Thread by @Suzi3D

LONG THREAD:

Today, a pro-Trump journalist was arrested while releasing a new doco exposing major US intel & military figures, based on materials from 2 ex-employee whistleblowers.

I have just viewed the doco. Its content is significant & I will now analyse it in full below.

DISCLAIMER 1: I deliberately didn't name the journalist, the documentary or the whistleblowers in the above tweet, because I'm well used to having my social media posts suppressed so was avoiding key words deliberately. I'll post the links at the very end of the thread.

DISCLAIMER 2: I am a journalist who specialises in writing about intelligence agencies and whistleblowers. I am not pro-Trump. I do not agree with much of the politics of the documentary maker & her whistleblowers. However, I believe their content is important and merits analysis

DISCLAIMER 3: What I saw in the documentary, in summary, is a far more in-depth & significant analysis of US intel than I've seen come out of the Left in years. The Left should be as alarmed by the revelations as any pro-Trump person is. Leftist journalists: we need to do better.

METHOD OF ANALYSIS: I will post rough time stamps as per the copy of the doco currently on YT (though probably it won't remain there for long), summarise key points from the doco, and add contextual information that I have accrued from my own journalism and experiences.

DISCLAIMER #4: I live in exile in Russia due to persecution in my home country by Western intel. I am not employed by any Russian organisation, have never received a single dollar from Russia/Russians, have NEVER been told what to say or write. My opinions are completely my own.

That said, let's get to it.

1. The documentary opens with a 'Drain The Swamp' animation. It's cute, but I can tell you for a fact that the swamp is a transnational operation, spanning more than 100 countries worldwide, and is not confined to any US political body. Sadly.

2. The opening question of the documentary, circa 0:20 secs: "What if I were to tell you that a small group of government contractors were hired by government officials to frame the Trump campaign, set him up for the Russia collusion investigation...

...provided witnesses for the impeachment hearings and provided administrative support services to the DOJ during the Mueller investigation? And what if it just so happened the same group of contractors are behind the fake news in Mainstream Media, influence operations..."

So begins the framing of the documentary, as being Trump and Russiagate-centric, but actually what follows, and what most interests me, are far more wide reaching questions around the power wielded by current and ex-US intelligence agencies, and their ability to target citizens

There is also investigative strands that touch on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Seth Rich & other areas of significant interest to people like @KimDotcom, all WikiLeaks supporters and myself - many of us who are well outside of Trump's camp or base. What follows is *public* interest

3. At 01:04 "The ObamaGate scandal only scratches the surface."

Cuts to Lindsay Graham & other politicians talking about "Russian interference".

Voiceover: "Both parties are equally guilty of covering up what should turn out to be an even bigger scandal: Shadowgate..."

At 01:37 the filmmaker describes Shadowgate:

"The tactical and operational role the shadow government played behind the scenes carrying out the coup against Pres. Trump. We're going to be looking behind the puppets at who the real puppet master string-pullers are."

02:02 "This is about people whose names never come up, but should. Career politicians... are not the shadow government. The shadow government consists of government contractors, defense, intelligence, security and so on... aka the Military Industrial Complex"

"...that way what the public sees through FOIA requests, investigations, Congressional hearings or otherwise, is as clean as a whistle. All the dirty work is kept private, with contractors in clandestine networks..."

"These contractors have used their connections, power and influence to create an unprecedented international criminal enterprise where blackmail is traded and people's personal data is gold."

The above concludes the introduction section of the documentary. My thoughts next:

IMO what she calls 'the contractors' aren't themselves innovating the criminal enterprise - they're just creating private, for-profit mirrors of the structures of the intelligence agencies they usually exit from into private industry. The contractors are like mini-intel agencies

...and the intelligence agencies themselves are usually among their biggest customers (though corporations and foreign govts/foreign intel agencies are on their customer lists too). We've seen that with everything from Stratfor in the US, to TCIL's private fusion centre in NZ...

...though she's absolutely right that the use of contractors provides deniability for their govt & non-govt clients. The contracting companies provide an insulation layer for corps & military industrial complex officials and actors who are up to no good, often with public money

I'd also add (as it doesn't get touched on in the documentary) private intelligence is a highly unregulated space, and the Rumsfeld "Total Force" doctrine brought many security & intelligence contractors under the umbrella of the US military, granting them immunity to prosecution

That fact, coupled with the Director of NSA having sole responsibility for writing NSA's policies & directives, then *only* being answerable to the 'Judicial Review Board' comprised of heads of CIA, DoD, State + Joint Chiefs (circle jerk much) makes intel agencies rogue operators

In #DecipherYou, a series where I studied Snowden files live on YouTube, we discovered the Director of NSA had been retroactively rewriting NSA policy directives to cover NSA staff for things they'd been doing that were illegal. They also tightly control flow of info to Congress

4. At 03:14 the filmmaker introduces her two whistleblowers.

"...who both worked extensively within the shadow govt as contractors have come forward with revelations that may be part of the biggest whistleblowing event to date."

"I am one of thousands of faceless patriotic Americans that worked within the shadows.... people that worked for John Brennan approached me... while I was in the Navy" says Tore.

Tore worked in Electronic Warfare, then Information Warfare. Her base was converted from EW to IW.

Bergy worked for General James Jones at his company Dynology, his direct report was the General's son.

(I'm adding a lot of screenshots now because I'm going to discuss the implications of what's written in the documents shown and not just what's stated in the voiceovers.)

Bergy worked on Dynology's DoD contract for "Interactive Internet Activities." Don't be fooled by the name

"Interactive", to DoD apparently means "two-way communications". Basically in their view, any two-way communication presents an opportunity for them to get involved in, or influence the communication. They stipulate: emails, blogs, chat rooms, and internet bulletin boards.

The document also talks about operating in "real time" - this is reminiscent of NSA documents from Snowden files which constantly talk about things needing to be real time - in fact one of the military targeting gateways is literally called the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG)

Note that the above Wikipedia reference (terrible source but in the above case, accurate as per related NSA docs I've studied from Snowden files) says the NSA established the RTRG in 2007 - and this whistleblower's document is dated June 8th 2007. Lending to its credibility.

Also note that in the document, the DoD states that the purpose of their "Internet Activities" is to "provide information to the public" (propaganda operations) "shape the security environment" (by influencing public opinions) & "support military operations" (info/influence ops)

At 04:30 the whistleblower himself states that it was also to support "hacking operations" - CNO (computer network operations).

Almost faded out at the bottom of the document, the words: "programs, products & actions that shape emotions, motives, reasons & behaviours.."

So the military doesn't just want to feed you false information or change your belief system - they also want to provoke emotions and feelings in you, that change your motives, your reasoning, and your behaviours - to make you take actions that are in their interests.

5. Bergy explains what Shadownet, the Dynology product he worked on is:

"A supporting application that is like a Microsoft Project, that allows you to manage large projects... but it's managing the most malevolent operations that you could imagine."

Let's discuss this screen:

Here's a more full view of it, though hard to read. @LissaKJohnson you will definitely want to see this.

The Dynology product credit at the bottom is dated 2009. So the contract was 2007 and the deployment of this version of the application was two years later (which is normal)

Screenshots like the above are so valuable because we are able to see what things look like to the operators of these psyops. We can see the functionality of the program, we can see their internal indicators and compliance requirements, and their capabilities. Literally priceless

On the top of the screen, we see:

"Engagements" - these are likely jobs, tasks, or the record of interactions

"Targets" - list of their victims

"Entities" - likely classes of targets, groupings like organisations or hashtags

"Personas" - the spy's sock puppets/fake identities

...and "Admin", because even spies have areas that are restricted from them, and themselves get monitored, by their I.T. administrators and executives.

(Spies themselves are ginormous internal targets and many literally live a life of fear like their targets. It's karmic & sad)

On the main dashboard of the application we see:

Under "Key Information":

A dropdown to select the target (yep, we really are names in their dropdown list)

A dropdown to select the fake identity they use to scam us with

They can also create targets and create personas

The "create target" part is one of the most worrying factors of all and I've been talking about this for years now -

In a for-profit surveillance industry, making more money and having more workload requires MORE TARGETS.

Every year, they need more targets than the year before

They started off just going after radicals/dissidents etc - then that became journalists, then *any* issue-based dissenter (on the right or left), then teachers/educators, scientists, you name it - but eventually, if we let this continue, literally everyone will become a target.

Now I've had to super-zoom in to try to show you this portion of their screen - which is the part @LissaKJohnson will be most interested in.

It's the angles by which they craft their attempt to influence us. Their ins. Designed to trigger emotion & mirror human social behaviour

The military are all about metrics, so what they're doing here is logging the strategy they used on the target so they can work out what was most effective.

Their manipulation options read:

Legitimacy
Inevitability
Self Interest
Nostalgia
Bandwagon
In Group-Out
Group-In

I have a fair idea what the first 4 are but when it comes to these terms I prefer to defer to @LissaKJohnson or someone who is trained in psychology as they often have more specific meanings when employed as attacks, than the obvious. I may see if she wants to do a stream on this

I'm pretty sure none of us would have to look very hard to find examples of "people" (personas) online using attacks on 'legitimacy', or invoking 'inevitability', 'self interest' or 'nostalgia' to bolster support for a political position or to sway the direction of a conversation

6. At 05:10 Tore explains her work for a company called CGI.

"I was a contractor for various intelligence agencies that were privately created... because unlike what most people think, our intelligence doesn't stay within our borders or within federal buildings."

"What I did was something called localisation... you find a group of people that could be a whole country, or a city, or a 6-block radius like CHAZ... you try to get into their mind. You have to understand how they eat, how they walk, how they talk, what pushes their buttons..."

"...what drives them nuts, what upsets them, what makes them happy, then you use that to their advantage to push whatever ideology or product or direction you want them to go. Marrying together cultural appropriation, language, nuances of the demographic you are targeting..."

At 07:39: "So if I want to blackmail you & put you under my thumb... I'll know your deepest darkest fears. I'll know people I can get in contact with to find out more about you."

Bergy: "You understand enough about someone.. you can use their anxieties"

"You can use those things to help reflexively control or influence a target, or a group of people, or an entire election, or an entire country."

Tore: "What Bergy created was a program that was based off the strategies that we [intelligence agencies] used in person..."

"...a psychological operation, but that crunches data... so you can predict how your target will respond."

At 9:42, Bergy: "The database component allows you to build behavioural profiles on individual targets. Through those you can implement reflexive control."

QUICK SYNOPSIS OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF WHERE WE'RE AT SO FAR:

This doco is proof that the full suite of intelligence agency targeting functions and psychological warfare capabilities are now operating in the private sector.

Snowden blew the whistle on GCHQ and NSA using JTRIG.

This doco proves that the private sector has access to the same technology, and is using it.

COMING UP: we get into who exactly started these companies, and the very famous names they've been targeting (not just Trump!)

At roughly 10:00 - 11:00 Bergy explains how Jim (Jones) prevented Shadownet technology from being moved to a classified military network so that they could commercialise the use of the technology (sell it to private sector corps/other customers)

Bergy: "[The military and] taxpayers paid us to do it, & we rebranded it commercially as Shadownet. So I come back here & I see these guys.. have just been having a field day utilising the technology that we've been developing to alter the outcomes of our elections, in America."

At 12:44 the filmmaker seems to claim that surveillance whistleblowers like Drake, Binney & co were used to ultimately legalise mass surveillance.

Having extensively studied their disclosures, I completely disagree with this. I suspect its poor wording on the doco's part.

18 seconds later, at 13:02 she's on to the next topic, which makes the prior claim seem really erroneous (and it was presented without evidence). Which is why I suspect poor wording. I think she meant the govt PR strategy after-the-fact rather than to blame the whistleblowers.

From 13:13 the filmmaker talks about the 2008 law re FISA, and section 702. She presents it as if this was the introduction of legalised spying on citizens. This lacks historical context. FISA/702 wasn't because of whistleblowers, it was part of a string of post 9/11 legislation

The Snowden files (which date back to 2003) show the government had been moving towards what they call "total awareness" (seeing everything) for literally every inch of the globe since the early 2000s at least - and the govt had no qualms spying on citizens during decades prior.

Their habit of retroactively legalising their illegal activities is a pattern that we see consistently unfold year after year and across the Five Eyes countries and their "partners". They break laws til they can't get away with it any longer then they make new laws to legalise it

Just as one example - this chart that I made of security legislation passed in my home country of NZ over the last decade details activities that in many cases were already occurring.

Laws, to intel agencies, are a formality, a nice-to-have, a fail-safe but not a prerequisite

The moving graphic (at 13:19 - 13:38) of data flows from the 'internet backbone' (at cable) being intercepted by the agencies is cute and mostly accurate. However its then used to make a huge claim - that private companies have "twinned" the data, for their own use and motives

In my opinion, that is unlikely. In the Snowden files we learned that the NSA has "customers" who access that data through a "customer needs request portal". The DoD is an NSA customer, so are nearly all govt departments/agencies (even 'boring' ones) & so is the Federal Reserve..

Given that Shadownet was owned by a DoD contractor, I doubt they would need to steal the entire world's data in order to get access to intelligence (called 'product' by the NSA)

They would just make a request for the intelligence and get it served up on a platter

Furthermore, the slew of post 9/11 information sharing legislation constantly references cooperation between state, federal, international AND PRIVATE companies. Fusion centres exist precisely to facilitate this exchange of information. At this point anyone & their dog can get it

Through fusion centres, telcos, banks and insurance companies, just to name a few of many types of private industry titans, can access intelligence gathered by military and law enforcement. Even health providers are in the chain. It's a 2-way data flow. They give & receive data

They give the government/military access to their customer databases, and in turn they can make information requests which are serviced by the fusion centres, pulling from law enforcement and government databases. (All law enforcement agencies are also NSA 'customers')

Furthermore, if someone was to "twin" or "copy" the full data-take from cable of the NSA, they would literally need Utah-sized data facilities, such as the NSA has been building, to store it all in. It really isn't feasible for any private corporation to store that much data

Do I doubt that a character as immoral, underhanded, malicious, and shady as that which the documentary is about to invoke - John Brennan - has an ego big enough to want to possess the NSA's full dataset for himself? No. But he wouldn't need to, he could access it other ways.

Which leads us into the real meat of this documentary - from 13:38:

"Tore alleges that she worked for John Brennan at The Analysis Corporation and Global Strategies Group."

This is where things start to get even more interesting.

Brennan is shown as President and CEO of TAC.

"What does TAC do?"

Tore: "Administrative work, analyses, data collection, biometric collection. Whatever contract they've been awarded by the government they do."

7. From 14:02 onwards the documentary explores a number of high profile "hacking" incidents related to the US government and intelligence agencies, over the course of the last decade.

Tore claims that the "hacks" were cover stories for what was really going on.

Tore: "See, Brennan has a certain M.O.... when he wants to get something, he pretends there was some hack."

Tore details how, in the course of her job, she was instructed to exfiltrate data from the State Department, then was shocked to hear it later being deemed a "hack"

Tore: "For me, going to copy a server off a consulate computer, State Dept, whatever, would be normal if we had a contract with them. They'd tell me what terminal, I'd scan the barcode, make sure I was at the right computer, and do my job."

Tore believes that when she removed data, it meant someone else would replace it. "...a switch."

She is asked what Brennan's companies do.

Tore: "They're the jacks of all trade. Except Global Strategies Group was a hub for all information. In & out, in & out..."

Tore: "All of the Directors there were former GCHQ, CIA, NSA, MI6, MI5, German intelligence... you have to wonder why were all of these former heads heading up consulting firms... they were collecting up everybody's data and privatising it."

From 18:15 there's a section making claims about Snowden. It looks like a hash job has been made of the editing. Again, I don't actually think its deliberate. But the way its been put together seems to add up to claims that don't sound quite right to me.

Filmmaker: "Now tell us about these data bridges to the NSA. Is that legally obtained information?"

Tore: "I mean that's kind of what Snowden did too."

Snowden has talked about how he created a program to bridge multiple databases for NSA. Snowden *was* a contractor. HOWEVER..

Tore's above quote is cut straight to a voiceover of the filmmaker claiming: "According to sources closely connected to this subject, under John Brennan's direction Snowden created a data bridge from the NSA database into private servers controlled by private intelligence... 1/2

...and cybersecurity contractors. A.k.a. The Analysis Corporation, Global Strategies Group & Canadian Global Information (CGI)."

My opinion is that this is misleading. Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, not Brennan. Snowden & Brennan did not work for CIA at the same time...

Ed is the right person to debunk or ratify the claims. However, my take (& I'm certainly not omniscient) is that the use of "A.K.A." in the voiceover takes the leap from Snowden's work for NSA-contractor Booz Allen, to an assumption that Brennan's companies had the same access...

...and its entirely possible that the NSA does have such arrangements with other contracting agencies than Booz, however I personally doubt that that came via Snowden.

The following quote at 18:51 from Tore is edited as if its a follow-on but she's just explaining a full-take.

The filmmaker cuts straight back to Snowden, now talking about his 2013 disclosures re PRISM, FISA & 702. She says "this kicked off, on the Federal level, justification for spying on US citizens."

I disagree. US citizens were already being spied on. What it kicked off is excuses

You can't blame whistleblowers for the government's reactions to their revelations. Especially when those are crafted by PR departments, caught with their pants down and trying to defend the indefensible.

I totally disagree with this idea of blaming the messenger.

The filmmaker tries to suggest (circa 19:50) that somehow Snowden's disclosures helped Brennan weasel-word his way out of having hacked the Senate Intelligence Committee to cover up the CIA Torture Report but the screen images don't back up the claim whatsoever.

8. By 20:00 the documentary is back on track, tracing trans-Atlantic intelligence sharing partnerships with GCHQ, the MoD and US private industry.

At 21:34 another huge claim: "GSG, CGI & other private contractors allegedly had unauthorised access to the entire Five Eyes network, unfiltered, unrestricted, decompartmentalised, outside any govt regulation or oversight."

By 23:00 we're back to the whistleblower Bergy, and he's explaining both who General Jones and his son are, and that their companies had DoD contracts that included to oversee Congress's 'Knowledge Management Systems'. "Hosted, managed and stored in Germany."

24:53 Filmmaker: "The ability for these contractors to eavesdrop on both the House and the Senate is staggering."

Bergy says he complained about it, and the CKMS contract was then awarded to a cut-out/shell company 1 mile away from Dynology's offices.

And the web gets bigger:

Bergy explains that other companies, with the same board of directors as Dynology, start selling identical products (identical to Shadownet)

The intellectual property ultimately paid for by taxpayers, is being replicated for profit. By familiar names

Bergy: "It's like the Directors of Coca-Cola sitting on the board of Pepsi."

From 26:37+ the filmmaker steps through a series of major data breaches announced to the public, and alleges that they weren't in fact hacks, but were exfiltrations of data into private hands, orchestrated by Brennan and cohorts.

I've covered the parts of the documentary which are within my realm of expertise pretty thoroughly, and the rest of it drifts on to topics that definitely aren't.

ie. the inner workings/relationships of Republican party operatives - the U.S. coup in Ukraine - etc.

However there is some stuff at the end that pertains very specifically to Julian Assange and Seth Rich that I know people want me to comment on, as I've done a vast amount of writing re WL across the last decade. So I'm going to skip to that to save us all time!

The portion about WL/Seth Rich is roughly from 1:00:00 onwards. Unfortunately a lot of it I cannot substantiate or say one way or the other whether it's true, as the whistleblower is talking about her personal experiences, and then her own theories of what happened...

I can tell you that I personally would defer to @with_integrity re technical analysis, & the work done by @ElizabethleaVos (both spanning years & in great depth), and also Bill Binney (ex-NSA Technical Director), Ray McGovern & VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity)

All of the aforementioned have spent vastly more time investigating the non-hack than I have.

As for what I personally think? I believe Julian Assange:

https://twitter.com/Suzi3D/status/1031515024693620739

Julian is a huge inspiration of mine, kindly mentored me and promoted my work for years, and has the utmost integrity both as a journalist and a human. His version of events also makes the most sense to me:

https://twitter.com/Suzi3D/status/1031509780047622146

Snowden has also said that he has no doubt state actors tried to hack the DNC - because that's literally what governments do. All of them. Not just Russia. Everyone does it to everyone, its standard practice. Ray McGovern and other whistleblowers agreed with him. BUT...

...that doesn't mean a government was WikiLeaks source. Nor that Guccifer2 was the source either. Julian was explicit: that the source wasn't a government and nor was it Guccifer2. The technical evidence reinforces that.

We know that both the NSA and CIA have programs that falsely attribute their own hacks and operations to other sources (look up Marble framework) - they make it look like their own nefarious activities were actually the Chinese, or the Russians, or the North Koreans.

It makes far more sense that a disaffected IT staffer in the DNC leaked to WikiLeaks and then US intelligence tried to cover it up via inventing Guccifer2, than that Julian would risk WikiLeaks impeccable credibility by lying about the source. He simply wouldn't. I believe him.

I promised about a zillion tweets ago that I would link the documentary at the end of this thread. Here it is:



Here is the fundraiser for the filmmaker, who was arrested today:

https://twitter.com/dsm012/status/1294746700574269440

I'm thrilled for people to learn more about surveillance abuses against citizens by intel agencies, but if we learned anything else from this thread, its that grains of truth & inspiration can be found even from people & platforms that we don't otherwise usually agree with.

END