like a native, according to NYPD recordings, but who had little trace of an accent when he spoke English.
Within days, according to reports obtained by The Intercept, the NYPD told the FBI about its nascent online investigation. The bureau promptly opened its own case, using Daniel, the NYPD undercover employee, as a proxy. NYPD and FBI records show the information went one way: from the NYPD to the FBI.
The FBI reports include screenshots of messages and pictures that Fong had sent to the private Signal group, including from his trip to Tatarstan in 2017. In one picture, Fong stands on a snow-covered street wearing a black ushanka, a Russian fur hat, with a Soviet-style red star.
From the outside, Fong appeared to fit a profile that has long concerned FBI counterterrorism officials: U.S. military service members drifting toward extremism. When the FBI first acknowledged this concern in 2009, officials said they viewed the military as a potential pipeline to far-right violent extremist groups. But the bureau didn’t exclude the prospect that U.S.-trained service members could become Islamist extremists, like Nidal Hassan, a U.S. Army major who killed 13 and injured more than 30 others in the Fort Hood mass shooting, also in 2009.
Fong had used guns since his teens, knew how to modify firearms, and had recently converted to Islam. The messages Daniel was providing to the NYPD, and Moussa to the FBI, also appeared to suggest that Fong had an anti-government ideology. In a screenshot of messages included in one FBI report obtained by The Intercept, Fong wrote:
Fuck getting [a gun] registered
Fuck the government
Fuck President Trump
Fuck the Feds
Fong also posted audio and video recordings to the group. Some were ordinary, such as complaints about being stuck at work. “I’m really, really ticked off because I couldn’t pray salah at all today,” Fong said in one recording, referring to the obligatory five daily prayers performed by Muslims.
Other recordings reviewed by The Intercept appeared potentially ominous. In one video, Fong set up his phone to record in his messy bedroom. “So, this is an AR-15-pattern rifle,” he said, showing his firearm to the camera. Fong had built the rifle himself, using individual parts to create a “ghost gun” that wasn’t legally registered. He had two magazines taped together in a so-called jungle clip, a military-style setup that speeds reloading. “So, the first lesson we’re going to learn is, how exactly do we clear a weapon?” Fong said. He then provided a one-minute tutorial on the proper handling of a rifle.
As with the meaning of a meme, Fong’s motivations were often hard to pinpoint. Was the video meant to be a useful tutorial, like hundreds of others available on YouTube? Or was it intended as training for people Fong believed to be violent extremists?
Many of Fong’s messages to the group were ambiguous in this way. In the group chat, for example, someone wrote: “Some dude got drunk last night and went on a bender and tried to kill cops …”
Fong replied: “I mean, I’d rather kill cops while I’m sober.”
In another instance, Fong included in the group chat instructions for making explosives with nitric acid that he’d copied from a website. “I really want to experiment with this without 1. Getting arrested 2. Getting my arms blown off,” Fong wrote.
On a different day, Fong posted: “I planned on dying here violently initially.” But then he followed that message immediately with: “Still not opposed to it lmao.”
Laughing my ass off — was it all just a joke to Fong? Or was the ambiguity an intentional cover for violent aspirations?
“No Need to Blow Them Up”
In March 2020, two months before the FBI and local police showed up at Fong’s house, James, the other young convert in the group, appeared to post a joking message of his own: “Me and the boys blowing up Keesler AFB near me,” he wrote, followed by a black flag emoji. Keesler Air Force Base is in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Fong replied to the message with another joke. “No need to blow them up,” he wrote. “Just yank the nerds off their computers and they’ll die of anxiety.”
Despite Fong’s reply, the FBI and NYPD assumed that Fong was somehow trying to aid extremists and terrorist groups. That assumption was bolstered, in the government’s view, by documents Fong shared with the group, including tactical instruction manuals that could be found online. “Take it, save it, study it,” he told the group, referring to military tactical instructions for entering a building.
Fong sent various other documents he found online, including a tutorial on how to make bombs. He never specifically plotted or encouraged violence, but Moussa had previously told Fong in the chat that he aspired to join the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group in Syria. Moussa then introduced into the group a man who claimed to be a Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham representative. This fictional terrorist, who was an undercover FBI agent, asked Fong for help in putting together a bomb. Instead of helping with the bomb, Fong removed Moussa and his friend from the group.
But some of Fong’s other actions weren’t as exculpatory.
In one message, Fong posted a link to a website run by Al Qassam Brigades, the militant Hamas wing. “This is a cause I am sure we can all get behind,” he wrote. Fong also posted a video tutorial showing how to donate to Al Qassam Brigades using bitcoin. Fong wrote in a message that he thought the group should learn about cryptocurrencies so as to “potentially give [donations] to groups we support anonymously.” But there is no evidence that Fong gave money to Hamas or explicitly encouraged donations from members of the group.
In April 2020, Daniel, the NYPD employee, flew to California. He told Fong that he was traveling on business, which was true. The investigators were taking their online probe into the real world, trying to position Fong to say something less ambiguous about supporting terrorists.
Fong met Daniel in his hotel room, since much of California was shut down during the pandemic. They prayed together in the room and ate takeout as a hidden camera recorded the meeting. Fong wore a long-sleeved shirt and skullcap. Daniel, his face blurred in the video, wore a black T-shirt and tracksuit pants. Their conversation went back and forth between Russian and English. They talked about the pandemic, Bill Gates, the economy, the Chechen war, and the Prophet Muhammed’s teachings about diet and exercise. Fong told Daniel that he admired Ibn al-Khattab, a well-known Salafi jihadist who’d fought in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Dagestan, and Chechnya until he was murdered by Russian security services in 2002.
Their conversation then turned to going overseas. Fong told Daniel that he was interested in learning more about Malhama Tactical, a private military contractor that became known as the “Blackwater of the Syrian jihad.”
“Well, first of all, Moussa is the one who told me about Malhama, you know?” Fong said, referring to the FBI’s informant. “I didn’t really know much about them.”
Malhama Tactical supported forces opposed to both the Syrian government and ISIS. While not a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, the military contractor was closely aligned with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which is designated as a terrorist group. Fong expressed interest in working with Malhama Tactical.
“You will train Malhama brothers?” Daniel asked Fong, according to a transcript translated from Russian by the FBI and obtained by The Intercept.
“I would want to work with Malhama, I think, and then fight with the group Ajnad al-Kavkaz,” Fong said, referring to a Chechen group active in Syria and Ukraine. “That’s what I would, like, ideally do if I go there.” Fong said he was particularly interested in fighting with the Chechen group in Ukraine, against the Russians.
“If I go there” — that was the context of Fong’s conversations with the undercover NYPD employee. It was a lot of talk and speculation. And it was as far as investigators could entice Fong to go.
The next month, the FBI and local police arrived at Fong’s parents’ home. The FBI agent asked Fong if he knew anyone who’d expressed interest in joining a terrorist group. Fong said that he didn’t. He also asked Fong if he’d ever met in person with anyone from the chat group. Fong claimed he hadn’t.
The FBI knew those claims weren’t true.
Illustration: Ryan Inzana for The Intercept
False Statements
Fong’s arrest in 2020 was big news in Southern California, where the press reported breathlessly on an FBI raid involving confiscated guns and allegations that a U.S. Marine had supported terrorists. The government claimed Fong had aided Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham by uploading documents about military tactics and bombmaking to the group chat and accused him of supporting Hamas by sharing a link to a website for the Al Qassam Brigades.
That the apparent “terrorists” Fong allegedly aided were government agents — Daniel with the NYPD and Moussa with the FBI — was irrelevant, according to the government. Under federal conspiracy laws, defendants need only believe that the person with whom they are conspiring is affiliated with a terrorist group.
But how much of Fong’s online activity could be considered First Amendment-protected speech remains an open question. The materials he shared with the group were available elsewhere online, and his precise purpose for sharing them was unclear. What’s more, while he’d appeared to suggest that he supported Hamas, he didn’t take any specific actions beyond sharing a website and a video tutorial.
Fong’s criminal trial began in January and quickly veered into the absurd. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter allowed Moussa, the FBI informant, who was paid $46,000 for his work on the case, to alter his appearance when he testified. Prosecutors had asked for what they termed “light disguise (such as changing their facial hair, hairstyle, or dress style),” to protect his identity. In addition, the judge ordered that the public be removed from the courtroom while the informant was on the stand. The jury was not supposed to know about the disguise or that the public was not allowed into the courtroom.
In the middle of the informant’s testimony, Los Angeles billionaire Isaac Larian — whose company developed Bratz dolls — wandered into the courtroom unmolested to say hello to Carter, who had presided over a 2011 trade secrets trial involving Bratz dolls and Mattel’s Barbies. Larian’s entrance startled Carter, who exclaimed that the courtroom should have been closed — exactly what the jury wasn’t supposed to know. Carter granted defense lawyers’ request for a mistrial.
Rather than retry the case, the Justice Department offered Fong a deal: Prosecutors would drop the material support charges if he’d plead guilty to a single count of making false statements to a federal agent. That charge had not been part of the Justice Department’s original indictment, and Fong knew that his panicked statements in his parents’ backyard had been recorded. “I couldn’t beat that charge,” Fong said. “They had me.”
Fong agreed to plead guilty, admitting that he’d failed to snitch to the FBI on Moussa, the bureau’s own informant.
In November, Fong was sentenced to three years and 10 months in prison — the net result of a four-month partnership between the FBI and the NYPD to nab a young man in California who, as even he admits, was guilty of an increasingly common offense: being a jackass on the internet.
The post The Hamas Terrorist Who Wasn’t appeared first on The Intercept.
A Defense-Linked Contractor Took Over a Successful CDC Anti-Overdose Initiative. It Imploded in a Day.
A groundbreaking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiative to support harm-reduction groups across the country fell apart this month after the program came under the control of a federal contractor that has done no public health work for the government.
The National Harm Reduction Technical Assistance Center, or TA Center, was founded in 2019 as a coalition of harm-reduction groups partnered with the CDC to offer training, funding, and guidance to those working to reduce overdose deaths. Its success rested on the deep experience and the trust community members had for the three main partner organizations, which included the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, or NASTAD; the National Harm Reduction Coalition, or NHRC; the University of Washington’s Supporting Harm Reduction Programs; and a handful of other groups.
This month, the TA Center ceased functioning as it had for more than three years: Instead of a partnership, the project would be administered as a federal contract. And the CDC gave the sole-source contract to the Florida-based firm H2 PCI, a relatively new federal contractor with close links to the defense industry and the murky world of military special operations.
H2 PCI entered negotiations with the primary partners in the center to make them subcontractors but did not send proposed subcontracts to the groups until early November. Rushed by deadlines, those talks broke down in late November, according to Laura Guzman, executive director of NHRC.
As the H2 PCI contract went into effect on December 1, the primary partner organizations that had made the TA Center a success parted ways with the project, Guzman told The Intercept.
“From the beginning, it was clear that they had zero experience in the public health field and absolutely zero experience in harm reduction,” Guzman said. “It would be really challenging to work with a contractor who has zero understanding of our world.”
Advocates fear the takeover could wash away the years of painstaking work of building up the TA Center and sever its vital connection to on-the-ground harm reduction providers, making it harder for them to serve the people who rely on them for clean needles, naloxone, and other services, according to Maya Doe-Simkins, a veteran harm reductionist who has worked closely with the program.
“This will have lethal implications.”
“This will have lethal implications,” Doe-Simkins said. “I mean, people’s jobs are important, but in communities, it’s also an issue of life and death.”
The project broke down because of what harm-reduction experts said was the CDC’s mismanagement of the process to transition the TA Center to H2 PCI, an unwillingness from CDC brass to address the groups’ concerns about the firm, and what the partners considered H2 PCI’s unworkable subcontract requirements, according to numerous sources formerly involved in the TA Center, including Guzman and others who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity because they still collaborate with the CDC on other public health projects.
The sources expressed concerns about the upstart H2 PCI’s lack of experience doing health work with the federal government. “From the beginning, we asked point-blank: ‘Do you have public health expertise?’” said Guzman. “And the answer was ‘no.’ Definitely logistics and communications, but really absolutely foreign to our world of nonprofit capacity building.”
The sources also questioned H2 PCI’s close ties to Advanced C4 Solutions, or AC4S, a larger defense contractor that has done more than half a billion dollars in federal contracts.
In a statement to The Intercept, Norm Abdallah, the CEO of both H2 PCI and AC4S, praised his firm’s track record and directed further questions to the CDC. “We have built a reputation for being able to deliver a superlative work product and we are excited to undertake the work that CDC has entrusted us to do,” he wrote.
The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including a detailed list of questions sent by The Intercept to the press office and more than half a dozen division heads and staffers working on the TA Center.
The implosion of the TA Center has already resulted in layoffs and resignations at two of the primary partner organizations, while other partners are scrambling to retain their employees with funding from other sources. The Washington-based Faces and Voices of Recovery, whose approach is based on recovery rather than harm reduction, is the only group still listed by the CDC as a partner for H2 PCI’s TA Center; until recently, the site featured six groups. (Faces and Voices did not respond to a request for comment.)
To many of the harm-reduction veterans who previously worked on the TA Center, the saga is a realization beyond even their worst fears of a feeding frenzy by private firms clamoring for a piece of the action amid an increase in federal funding and a flood of opioid settlement money earmarked for harm reduction.
“We’ve seen a bunch of what I would call ‘harm-reduction colonialism,’” said Timothy Santamour, a harm-reduction activist in Florida. “It’s no longer a fear, it’s an actuality.”
Newfound Distrust
At its core, harm reduction is best understood as a set of practices and ideas centered around a two-pronged mission of reducing the negative consequences of drug use — access to syringes, naloxone, and other lifesaving public health services —while simultaneously advocating for the rights and dignity of people who use drugs.
The influence of harm reduction in public health has expanded rapidly in recent years, bolstered by a growing body of scientific evidence proving its efficacy. At the same time, to meet increased demand, the number of service providers has exploded as drug users, families that suffered overdoses, and community activists joined existing providers in fighting against the ravages of the opioid crisis.
When Santamour, a co-founder of the Florida Harm Reduction Collective, began laying the groundwork for his organization in late 2019 and early 2020, the TA Center played a key role in helping him get the operation off the ground, in large part due to the trust its partner organizations enjoyed in the community.
“How quickly we’ve been able to grow in Florida and to have an impact, that has really been because of NASTAD and NHRC,” he said. “We would not have been able to do that on our own so quickly.”
The partners who made up the TA Center were originally funded by the CDC through a cooperative agreement, a funding mechanism whose main difference from a traditional contract consists of a higher degree of collaborative work between the funding agency and the partners. The original cooperative agreement was set to expire in 2022 but was extended twice and was supposed to run through December 1.
According to sources previously involved in the TA Center who spoke with The Intercept, the CDC informed the partner organizations in the spring of 2023 that the TA Center would be moving from a cooperative agreement to a contract. The federal officials gave the impression that the new contractor would function merely as a “pass-through,” essentially an added layer of bureaucracy with no substantial role in the operation of the TA Center.
It was not until late September that the partners learned that H2 PCI had been selected for the contract. Tensions flared, the sources said, when the CDC informed the partner organizations that H2 PCI would not be operating as a pass-through; instead, it would be required to receive at least 51 percent of the contract award and would therefore be taking an active role in running the TA Center.
With the December 1 deadline fast approaching, H2 PCI finally offered subcontracts to the partners in early November. The subcontract contained several unworkable provisions, said Guzman, the head of the former partner organization NHRC. For one, there was a nondisclosure provision. While the TA Center had created an information pipeline flowing back to the CDC, now all information with the federal agency would be sent through and vetted by H2 PCI. What’s worse, partner groups feared they wouldn’t be able to discuss aspects of their TA Center work with other groups without clearing it with H2 PCI.
“We are a convener of people, and we are constantly sharing information,” Guzman said. “So with providers, we couldn’t do anything without their approval.”
“The CDC has proven itself to not be a friend or a partner in harm reduction.”
The partner organizations also bristled at the H2 PCI subcontract’s lack of a termination clause, meaning they would not be able to exit the arrangement. The CDC contract contained the possibility for four years of renewal, and H2 PCI’s subcontracts bound the partner organizations to stay on board so long as TA Center money kept flowing.
“This was a unilateral contract that we could not undo,” said Guzman, echoing other partner organizations’ complaints. “I’ve been in the nonprofit world for 30-plus years, and I have never entered into any contract, even smaller contracts, with anybody where it’s not mutual.”
“Their answer was, ‘This is standard practice in our business,’” Guzman said. “And of course that’s where I think we pretty much live in two very different worlds.”
All three primary partner organizations expressed their concerns about the subcontracts to the CDC, to no avail. “We heard over and over that this was a done deal,” Guzman said.
Two of the partner organizations officially rejected the subcontracts on December 1, and H2 PCI rescinded their proposed contract from a third organization. Last week, NASTAD, NHRC, and the University of Washington team were officially removed from the TA Center.
As news of the TA Center’s partial implosion began filtering out last week, it was already threatening to undo much of the progress that the CDC has made to build connections with the harm-reduction movement.
“It’s going to be pretty hard for them to recover from this, because nobody’s going to trust them,” said Santamour. “The CDC has proven itself to not be a friend or a partner in harm reduction.”
Handouts of Narcan, fentanyl detection packets, and foil are given to drug users in need as a part of outreach on the streets of San Francisco on Feb. 3, 2023.
Photo: Nick Otto for the Washington Post
Jointly Owned Subsidiary
It is not entirely clear how or why the CDC selected H2 PCI to operate the TA Center, but records show the company won the $3.8 million annual contract thanks in large part to its status as a Native-owned “disadvantaged small business.” The designation makes companies eligible for no-bid contracts set aside as part of federal efforts to expand opportunities to marginalized communities.
H2 PCI is a jointly owned subsidiary of two Native groups — Hui Huliau, a Native Hawaiian organization, and the Alabama-based Poarch Band of Creek Indians — that do business with the Defense Department and other agencies through a raft of holding companies.
Incorporated in 2021, H2 PCI’s only other federal contracts are for supplying furniture and performing construction at State Department buildings in Cameroon and Zimbabwe. It won both public tenders in a no-bid process like the TA Center contract. Because contracts set aside for Native- and minority-owned businesses are not competitive, the contract officer selecting the entity must justify its appropriateness for the work entailed in the contract — though the justifications in the case of H2 PCI and the TA Center have not been made public.
H2 PCI shares an address and a CEO with the more well-established firm Advanced C4 Solutions, which is also owned by Hui Huliau. Over the years, it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts for services. For the State Department, the company had a contract during the winding down of the Afghanistan war and various transport tasks in Syria, Libya, and other hotspots. A 2014 State Department email released by WikiLeaks describes AC4S doing private security work in Yemen. The company’s website says its customers include federal intelligence, defense, and security agencies, including a host of Defense Department agencies doing work like bolstering “the War fighter’s Information Dominance objectives.”
“The industry practices that they prefer have nothing to do with our industry practices. The mechanism of contracting was very, very, very different from the way that we operate.”
Abdallah, the CEO of both H2 PCI and AC4S, is described in a company biography as having “over 20 years of experience in Joint, Special Operations and Air Force Combat Communications as well as Air Traffic Control support,” as well as being a “cyber operations officer” in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.
In promotional materials available on the website of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, H2 PCI is described as offering “tactical global logistics and construction,” with no mention made of public health or harm reduction.
In early conversations with the partner organizations of the TA Center, according to people with knowledge of the conversations, Abdallah and other members of H2 PCI pointed to their extensive work coordinating logistics in challenging locales as a selling point for its ability to take on the mission of coordinating technical assistance.
Guzman, the former TA Center partner organization head, said the background in a different industry made a big difference in the failed subcontract negotiations.
“The industry practices that they prefer have nothing to do with our industry practices,” she said. “The mechanism of contracting was very, very, very different from the way that we operate; not just the nature of the contract, but also because it is the key to success to be collaborative.”
Fighting the Overdose Crisis
Driven in large part by the contamination of black-market drugs with synthetic opioids like fentanyl and its analogues, overdoses have become the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, killing 106,699 people in 2021, the last year for which statistics are available. In response, there has been an explosion in the number of groups providing syringes, the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, and other lifesaving services to people who use drugs.
The TA Center was formed in 2019 and in some of the darkest days of the ongoing epidemic dispensed tailored help through its partner organizations.
With funding from the CDC and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the TA Center has, in its four years of operation, responded to more than 1,700 requests for assistance, helping hundreds of local organizations get off the ground, remain afloat, and navigate the often Byzantine rules of local health departments.
The TA Center was the flagship program funneling CDC resources and assistance directly to local harm reductionists. It had become a critical lifeline for front-line public health activists, who are often cash-strapped and frequently labor under intensely hostile and isolating conditions, according to Doe-Simkins, who co-founded Remedy Alliance, which helps supply providers with free and low-cost naloxone.
“Folks were working in really hostile, scary environments, and it is very isolating to be running an underground syringe-service program,” she said. “And the TA Center connected those folks to each other, which was such a really deep comfort for people who are doing some of the most groundbreaking public health work in this country.”
The post A Defense-Linked Contractor Took Over a Successful CDC Anti-Overdose Initiative. It Imploded in a Day. appeared first on The Intercept.
How to Authenticate Large Datasets
Unlike any other point in history, hackers, whistleblowers, and archivists now routinely make off with terabytes of data from governments, corporations, and extremist groups. These datasets often contain gold mines of revelations in the public interest and in many cases are freely available for anyone to download.
Revelations based on leaked datasets can change the course of history. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of military documents known as the Pentagon Papers led to the end of the Vietnam War. The same year, an underground activist group called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office, stole secret documents, and leaked them to the media. This dataset mentioned COINTELPRO. NBC reporter Carl Stern used Freedom of Information Act requests to publicly reveal that COINTELPRO was a secret FBI operation devoted to surveilling, infiltrating, and discrediting left-wing political groups. This stolen FBI dataset also led to the creation of the Church Committee, a Senate committee that investigated these abuses and reined them in.
Huge data leaks like these used to be rare, but today they’re increasingly common. More recently, Chelsea Manning’s 2010 leaks of Iraq and Afghanistan documents helped spark the Arab Spring, documents and emails stolen by Russian military hackers helped elect Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016, and the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers exposed how the rich and powerful use offshore shell companies for tax evasion.
Yet these digital tomes can prove extremely difficult to analyze or interpret, and few people today have the skills to do so. I spent the last two years writing the book “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data” to teach journalists, researchers, and activists the technologies and coding skills required to do just this. While these topics are technical, my book doesn’t assume any prior knowledge: all you need is a computer, an internet connection, and the will to learn. Throughout the book, you’ll download and analyze real datasets — including those from police departments, fascist groups, militias, a Russian ransomware gang, and social networks — as practice. Throughout, you’ll engage head-on with the dumpster fire that is 21st-century current events: the rise of neofascism and the rejection of objective reality, the extreme partisan divide, and an internet overflowing with misinformation.
My book officially comes out January 9, but it’s shipping today if you order it from the publisher here. Add the code INTERCEPT25 for a special 25 percent discount.
The following is a lightly edited excerpt from the first chapter of “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations” about a crucial and often underappreciated part of working with leaked data: how to verify that it’s authentic.
Photo: Micah Lee
You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, and juicy documents or datasets that anonymous people send you are no exception. Disinformation is prevalent.
How you go about verifying that a dataset is authentic completely depends on what the data is. You have to approach the problem on a case-by-case basis. The best way to verify a dataset is to use open source intelligence (OSINT), or publicly available information that anyone with enough skill can find.
This might mean scouring social media accounts, consulting the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, inspecting metadata of public images or documents, paying services for historical domain name registration data, or viewing other types of public records. If your dataset includes a database taken from a website, for instance, you might be able to compare information in that database with publicly available information on the website itself to confirm that they match. (Michael Bazzell also has great resources on the tools and techniques of OSINT.)
Below, I share two examples of authenticating data from my own experience: one about a dataset from the anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors, and another about leaked chat logs from a WikiLeaks Twitter group.
In my work at The Intercept, I encounter datasets so frequently I feel like I’m drowning in data, and I simply ignore most of them because it’s impossible for me to investigate them all. Unfortunately, this often means that no one will report on them, and their secrets will remain hidden forever. I hope “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations” helps to change that.
The America’s Frontline Doctors Dataset
In late 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, an anonymous hacker sent me hundreds of thousands of patient and prescription records from telehealth companies working with America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS). AFLDS is a far-right anti-vaccine group that misleads people about Covid-19 vaccine safety and tricks patients into paying millions of dollars for drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which are ineffective at preventing or treating the virus. The group was initially formed to help Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, and the group’s leader, Simone Gold, was arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In 2022, she served two months in prison for her role in the attack.
My source told me that they got the data by writing a program that made thousands of web requests to a website run by one of the telehealth companies, Cadence Health. Each request returned data about a different patient. To see whether that was true, I made an account on the Cadence Health website myself. Everything looked legitimate to me. The information I had about each of the 255,000 patients was the exact information I was asked to provide when I created my account on the service, and various category names and IDs in the dataset matched what I could see on the website. But how could I be confident that the patient data itself was real, that these people weren’t just made up?
I wrote a simple Python script to loop through the 72,000 patients (those who had paid for fake health care) and put each of their email addresses in a text file. I then cross-referenced these email addresses with a totally separate dataset containing personal identifying information from members of Gab, a social network popular among fascists, anti-democracy activists, and anti-vaxxers. In early 2021, a hacktivist who went by the name “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” had hacked Gab and made off with 65GB of data, including about 38,000 Gab users’ email addresses. Thinking there might be overlap between AFLDS and Gab users, I wrote another simple Python program that compared the email addresses from each group and showed me all of the addresses that were in both lists. There were several.
Armed with this information, I started scouring the public Gab timelines of users whose email addresses had appeared in both datasets, looking for posts about AFLDS. Using this technique, I found multiple AFLDS patients who posted about their experience on Gab, leading me to believe that the data was authentic. For example, according to consultation notes from the hacked dataset, one patient created an account on the telehealth site and four days later had a telehealth consultation. About a month after that, they posted to Gab saying, “Front line doctors finally came through with HCQ/Zinc delivery” (HCQ is an abbreviation for hydroxychloroquine).
Having a number of examples like this gave us confidence that the dataset of patient records was, in fact, legitimate. You can read our AFLDS reporting at The Intercept — which led to a congressional investigation into the group — here.
The WikiLeaks Twitter Group Chat
In late 2017, journalist Julia Ioffe published a revelation in The Atlantic: WikiLeaks had slid into Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter DMs. Among other things, before the 2016 election, WikiLeaks suggested to Trump Jr. that even if his father lost the election, he shouldn’t concede. “Hi Don,” the verified @wikileaks Twitter account wrote, “if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do.”
A long-term WikiLeaks volunteer who went by the pseudonym Hazelpress started a private Twitter group with WikiLeaks and its biggest supporters in mid-2015. After watching the group become more right-wing, conspiratorial, and unethical, and specifically after learning about WikiLeaks’ secret DMs with Trump Jr., Hazelpress decided to blow the whistle on the whistleblowing group itself. She has since publicly come forward as Mary-Emma Holly, an artist who spent years as a volunteer legal researcher for WikiLeaks.
To carry out the WikiLeaks leak, Holly logged in to her Twitter account, made it private, unfollowed everyone, and deleted all of her tweets. She also deleted all of her DMs except for the private WikiLeaks Twitter group and changed her Twitter username. Using the Firefox web browser, she then went to the DM conversation — which contained 11,000 messages and had been going on for two-and-a-half years — and saw the latest messages in the group. She scrolled up, waited for Twitter to load more messages, scrolled up again, and kept doing this for four hours until she reached the very first message in the group. She then used Firefox’s Save Page As function to save an HTML version of the webpage, as well as a folder full of resources like images that were posted in the group.
Now that she had a local, offline copy of all the messages in the DM group, Holly leaked it to the media. In early 2018, she sent a Signal message to the phone number listed on The Intercept’s tips page. At that time, I happened to be the one checking Signal for incoming tips. Using OnionShare — software that I developed for this purpose — she sent me an encrypted and compressed file, along with the password to decrypt it. After extracting it, I found a 37MB HTML file — so big that it made my web browser unresponsive when I tried opening it and which I later split into separate files to make it easier to work with — and a folder with 82MB of resources.
How could I verify the authenticity of such a huge HTML file? If I could somehow access the same data directly from Twitter’s servers, that would do it; only an insider at Twitter would be in a position to create fake DMs that show up on Twitter’s website, and even that would be extremely challenging. When I explained this to Holly (who, at the time, I still knew only as Hazelpress), she gave me her Twitter username and password. She had already deleted all the other information from that account. With her consent, I logged in to Twitter with her credentials, went to her DMs, and found the Twitter group in question. It immediately looked like it contained the same messages as the HTML file, and I confirmed that the verified account @wikileaks frequently posted to the group.
Following these steps made me extremely confident in the authenticity of the dataset, but I decided to take verification one step further. Could I download a separate copy of the Twitter group myself in order to compare it with the version Holly had sent me? I searched around and found DMArchiver, a Python program that could do just that. Using this program, along with Holly’s username and password, I downloaded a text version of all of the DMs in the Twitter group. It took only a few minutes to run this tool, rather than four hours of scrolling up in a web browser.
Note: After this investigation, the DMArchiver program stopped working due to changes on Twitter’s end, and today the project is abandoned. However, if you’re faced with a similar challenge in a future investigation, search for a tool that might work for you.
The output from DMArchiver, a 1.7MB text file, was much easier to work with compared to the enormous HTML file, and it also included exact time stamps. Here’s a snippet of the text version:
[2015-11-19 13:46:39] <WikiLeaks> We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.
[2015-11-19 13:47:28] <WikiLeaks> Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities.
[2015-11-19 13:48:22] <WikiLeaks> With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.
[2015-11-19 13:50:18] <WikiLeaks> She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.
I could view the HTML version in a web browser to see it exactly as it had originally looked on Twitter, which was also useful for taking screenshots to include in our final report.
A screenshot of the leaked HTML file.
Along with the talented reporter Cora Currier, I started the long process of reading all 11,000 chat messages, paying closest attention to the 10 percent of them from the @wikileaks account — which was presumably controlled by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s editor — and picking out everything in the public interest. We discovered the following details:
- Assange expressed a desire for Republicans to win the 2016 presidential election.
- Assange and his supporters were intensely focused on discrediting two Swedish women who had accused him of rape and molestation, as well as discrediting their lawyers. Assange and his defenders spent weeks discussing ways to sabotage articles about his rape case that feminist journalists were writing.
- After Associated Press journalist Raphael Satter wrote a story about harm caused when WikiLeaks publishes personal identifiable information, Assange called him a “rat” and said that “he’s Jewish and engaged in the ((())) issue,” referring to an antisemitic neo-Nazi meme. He then told his supporters to “bog him down. Get him to show his bias.”
You can read our reporting on this dataset at The Intercept. After The Intercept published this article, Assange and his supporters also targeted me personally with antisemitic abuse, and Russia Today, the state-run TV station, ran a segment about me.
The techniques you can use to authenticate datasets vary greatly depending on the situation. Sometimes you can rely on OSINT, sometimes you can rely on help from your source, and sometimes you’ll need to come up with an entirely different method.
Regardless, it’s important to explain in your published report, at least briefly, what makes you confident in the data. If you can’t authenticate it but still want to publish your report in case it’s real — or in case others can authenticate it — make that clear. When in doubt, err on the side of transparency.
My book, “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations,” officially comes out on January 9, but it’s shipping today if you order it from the publisher here. Add the code INTERCEPT25 for a special 25 percent discount.
The post How to Authenticate Large Datasets appeared first on The Intercept.
Pentagon Taps “Tiger Team” to Rush Weapons to Israel
The Pentagon is working to expedite weapons exports to Israel by deploying a so-called Tiger Team of experts to facilitate the transfers, according to procurement records reviewed by The Intercept. Some of the arms sales will be carried out through a new Army initiative designed specifically for the provision of weapons to Israel.
The Israel-specific program, called the Israel Significant Initiatives Group, is located within the Army’s Defense Exports and Cooperation office, which oversees policy for U.S. arms sales.
The Tiger Team meets daily with the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, which executes U.S. arms sales, to overcome barriers to arms sales to Israel. The “tiger team,” a crisis rapid response team involving a diverse set of experts, is supposed to examine potential bottlenecks and delays in weapons transfers and offer advice for alleviating the issues.
The existence of both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group have not been previously reported.
“As implementer of the vast majority of both State and Defense Department security assistance, DSCA sits at the center of our arms transfers to Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former director for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees U.S. arms transfers. He said the creation of a Tiger Team is a policy choice by President Joe Biden to get weapons to Israel as fast as possible.
“This shows that at all levels of government, from policy to implementation, the Biden Administration is doing all it can to rush arms to Israel despite President Biden’s recent explicit statement that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is ‘indiscriminate,’ and despite extensive reporting that the arms we are providing are causing massive civilian casualties,” said Paul, who resigned from the State Department in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing weapons assistance to Israel. “This will not be a proud moment for the Biden Administration, the State Department – or for DSCA.”
The Defense Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group.
According to a source familiar with the Tiger Team, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations, the group of experts has raised harm to civilians in Gaza as a potential issue with U.S. weapons sales to Israel.
“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest and direction from the top to keep the process moving,” the source said.
“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest.”
Both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group are using defense contractors to staff up. Reference to the Tiger Team appears in a job posting by the Hoplite Group.
“In response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency has served as the implementer of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process with Israel,” the job listing says. “There is a desire to generate real-time Lessons Learned to assess major bottlenecks, anticipate major hurdles to overcome, and analyze the limits of FMS support to Partner Nations.”
Another defense contractor, Sigmatech, listed a position for an “operations support specialist” to work on the Israel Significant Initiatives Group. The listing has since been removed.
The White House convened a Tiger Team in preparation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the Washington Post. After the invasion, the Tiger Team reportedly developed contingency plans for how to respond in the event that Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
Israel’s War on Gaza
According to Paul, the new Tiger Team for Israel shows that the arms sales system, already supercharged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is still not fast enough for the administration.
“The assembling of a Tiger Team demonstrates that the Biden administration believes that all of the existing mechanisms of arms transfer — mechanisms which have proved their extreme ability to expedite arms transfers to Ukraine for the past two years — do not work fast enough,” Paul said.
The Defense Exports and Cooperation office has previously touted its work providing security assistance to allied countries. Over the past year, for example, it has posted copies of several Defense Department press releases detailing security assistance to Ukraine, as well as other partner countries like Colombia and the Philippines.
“U.S. Sends Ukraine $400 Million in Military Equipment,” a March press release is titled. The release includes a picture of a tank unit billowing smoke from its howitzers. Another press release, from December of last year, detailed a security package to Ukraine, right down to the specific numbers of munitions like artillery, tank, and mortar rounds.
When it comes to Israel, the Defense Exports and Cooperation office has not posted a single press release this year. Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Biden administration’s weapons transfers to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported.
White House spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged the secrecy in October. “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” he told reporters.
Shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, the White House asked Congress to remove key restrictions on Israel’s ability to access U.S. weapons stockpiles in the country, as The Intercept reported last month. The White House request sought to “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles” from the stockpiles, as well as to remove requirements that such weapons be obsolete or surplus in nature.
In other instances of weapons sales to Israel, the administration has cut out Congress entirely. Last week, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to authorize the sale of 13,000 tank shells to Israel.
The post Pentagon Taps “Tiger Team” to Rush Weapons to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.
State Department Stuns Congress, Saying Biden Is Not Even Reviewing Trump’s Terror Designation of Cuba
As one of his final foreign policy acts as president, in January 2021 Donald Trump added Cuba to the list of “State Sponsors of Terror,” reversing the Obama administration’s 2015 determination that the designation was no longer appropriate.
The incoming Biden administration pledged to Congress it would start the process of overturning Trump’s redesignation, which by statute requires a six-month review process. Yet in a private briefing last week on Capitol Hill, State Department official Eric Jacobstein stunned members of Congress by telling them that the department has not even begun the review process, according to three sources in the room.
In the briefing, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., inquired as to the status of the review. In order to remove Cuba from the list, statute requires at least a six-month review period. The news that the State Department had not even launched the review came as a surprise to McGovern and others in the room, and meant that the delisting couldn’t occur before mid-2024 at the earliest. McGovern pressed Jacobstein, noting that Congress had previously been assured that a review was underway. Jacobstein, according to sources in the room, said that perhaps there had been some misunderstanding around a different review of sanctions policies that State was undertaking.
“I don’t think they were prepared to respond to how upset members were,” said one Democrat, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. “They were furious.”
Vedant Patel, a spokesperson for the State Department, declined to comment on a closed-door meeting in Congress, and additionally declined to directly confirm or deny whether a review was ongoing. “We’re not going to comment on the deliberative process as it relates to the status of any designation,” said Patel. “Any review of Cuba’s status on the SST list — should one ever happen — would be based on the law and criteria established by Congress.”
McGovern, however, had already been told that such a review was ongoing, according to multiple sources who heard directly from McGovern about the State Department’s messaging.
Biden’s refusal to even review Cuba’s status marks a strong rebuke of one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements, the move toward normalizing relations with Cuba.
The Trump administration’s rationale for redesignating Cuba as a sponsor of terror relied heavily on the country having hosted representatives from FARC and ELN, two armed guerrilla movements designated by the U.S. as terror groups. But in October 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks. The move by the Trump administration was “an injustice,” he said, and ought to be undone. “It is not us [Colombia] who must correct it, but it does need to be corrected,” added Petro, himself a onetime guerrilla.
“When it comes to Cuba,” Blinken said at the press conference, “and when it comes to the state sponsor of terrorism designation, we have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements, and we will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation.” Blinken’s public claim — “we will continue as necessary to revisit” the designation — coupled with private assurances from the State Department left members of Congress certain that a review was underway.
Blinken was also asked about Cuba’s status in a hearing in March 2023 and said that Cuba had yet to meet the requirements to be removed from the list. “In both of these instances the Secretary was reiterating what we’ve said previously — should there be rescission of the SST status, it would need to be consistent with specific statutory criteria for rescinding a SST determination,” Patel said.
The terror designation makes it difficult for Cubans to do international business, crushing an already fragile economy. The U.S. hard-line approach to Cuba has coincided with a surge in desperate migration, with Cubans now making up a substantial portion of the migrants arriving at the southern border. Nearly 425,000 Cubans have fled for the United States in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, shattering previous records. Instead of moving to stem the flow by focusing on root causes in Cuba, the Biden White House has been signaling support in recent days for Republican-backed border policies.
Hopes for a shift on Cuba policy have not just been fueled by the State Department’s misleading pledges about a review, but also by a semi-public moment picked up by a hot mic ahead of the previous State of the Union, in which Biden approached New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the chamber’s leading Cuba hawks, and told him the two needed to chat. “Bob, I gotta talk to you about Cuba,” Biden told him. Menendez has since been indicted as an alleged intelligence asset of Egypt, and there is no indication the two have talked about Cuba.
The post State Department Stuns Congress, Saying Biden Is Not Even Reviewing Trump’s Terror Designation of Cuba appeared first on The Intercept.
TikTok Influencer Recruiting for Secret U.S. Bases in Israel
Twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army infantry veteran Thomas Latham is one of countless young people on TikTok, but he’s used it for a different purpose than most: recruiting veterans to staff secret U.S. military bases in Israel.
“Being a contractor is lit, in America this view would be $4,000 a month,” says the superimposed text on a TikTok post by Latham. His phone camera pans across the view from a high-rise in the Israeli town of Beersheba. In 2017, the Israeli military celebrated the construction of a U.S. military base in the town — a presence the Pentagon tried to downplay.
The video is one among many on Latham’s feed, where he frequently extols life as a military contractor. Latham regularly posts job opportunities to help veterans trying to find work after the military, he said in an interview with The Intercept. At first, the TikTok posts came as part of his work as a recruiter for the private security contractor Triple Canopy. Since leaving Triple Canopy, he’s recruited for other firms too, but sometimes he just posts.
Thanks to the job listings and other commentary, Latham’s TikTok account provides a rare glimpse into the secretive world of national security contracting.
“People like me because I don’t gatekeep information.”
“I think what makes it work so well is it’s an industry clouded in mystery,” Latham told The Intercept. “People like me because I don’t gatekeep information.”
Amid all the self-serving talk in the military contracting world about service and honor, Latham’s honesty stands out, especially when it comes to companies’ real motive: their bottom line. “Private defense companies after seeing another conflict on European soil,” says the text on one TikTok, as a camera zooms in on a tuxedo-clad man opening his arms and grinning.
“Private contracting, regardless in which realm — you need conflict you need things to guard. You need things to protect,” Latham said. “Without anything going on, contracts are not going to pay as much.”
For critics of U.S. defense spending, however, the contracts speak to a bloated military budget that outsources its own security, creating a windfall for private security firms to do what used to be a government job.
“It really speaks to our priorities that the Pentagon has divested from essential functions like base security,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information, who noted that defense priorities seemed to be tailored to contractors.
Latham worked as a recruiter for Triple Canopy until March, before taking up a recruiting contract for a smaller firm, which he declined to identify. (Though Latham still posts contracting opportunities, he said he now works for the U.S. Forest Service.)
Many job listings of the sort posted by Latham require government security clearances, meaning that potential candidates will frequently be military veterans or those who have already worked in the private security world. Both communities, and the significant overlap between them, can be insular and are known for informal sharing networks.
“As mysterious as the defense industry is, I managed to open a gate for Triple Canopy,” Latham wrote in a LinkedIn post, “to a direct market of qualified individuals.”
A TikTok Thomas Latham posted from Beersheba, Israel on March 14, 2023.
Photo: The Intercept
Younger Recruits
With companies needing to reach a younger candidate pool for contracting gigs, Latham is at the vanguard of recruiting. He is using TikTok, the China-based social media giant that allows for sharing short, often informally made video clips, as a new vein for tapping into the networks of qualified potential applicants. TikTok is especially popular among young users who, like Latham, peruse and post on the platform to engage with everything from entertainment to news.
William Hartung, an expert on defense contracting with the Quincy Institute, said companies like Triple Canopy may be taking the novel approach to expand their reach among candidates. He said, “It may be as simple as seeking platforms where they are more likely to reach younger potential recruits.”
After leaving the army in 2021, Latham was approached by Triple Canopy about a job in Kuwait. He was so excited, he took to TikTok to post a 15-second video letting people know how much they could make working there. The post quickly went viral. Triple Canopy took note — and offered him the recruiter job. (Constellis, which owns Triple Canopy, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“The reason why I got into this was to help veterans land jobs in a field that they’re already familiar with,” Latham said. “I understand how it is to be a veteran, how hard it is to find a job in a bunch of different industries you never really fit in.”
The golden age of private security contracting, Latham said, was during the Iraq War. In the era following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration sought to privatize its global war effort, handing companies contracts for everything from logistics to providing security. In the first 10 years of the Iraq War, the U.S. spent nearly $140 billion on contracts with businesses, private security contractors among them.
The most notorious of the private security firms was Blackwater, which massacred 17 Iraqi civilians in a single notorious incident and kicked off a national discussion about contractor accountability — and a lengthy legal fight.
In one TikTok post referencing the Iraq era, Latham makes light of a 2014 merger between Triple Canopy and Academi, Blackwater’s successor. A TikTok user asked Latham in a comment, “Isn’t Academi formerly known as Blackwater?” Latham refers to the firm in a response as “a company that shall not be named.” He cracks, “I’m unsure; I’ve never heard of that company before and neither have you.”
Whatever the companies’ names, the post-September 11 wars were a windfall for the industry — and for the cohort of veterans and other security personnel who found new, if sometimes dangerous, employment. At the height of the security contractor boom, Marine veterans could make as much as $200,000 a year.
“I’ve met people that were veterans. They were like, ‘Yo, dude, I have no money, I have nothing.’ Now they’re making money that they would never even imagine.”
“I’ve met people that were veterans. They were like, ‘Yo, dude, I have no money, I have nothing.’ Now they’re making money that they would never even imagine,” Latham said. “You kind of feel good after being a part of that.”
Hartung said the jobs offer veterans opportunities to make an income that might not otherwise be available to them. “Many veterans struggle to find adequately paying jobs when they leave the service, especially those with families to support,” he said. “Working as a private security contractor can be relatively well paying, and it uses skills that ex-military personnel learned during their time of service.”
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, fewer employment opportunities became available, though Latham said newer conflicts might change that. In January, he posted a listing on TikTok for a Triple Canopy gig in Germany, where the Pentagon’s European Command runs much of its effort to support Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.
A screenshot of a TikTok Thomas Latham posted on July 13, 2023.
Photo: The Intercept
“A Lot More in Play With Particularly Israel”
“Ever since Hamas invaded Israel,” Latham said in a TikTok two days after the attack, “there’s been chatter about if we’re gonna get out there and expand within Israel.” The chatter, he explained, was coming from “a lot of my buddies in the private sector.” In the TikTok, Latham superimposes himself in front of a screengrab of a contract listing for a security detail in Jerusalem. The job listing doesn’t disclose who the work is for, and Latham, using his expertise, sorts through some possibilities.
He says in passing that “there are contracts that have dropped” to support U.S. Special Operations Forces, the military’s secretive elite units, which the Pentagon has acknowledged are operating in Israel.
Latham concludes that the job listing is likely for a position with SOC, a Virginia-based security firm, to work for WPS — or World Protective Service, which does security for the U.S. State Department around the globe. After naming a few of the listing’s requirements, he said, “So it just makes sense that it’s a WPS contract and it’s SOC’s WPS contract — if I was a betting man.”
“There’s a lot more in play with particularly Israel that not a lot of people know about. We have military bases there.”
The video is typical, with Latham explaining to both potential security recruits and laypeople about how the contracting jobs work, but also delving into the geopolitics that drive the industry. The short video about the Israel posting offers Latham’s explanation why assignments are cropping up there in the aftermath of the Hamas attack: because U.S. installations there were “taken completely off guard by all this.”
“There’s a lot more in play with particularly Israel that not a lot of people know about,” Latham says. “We have military bases there, multiple military bases there.”
Latham is referring to the web of bases the U.S. quietly maintains in Israel. In August, the Pentagon awarded a $38.5 million contract to build facilities for housing troops at a secret base in Israel, The Intercept recently reported.
Other bases include weapons stockpiles the U.S. military has maintained in the country since the 1980s, originally intended for use by the U.S. in the event of a regional war but which Israel has increasingly drawn on for its own purposes over the years. (President Joe Biden recently asked Congress to remove nearly all restrictions on Israel’s ability to access the stockpiles, as The Intercept reported last month.)
Israel’s War on Gaza
Last year, the U.S. Army awarded Triple Canopy a $21 million contract for armed security guards at an undisclosed and not previously reported communications site in Israel, according to procurement records. The work requires a secret-level security clearance.
Latham’s TikTok account, with some 17,000 followers, appears to drive significant numbers of people to private security job opportunities. Data Latham posted on engagement with links on his social media postings show over 1,000 people clicking through to each one of three security job postings in Israel, Kuwait, and Germany — the countries he has said he recruits for.
The conflict between compensation and undesirable locations is a recurring theme in Latham’s posts.
“When you thought you were done with international contracts, yet the offer though,” another TikTok is captioned.
“6 figures take home is cool and all, but what’s the living conditions lol?” a user replies. “A tent for 175k? Nah.”
The post TikTok Influencer Recruiting for Secret U.S. Bases in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.
Henry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100
Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.
There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.
The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.
Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.
As National Security Adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.
In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”
“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.
Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”
North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.
As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.
In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans. In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.
Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”
Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.
“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”
“He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”
Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”
Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.
In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.
Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.
“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”
Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.
Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.
To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.
“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.
When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”
“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”
“Come on now.”
“No, no, no, were particularly —”
“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”
When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”
“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war.”
Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”
Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.
“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”
Correction: December 1, 2023
An earlier version of this article included a pre-publication title for Carolyn Eisenberg’s book. The story has been updated to reflect the actual title.
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